My hands haven’t trembled in the longest time. I miss that feeling, not of settled fears and soiled familiarity but of reaching out with uncertainty, of electricity and promise and the sense of something other, ready, attention present below your prints. Moments yet unsavored, sensations to be delivered by osmosis and stored within your veins. That explosion of not knowing, Midas’ promise within your fingers, strange alchemical urges pushing adrenaline surges all throughout your body. Bloody and distinct, pulsating quivered impulses shaking you so hard that surrender sounds like bliss. I miss that feeling, of reaching out for something.
I only show her a few times before she asks to have a go. The knife, so small in her hands, still drives deep, its cool flatness pressed into and parting the meat of my left flank. Our fingers cross upon its hilt as she tilts her chin to face me and then I see the sunset rolling its dusk across each iris. She says, ‘I thought there’d be more bleeding,’ before the light fades out completely. There, in the following night, starts some new fire. Burnt between us and sizzling in the air, a scorching promise to engulf.
Dana takes my hand and pulls me into the crowd, through a collision of skin and denim, clashing rhythms and thrashing bodies gnashed together. Chest against flesh, I can hear the music through her, finger pulses typing code into my limbs. I sway, rocked in the crush, hemmed by the gentle ravening. Moved to move and led astray, I listen to Dana’s steps and dips, watch each beat breeding a syncopated beading upon her brow. Sweet, glistening moments, tussled into tempo and thrown with little twirls. Elsewhere in the gaudy ruckus, all else fades away until only she remains.
I point to the handgun working its paperweight charms on a stack of Vice magazines. Caleb picks it up lazily and tells me he’s trying to prove a point. I tell him I always thought Chekov used a menacing and specifically destructive tool as an example simply to whittle the chaff from an otherwise nebulous theory about the importance of foreshadowing and loop closure played out by overlaying plot elements within traditional narrative structures. Caleb flicks the safety on and off, toying with a light switch that only brings the darkness, and tells me, ‘Nah, it’s just a bet.’
‘You’re the most exquisite thing I’ve ever seen,’ he says. I don’t sigh or tell him he’s wrong or accuse him of lying. I say, thank you, which I’ve always believed is the appropriate response to a compliment, whether you believe or not. It’s important not to devalue a person’s sentiments. My mother taught me that, I think. ‘I mean it,’ he says, thinking my thanks is a no. ‘I know,’ I say. I can tell. The truth of it is there in his eyes and that half crescent smile that rises with his happiness. It breaks my heart.
I want to ask, is it okay that I came in your ass, but that doesn’t feel right, so I just hug her and tell her she’s beautiful. She tucks her head against her chest and denies it, as though disbelief could protect her from the fact. My legs are half set gelatin, I don’t trust them to hold me up, so I lean against the railing hoping it doesn’t show. ‘I’ve wanted this for the longest time,’ she says. I can’t imagine why. My phone vibrates inside my pocket. Where are you? It asks my thigh. Where? Where?
I don’t want to be here, Caleb was going to cook and then I was going to thank him profusely. I even bought wine. If people are onions then Cleo is the part that makes you cry. Honestly, I don’t know why I let her do this to me, she’s not even grateful. I’m giving up my Saturday night to stare at some guy trussed up like an H.R. Geiger nightmare, his face all cartoon eggplant purple-blue and impolite extremities, even for a dead man, inappropriately stiff. If I hadn’t thrown up already I would vomit with rage.
I have this fantasy where we put on that Shirley Bassey album you love and smoke a joint on the sunroom lounge. With your head in my lap, you lie there taking each puff like a philosophical question, explanations wafting away from us with each billowed cloud. This is the meaning of life spelled out in smoke. The amber hues of the afternoon coating us in its half shuttered sepia tones, your voice in the shush is syrupy slow, the way a ponderance feels as it creeps across your skin. Love, you say, love is something you’ve always known.
I dreamt of you last night, abusing me on television. You were being interviewed for a piece on arthritic hips and somehow found a tangent to include my defamation. Watching you broadcasting hatred, I was outraged and confused and happy you were hurting. I woke turgid and stinging, bitter feelings clinging at me, stinking, meaty shreds of memory tainting my sense of me. I scrub and can’t get clean. I don’t know how to say, I hate you, so I carry your shame and resentment with my id, paying penance for my wisdom and getting guidance for my sins.
‘Sorry,’ I say, because it’s the right thing, ‘I’m having trouble with temporal dissonance,’ which is wrong but true. She looks at me from the pity end of the spectrum and sticks a worried smile over it. Dane slips an arm around her shoulder and manoeuvres her away with sly parental subtlety. I watch the ice melting in my drink and count to ten for a minute. Next time, I tell the bartender’s back, I’m not going to do anything. Nothing happens and I stare into the clot of people filling up the room, wondering if I’m really here.
Waking up at three am, wondering what happened to the day I was just in. Sweat-stuck to the sofa amidst the dusty rubble of recollection, small portions of shame gnawing on my extremities, street sounds of construction churning asphalt in my head. I might have died, I tell the dark, you wouldn’t know. The LED eyes of technology blink and stare and bide in myriad concert from their shadowed ghettos, judgements made in standby. Feeling my way over the stained and sticky, grubby paw prints of excess spread across my skin, trying to remember what I should forget.
Nature documentaries voiced by baritone sedatives and about an hour of awkward casual contact on the couch, hands grazing thighs and nestled knees and nested desires incubating under the skin. Then she says, ‘You can fuck me if you want,’ as though asking for the channel changed. When I form the question on my face she says, ‘Yeah, you can fuck me. Just don’t try to kiss me on the mouth.’ I ask if she keeps her hymen in her throat and she tells me to forget it. The narrator says that certain types of mantis eat their mates.
Little bubbles of conversation float above the squabbling murmur of the room, popping into moments of clarity and vanishing into the atmosphere. Caleb itches at the crown of his thinning pate, dirty fingernails dug between follicles with miner zeal. ‘I mean, you never stop wanting to have sex with other women,’ he says, taking another drink, doing a rub your head and pat your stomach routine. ‘These days it’s too much trouble,’ he says with failed acceptance. ‘I’ll just wind up disappointing some girl.’ It makes a sad kind of sense. ‘But you never stop wanting to do it.’
She slips her hand into my pants and lays a kiss against the corner of my mouth. The softness of her palms and all that I can think of are car wrecks and the awkward sweaty aftermath of fucking. Whispering now into my ear, broken glass and bent metal, nothing upon nothing, sweet and viscous. She tastes of vanilla. Below the belt ministrations, gravel rash and bruising. Her hands are giving me mixed signals. Stop, I tell her rising. Softly, stop, but she rolls onward, lays me flat and curbs my reservations. Let me drive this time, she says
Waiting to cross and the woman in front of me keeps coughing pointedly and looking in my direction. I’m the only person who’s ever smoked outdoors and the outrage has forced her into passive aggressive action. Burning my choices down to the quick, I want to feel for her wasted umbrage. Nicotine coated synapses like a Teflon shield of nonchalance, I exhale into the sky, a cumulous pall appalling the woman. Thin lipped and dagger eyed, she gives me another quiet in the library cough and stares, forcing me to smile and wiggle my tarry yellow fingers at her.
A Few Short Words 