It’s always the same. She asks me to come and I tell her maybe, knowing that I will. I waited once, for almost the passing of the sun, for her to come to me and she never did. As I sat there, waiting, I thought about her eyes and the softness of her skin. I go to her, labeling my feet betrayers as they move, though they follow my command. My sins coalesce into shadows, tethered stalkers closing the gap as the day wears on. I weigh my heart in her hands and find them wanting for its weight.
Convened in a court of accusations, my point is that it never happened but my refusals only seem to make it true. I tell her that, but she props her indignation up with other peoples lies like wadded paper jammed underneath an uneven table leg. I feel so frustrated then that I could cry, which makes me angry, and when I take it out on her I know I’ve gone too far, though it doesn’t stop me. I’ve painted her face with a pastiche of pointillist swatches in shades of anger and betrayal, stained by watercolor streaks of sorrow.
Julie comes over to borrow a cup of sugar, which seems so far fetched I laugh right at her, but she tells me no, she wanted to bake cookies and thought she had enough because who runs out of sugar anyway. I tell her that I only have the synthetic stuff now since Darren’s diabetes and she deflates a little as she remembers, so I ask her in for coffee which tastes a bit like old dirt, because I don’t have any real sugar, and I find myself apologizing to her even though I know I don’t really care.
The time we lay in bed, making love as the afternoon sun cascaded through our window. Old vinyl jazz and the hum of traffic mingling with the tang of sweat and salted air. Summer breezes like childhood whispers, drifting languid through laced drapes, over tangled sheets entwined with limbs like M.C. Escher prints. Impossible promises spelt in whispers, warm breath on cooling flesh and sighs like sybaritic siren songs. Electrical storms raging under each fingertip, charged with spent kinetic energy. The way you held me as we fell asleep, wreathed in satisfaction and the flitting shadows of the clouds.
When she opens the door I swoop in and lift her in my arms. She clasps her hands at the back of my neck and crosses her legs around my waist, her buttocks resting against my hips. Our momentum carries us into the hall. As the door closes behind us her back hits the wall. She barks in my ear and I dig my hand into her hair. The touch of her lips to my neck writes braille desires on my skin. I feel her body against mine, hard under the fabric of her shirt. I can smell strawberries.
The first time I died I was sixteen and learning to drive. I was getting good too. I tell myself now in the middle of the night that it wasn’t my fault and it’s probably true, though I’m not sure I believe it. I don’t remember much, just dad eternally dialing at the radio presets as though they might start broadcasting new stations if he came around one more time, and mum chattering in the back with one eye in the rearview mirror and the other on the neighbours lawn. I remember waking up and knowing things were different.
I take the pamphlet from her and let the spiel go over my head. There’s a scar crossing her nose like a spectacle bridge, I want to run my thumb over it when she smiles. I rest my eyes on her lips and ride the cadences spilling from them, rollercoaster consonants powered by enthusiasm. Her voice feels like melted butter smells. She stops when I take her hand and put the pamphlet there. Even in the shadows her fingers are warm. When she retreats, there’s an apology in her movements that doesn’t show in her eyes, so I smile.
Colt sits down with his usual heaviness, spilling beer onto the table. I blot at it with a coaster but it just herds the beer around into little Moses channels. Colt slides the low tide drink at me through the streams and nods over his shoulder. I finish off my beer and raise my eyebrows at him down the length of the glass. He leans over the table, his slender fingers plying unseen pockets, and manifests a cigarette. In conspiracy tones he tells me I should fuck the bartender. I tell him beautiful women make me want to die.
The air is thick with the threat of rain. Shadows wander the streets in the auspices of a vagabond sunrise. The baker’s ritual clogs the alleys with olfactory rolls and damper scones. A depression in the street has become a burrowed slice of haven, clouded with refused takings and the leavings of scavengers. In the last dead end, Junk Struck Larry lay his head, his lip curled in imitation of his body, a freshly milled pout made with an old recipe. A discard ragged wraith haunting a stolen castle, lain in a bed built of goodwill and bad intentions.
She leaves before I decide to ask her to stay. I hear the door click shut and her heels clack away. I lie there with my eyes half closed telling myself I’m still asleep. I pull her pillow close to me and try to paint her in its scent. When she’s asleep I talk about myself. I find things I couldn’t see during the day and lay them end to end at the start of her dreams. I miss her then. She always wakes before I do. I lie there with my eyes half open, hoping she will stay.
Marion liked her life, mostly. A bit anyway. She liked the bits she liked, brief as they were, and put her head down through the rest. Which is about as much as can be said for anyone really. It was comfortable though permanent, in the way that a life will set over time like concrete drying in the sun, a child’s name scratched into the surface with amateur fingers. A baking fate. At night she put herself to bed with a liturgy of crime drama and soft-core prose. She didn’t trust herself with anything as risqué as romance.
Driving along in Colt’s rattly old Valiant which he never fixes but says is a classic, on the way to nowhere for a hide and seek party. We fall into a rhythm of bitumen and telephone poles, the radio gnawing its way through static and garbled golden oldies under Colt’s relentless scanning. I roll the window down and fly my hand in the wind, my hair whipping around my face. I close my eyes and feel the air rushing against my palm, pushing its way through my fingers, chasing the sun as I pitch my hand into the sky.
The girl just shrugs her shoulders, her blank face flickering blue-black in the television glare. A blender whirs and churns under the touch of a middle aged shopping network Barbie doll, its virtues diced into ticker traffic bulletins that flow like river flotsam across the bottom of the screen. The girl stares, unseeing, unmoved by the Barbie’s ministrations. I can see the failures of her life welling up behind her glassy eyes like aquarium lobsters waiting to die. I reach my hand out to her and she whimpers softly, though I’m not even sure she knows I’m there.
They stare at the painting, faded acrylic pushed against bare red brick. A tiny boat in an ocean scene, still within a squall. They follow it, he towards serenity and her into its maw. The threat of storms. Her voice lowered in the light but shedding its own upon the room. He watches her silently with time rimed eyes, propped up in bed as though king of a soiled throne, while she gathers up her clothes and hangs them on her frame. She can feel him tugging at each of the strings of self-consciousness tied to her body.
I nearly got stabbed last night. Is it still a stabbing if they only cut you? The guy standing there, slashing his knife around in the air. I had to throw the bag of weed at him. I run past him while he fumbles with the bag and the knife, nearly breaking my neck on the mess of ethernet cables and pizza boxes living the hall. I pull myself up and run through the lounge screaming, it’s a bust! My deadbeat brother sits there in rigor mortis bong grip, watching me with dead eyes and that sadistic grin of his.
A Few Short Words 