Dana puts her hand on my knee and looks at the tip of her cigarette, a yellow red corona in the dim night. There’s the sound of evening bustle aching wearily over the hills, tired commuters and the wheels of industry, endless trains with spliced punctualities that blend the rumble of their schedules. There’s no wind and the air feels one step removed, not coy nor cautious but aloof, distant in the way of oblivion, had it cause to notice I would be as dust. Dana squeezes, biting at my jeans with her nails, and looks into the light.
Posters and stickers mark the walls in history, if I run my hands across them they will tell me a story in the way of Parisian cobblestones. The time before me is fascinating. I try to picture the establishment of things, the scope becomes so vast as to be vague. My eyes start to hurt from looking into it. I squint, breathe, and wonder briefly how to proceed. Caleb looks at my profile with defiant silence and scratches his balls. Because I’ve noticed, I don’t say anything. I drink my water and nod, agreeing with all that has happened.
When Sarah talks I picture a knife made out of glass being pushed between my ribs. What seeps forth is a bloodless letting of sins, oozing black and oily thick. Each utterance angles the blade perfectly. The pain is fierce though administers a certain lightness in the wake of its incision. I hated her once, before I learned to love the sharpness there. In time, no doubt, the edges will dull, the sins will build again in calloused pores, slathered onto my skin and ground upon with pumice into vicious mettle. Then the real blood will start to flow.
The cashier gets to sit in a little chair and think about nothing while he pushes my items over the scanner like a cyborg metronome. Toilet paper, soap, coffee. Rough night, I tell him. Something sparks inside the black part of his eye, a dying star at the back end of a telescope, dead before it’s seen. ‘Twenty four sixty,’ his stripped out voice with all inflections sanded off. I hold up my card and smile awkwardly into his abyssal face. There’s no echo. He says, ‘do you need cash?’ and I say, thanks, but I should have enough.
Papier mâché honesty, delicately finished in porcelain and poise, she wears herself like a mask and nobody notices. Such life draped upon her shoulders, where for once it glimmers, and nobody asks how she got it, though she aches to be revealed. From behind herself she smiles and sadness pours out, pooling at her feet and staining the ground. Revelling in revolt, she shreds the world with her eyes to let the ribbons float. When the truth finally leaves her, it’s light and swift and devastating, yet flits about unnoticed. Everybody nods and says it simply can’t be true.
They’re not other voices, they’re my voice. They don’t sound like me, they sound like what I sound like on the inside of my head, speaking in the narration tones I’m all twist-wired up to trust. I don’t know if other people get that, probably they do. And they say all sorts of shit that I couldn’t possibly have thought. Fathomless dark, so dark and playing constantly in surround, only wrong somehow and static in the round like radio in vacuum, too loud without sound though and it makes it hard to think. God, sometimes I just wish I could be alone. Proper alone, they way silence feels unheard. I want to sit somewhere and be empty. I can see it, myself by the beach, sat up high in the dunes with my legs folded below me and the tree line running at my back. Even the waves are reverent, their flagellations hushed into the sand and soaked up inside the earth, the waters of the world behind it backed upon the sky so too perfect shades of blue kiss out a horizon. I sit in this, amidst all this, and I am empty. Nothing touches me, not so much as air disturbs the tranquility of my skin, and I do not need it, I am sustained by my own absence. Removed, so far removed that I float. Inside and out, scaled to infinity inside existence, sealed by convergence in the void of all things, I am absorbed absolutely. The purity, such nothing. And then the sharpening of the knives, they tell me I must die. The sky withers and the waves start to squall, sand burns to glass before an ever screaming maw and the blackness widens its breach upon the distance. Consumption all consuming, they take me apart with their presence and I feel so isolated. So alone with myselves, caged in paralysis by the binding of my insides. I can’t do anything from here and though I sit with a passive face, I die inside in myriad and the screaming could be mine but it’s impossible to tell when all our voices sound the same.
Diana talks to me as a splinter gliding across my heart. There’s nothing sharp as emptiness, high contrast edges. Standing in comfort even under duress because paired is right and more to tame the boundaries fight. That darkness though, frontier hunter, seeping in from hunger, inevitable, so they say. And the splinter landing, stuck with improbable weight, doesn’t go aweigh but sinks, forced to rock. Singing sirens out of reach, some doomed cantor confided and the poison supplied worked in candour, assuring you good night. In time you’ll learn to die, where nothing, sharpened emptiness, will wait for you.
