We huddled together in our own fractured silences, slender tendrils of levity prodding at opposing seams. I shivered a little inside myself each time our smiles died. Some sadness is contagious. As I sat there next to her I could feel it creeping over me, that slow helplessness that seeps into your pores and crystallises somewhere near the heart. I wondered what I could do. I wanted to burn it away with the heat between us but I kept the distance of unsalted wounds. I got up and left, believing that leaving was the best that I could do.
The monstrosity dragged itself across the cold linoleum floor. Gritting his teeth, Carter watched it draw closer, watched its mouth working at words through a palpating mess of blood and gore. A raspy hiss, slurred and husky, a sound like cutter but more familiar, percussed by a sickening snick of teeth on bone. It was trying to say his name. Carter tightened his grip, shut his eyes and hove the axe hard against his wife’s once white neck, severing the life they’d made. ‘I’ll always love you, Sunshine,’ he whispered into the silence. There would never be another future.
She goes down on me then blows me off. I’ve barely got time to sigh and dry out before she’s kissing me on the stoop. You know, I don’t really mind, it’s just weird that it happened so early in the day. Normally I don’t get into complicated post-sex shame until after the sun’s gone down. So I stand on her street looking at the afternoon sun and wondering what to do with myself, now that I don’t feel the need to. There’s a couple hours left until hard liquor, but I think a beer would be okay.
She watches him go, slightly bored, with an onset of the musty disappointments you find at the end of dreams. Her thoughts a slithering question mark. Under the surface she says, surreal, full punctuation unseen. She washes her hands of electricity, fingertip sensations tightly strung end to end in to a webbing that she rubs free of care. Stung now empty, watching at nothing, she captures the wait. Tapping tap tapping, heels’ rapping kinetic, churning the water wheel. Under the surface she says, refresh, zero punctuation clearly heard. Rising she goes, following a stream of consciousness, only flotsam now.
Caleb, who is a complete fucking scumbag, is giving a lecture on the moralities of Batman. I’d probably have that conversation if it could be one. Every time he thinks he’s about to make a point he swishes up his drink (a fucking whiskey lemonade which he might as well pour straight into his vagina) and throws a swallow down like a magician takes a bow. Everyone at the table clearly thinks he’s great except for Cleo who I can always rely on to be bored, that bitch is like the Galileo of apathy and sometimes I’m just so fucking grateful.
‘What people don’t understand,’ Caleb says, swish, swallow and smug, ‘is that Batman only has one rule he never breaks. His moral compass only points in one direction but he’ll take any road he can to get there.’
I’d break that rule over Caleb’s handsome fucking head if I knew I could get away with it.
Cleo sighs over the brim of her martini (three olives, dry, and a nod to bygone times) and says to no-one, ‘Comics are for kids.’ The dickhead stops mid-monologue and sharpens his eyes on Cleo’s face. They slept together once, in what I can only imagine was a fit of drug filled boredom, and it always makes me laugh. I know what Cleo likes and I know she wouldn’t have taken it easy on him. There’s probably a few scars cowering under that firsthand vintage jacket he’s affecting. I watch her screw up a napkin and lob it into Caleb’s glare, smacking him in the smug and shutting him right up. She could have been an athlete if she didn’t believe sweat was a byproduct of sex.
The table laughs it off while he sulks and everyone falls back into a rhythm of pointlessness. I love the spectacle of a gathering, the cadence of conversation as it rises, falls and swells around a room. I love watching people think they’re not just animate meat, their little bubbles of hope and expectation that stew around the surface of this twisted social broth. I love playing whodunnit (or will do it), I’m like the Miss Marple of hookups, only mildly less celibate.
I’ve been watching Dylan (ugh) and Sammy’s chairs edging towards each other all night, slow-burn seismic shit the way tectonic plates slide in for a quake. I hope she likes the taste of salt and disappointment. The way she giggles I doubt that she minds anything so long as it’s said with Pavlovian intent. I can practically see her salivating as he rings her little bell.
I feel my phone vibrate and I pull out one of Cleo’s texts. Fuck this shit, it says. Happy hour. Lowered bar. Coke and cocktails. I hate how much I love this girl. I throw back my daiquiri, all slush and good intentions now, and excuse myself nodding towards the little girl’s. Smoke bomb, I text her back. Don’t be long.
I prowl through Sasha’s bookcase while she cooks, fingering the philosophers couched between the classics. There’s something purposefully eclectic in her selections, Kafka and Satre cuddled up to Caroll and Chaucer. I trace a line down The Catcher in the Rye’s spine and ask, how many existentialists does it take to screw in a light bulb? She does that little laughing sigh thing that sounds like resignation. The question is irrelevant, she tells me plating another pancake, the answer is in the question. Fish, I say hopefully, and this time it’s all sigh and the smell of burning sugar.
You can do anything you want, she says, and I could have died right then, instead I run my tongue from her collar to her chin savouring the taste of caramel and sin. I move my hand against her hip, braced and grinding, her splay legged wrappings around my waist. Anything, she says, and my hands make memories and break promises, our intentions hard between us in the heat of the moment. She tastes my lips again for seconds at a time that feels like the finite spread from one end of forever to the present. Anything, she says.
They watched each other through the open wedge of door and jamb, both seeing the end. I’ll do it, he said already lowering the knife, I’ll fucking do it, but the heat was gone. His threats condensed, wavered and dissipated, only as real now as the breathy steam their shouts had purged into the chill winter air. I’m tired, she said, do it or don’t but be done with it. And the knife clattered with a shrill tinny trill upon the blackened white and unfeeling linoleum. Silence then, tears after that, and finally an end to all that was.
You’re so fucking pretty, I tell her, and she says you can’t say that, looking at me with those doe eyes that say I’ve crossed a line, but her cheeks are blushed and tell me it’s a crossing gladly borne. Too fucking pretty, maybe, but I don’t tell her that. I just look, waiting for something to happen. She lays a hand over mine and our eyes turn down to watch them twine. I feel so empty inside. Trying to escape her voice is quivered, caught and small. Do we kiss now? Maybe, I tell her, maybe another time.
Pull my headphones on like loneliness wears a cloak, watching strangers sway with pedestrian grace, all of them intent on their intentions. The Tango Saloon ply their rhythms in my ears while I apply it to the streets, dissonant beats and business feet, shuffle, mill, repeat. I make sure they see me seeing them, too scared to be afraid, but they all look away. Knees pulled tight against my chest and cross my arms about them. Feel myself fading, xylophone ribs and sallow skin. Degrading thoughts like abscesses puckered on my brain. Increase the volume, drowning out the pain.
Sammy puts the beer down beside me and retreats into her smile, folding herself up on to the chair, compliantly pliant. She’s so young. I want to suck out her innocence and smear it over my decaying life. I don’t look at her while we’re talking so I don’t have to think about it. She tells me about herself and I dredge up comparable miseries, silt covered adolescent syndromes, dirty and malnourished things that look better deteriorated. Don’t worry about me, I tell her halfheartedly pained, I always make the most out of the worst that I can find.
Secretary says she hates me. I don’t buy it. I lean against the edge of my desk and fold my arms, watching as she minces towards me, her neat little steps swinging heel toe heedlessly through the minefield of papers and notes and carbon effluvium entrenched on my office floor. Planting one modest plum coloured heel against the nearest column of detritus, she snipes me a look of apathetic resentment. Her skirt rides up on the swell of her thigh and my skin prickles with the sweet hot shame of desire and the thought of vanilla ice-cream melting on pancakes.
‘You’re twelve o’clock is here,’ she says.
When I tell her I don’t have any appointments she sights me down the barrel of her nose and chambers another citric glare, the room steeped in that venomous brand of silence only a woman can excrete. I’m sure I don’t remember but I shrug acceptingly. Secretary sighs and flicks her heel out, toppling the papers underneath and sending a domino cascading through the room. She spins around with a reckless elegance and sails back the way she came.
‘Buy a calendar,’ she says and pours herself through the door.
There’s barely time to catch my breath before Twelve strides in and takes it back. She carries the scent of camphor and herself like velvet, in a dress so honest that I’m not sure where to look. I salvage a chair from the debris and motion for her to sit down. Retreating behind my desk, I reach for the bottle of oak aged fortification I never bother to put in the top drawer. She watches me with a still, hawkish candor while I evict a family of wasted pens from a tumbler and clean it with the backside of my tie. For some reason I want this to bother her. I pour myself three middle fingers and practice looking at her face.