They told me to. I don’t know, I didn’t really want to do it. Sometimes I have these other thoughts, ones that aren’t mine, telling me what to do. I mean they sound like me and I know they’re just in my head, but that’s worse I think. They turn up without warning and say things I don’t agree with, hounding me with torturously precise intimacy, and I know they have to be just as real as I am because my voice is in here too. If they don’t exist, how can I think therefore I am? Who’s left?
She doesn’t look at me much while she’s talking but there’s lots of casual touching, bumping her shoulder into mine and that sort of thing. It’s endearing, even if it’s a bit sad and transparent. ‘I don’t have much luck with guys,’ she says in tone of incantation. Her fingers graze upon the back of my hand, indelicate and openly hungry. ‘They’re never as nice as they seem.’ I tell her I’ve seen, ‘wolves dressed as sheep, your men,’ and lambs throwing themselves under the tooth, both prey and predation. ‘Do you want to eat?’ she says, ‘I’m starving.’
Through the distance of space and the closeness of technology we discuss the dissipation of relations that never were. I tell myself I did the right thing, then apologise to her for not making any promises. Thinking of the future and ignoring the past, I tell her, I don’t want anybody to get hurt. She calls me an asshole, it’s true enough so that I pin it to my heart beside my other still-beating disappointments, a sodden general’s medal array. None for valour. I’ll a see you later, she says and then it’s done, because nothing ever happened.
Dinah yanked the last hair free and took it between the thumb and ring finger of her left hand. She set the tweezers down, held the hair in front of her and looked right past it to the truth within the mirror. ‘I always get so red,’ she said. Flicking at the iPad cradled in her yoga posed legs, Juliette didn’t look up but stiffened slightly and pulled in a breath, ‘It’s your skin babe. Porcelain marks easy, but it’ll fade.’ Dinah blew the hair away and wished, wondering if an eyebrow would work as well as an eyelash.
Lately, things are wrong in a way they never used to be. My mouth tastes like ash and my fingers hurt. I’m tired all the time in a way that doesn’t make me want to sleep. Time is my enemy and it works in seditious ways. I don’t relate to my life anymore, it’s always something described to me on other people’s terms. Events get all mixed up like colour swatches in a paint store explosion. I worry that I’m not crazy enough for any of this, but Sasha says we’re all crazy, that we need it to survive.
When she hugs me goodbye I count the seconds between the thunder and the clap, glad I didn’t hold my breath. I don’t know when it started raining. I think it could have always been this way. Drizzle drowning the world in increments, moisture in the bones, deterioration sinking in. Sometimes the promise in the clouds is the worst. Mindfully, I romance drier days, though things were brittle then, they carried the spark of kindling, the threat of fire as purpose brushed against potential in whispered movements begging to be ignited. Dampened now, it looks like rain all week.
Not a ghostly scene, yet something more sinister. Ring of leaves, silent in respect, moved only by the gallish breeze. The smells of expended energy, exploded in tableaux, burnt out anger like the dying phosphors of a done for match. Playing cards strewn across the courtyard, empty slacks abandoned alongside a knapsack, exsanguinated, deflated and mournful. Struggle painted upon the ground and spread out in situ. In the middle sits a tin, memorabilia contained within; a stopped watch; plastic soldier; photograph of him and her, set in bliss before ruin; an earring; ticket stub, faded, railway journey; foreign currency.
I walk out on Kirsten’s diatribe and Sarah’s endlessly bobbing head. People make me feel uneasy, my skin begins to reject the host, layers of muck and membrane and philosophy splayed apart and rewrapped about my being, slipping like loose silk upon a maypole, little by enough, tiny contrasts exposing themselves as invisible sores upon my body, itching at me in an impenetrable way. My legs shake, unsure and belligerent, taking their ragged cues from my lungs. My mind, only sluggishly, makes demands of my nerves, sputtering and cowed beneath the stratum, woven throughout the functions of the flesh.
A Few Short Words 