Sometimes I can hear Secretary scrabbling for information in the other room. We don’t talk about it and normally I don’t care what turns the girl’s key, she keeps quiet and it makes me think she cares, but her silence behind the door while I’m in front of Twelve gives me a dry, cheese grater pang of cheaters guilt. I want to take off my skin and wash it.
Twelve breaks my mood with a voice that’s somehow wide and warmer than I’d expected, gravelly eclectic like rain falling on limestone. ‘I love the decor,’ she says, not looking around. ‘How do you find anything?’
I tell her I use hard work and diligence and she makes a little humming sound like a stovetop element warming up. Maybe she would have preferred luck. I watch as she slides her fingers into her tiny pink clutch, probing for her desire, amazed that she can fit anything in there. I don’t ask if she would like a hand. She comes up with a menthol Kool and slides it between her lips.
‘Can you light me up?’
I dig a box of Redheads from my tool drawer and toss them over. There’s a reckless elegance to her movements as she catches the matches, the liquid rhythm of a wave riding its surfer. I’d prefer to watch.
‘They told me you’re the best.’
I’ve never met them but I know the type. It could be true but it’s probably all lies and accusations. I stare into her silence, sipping rum from my tumbler and listing the names of sins in my head. I’ve always liked sloth but I never get time for it, I’m always too busy avoiding other things, like people who might feel the need to talk about me with dangerously attractive women, or tigers, which seems easy but requires the same level of vigilance.
‘Most of it was better than worse,’ she says finally, using my floor as an ashtray.
That’s still no reason to believe it.
We sat on top of a mountain shaped like a molehill and looked over each other’s vistas, you through your lens and me through the soft pink haze of adolescent love. Every time the shutter whirred I wondered what you saw, considered the treachery of images, and shrugged my inner monologue. Every time you paused I scrawled, with shaky butterfly fingers, notes on admiration that read like playground sonnets. I used my pen to stem the pent up and sketch an allegoric sunset, which you drank with our draught and laughed over, wondering that love could be so young.
I fucked Dylan last night. I know, right? I totally shouldn’t have, then three Long Island’s and a tab of what the guy told me was LSD but was really more like MDMA (or whatever, something just as cruisey), and I’m thinking fuck it, I don’t have to suck his personality. Sometimes you just want a guy to hold you down and press all his manly shit against you while you writhe around beneath him shouting the names of Jane Austen protagonists at the ceiling. Really though, it was a mistake, even if it was suspiciously good.
I don’t like sleeping in foreign beds or talking to my sex toys, so I wake up while Dylan is still dreaming about beer tastings and MMA fights or whatever homoerotic shit guys like him dream about. I try to leave and get half way free before I notice my right hand is still cuffed to the bed head, which is something I don’t remember being involved in last night but is totally a thing. Most midrange love cuffs have a quick release switch on the side of them (which always blows me away. If you’re going to put yourself out there, fucking commit to it). After a minute of fuzzy, incompetent pawing, that makes me picture something out of Jigsaw’s spring break, I get my hand emancipated and slither upright.
Of course that’s when he wakes up, as I’m standing there, inconsolably naked, wondering which part of his adolescent pit has swallowed my clothes. His face is wrapped around this prissy, lion’s pride grin, as if I’m some endangered animal he just brought down. I push my hair back on my head, hoping it stays there (it’s the only hair left on my body and it fights me so hard I wonder why I keep it), and glare at him with indentured defiance. I ask him if he’s seen my shit and he laughs so softly I have to strain myself not to kill him.
Eventually I find my clothes and slink away. I had to leave my dignity behind, though honestly I can live without it. Dignity is just something people drape over you for not spilling drinks down your dress, making out with bass players or vomiting out of cab windows, and you can still be plenty indignant without it. What I can’t live with (or don’t want to) is knowing that everybody is going to find out I let Dylan stick it to me. Social networks and strangers with drugs, I always get burnt by the things that I love.
I can feel my skin wearing me, even after all this time it feels borrowed, like an Amazon meat sheath delivered to the wrong door and not returned out of necessity. It doesn’t even look like mine, but I’ve been hauling it around so long it’s gotten hold of familiarity and keeps wringing the thing every time somebody sees us. I can’t peel it off or pry me out of it, even if I could how could I choose a replacement, I don’t know what I should look like. I resign myself to it and all its incumbent tortures.
A Few Short Words 