I was looking for a cardigan when I found it, a small wooden chest in the hope style, filigree inlay with beautiful detail, velvet lined and carefully partitioned, not yet full but still thoroughly occupied by more than two dozen vials, each beautifully labeled in private school cursive. Name and date, rank filing of precise chronology, a planting calendar of seed that never bloomed, millions doomed, dead since laid to bed. Laughing pridefully below the surface of her wit, Cynthia calls it the cream of her crop, a sick deciduous harvest, chilling even in the growing warmth of spring.
There’s Caleb staring at a stovetop covered in pots, each full to brimming with water, a stopwatch, pad and pen held in an arrangement of fingers, shuffled amidst them with the delicate alacrity of a seasoned croupier. ‘I’m seeing if its true,’ he says, eyes intent, ‘if they’ll boil.’ Everything still but for the pensive agitation of the water. ‘It’s always yes,’ he says, ‘I can’t tell if it’s me or them or time itself.’ I wonder what will happen if I make him look at me. Have you seen how long it takes without watching? I ask him.
Something changes in the night so that I die a little, more than ever through the day. Irredeemably alone, my thoughts, crept in from dark spots and sat upon our bed. Her head wedged in my pit, my arm locked above us lest it pincer down to nut-crack her sweet face. There’s a divine innocence in her repose, elevating her above herself in sleep. An unseen surrender that truly makes her beautiful. It’s in these moments I want to hurt her. Gigil, the Filipino’s say, or some such variation, unheard though whispered with my hands upon her flesh.
Standing there in Batman’s silhouette, an itch over my skin. Her laughter saws against the night, sharp and disquieting. I slip the cowl off and sit beside her on the bed. The stiff synthetic mask, cold clutched in my hands, is dead now emptied, caved into a rictus grin. Smirking, as if my intentions mock me. ‘I thought you’d like it.’ She softens her laugh and lets it taper so that it slips away soundlessly, leaving mirth and supplely dimpled humours in its place. Expressions play acting emotions with silent cinema grace while searching for a genre of reaction.
Cold and inert, my father’s chassis laid upon his bed. A quirk, he always said, bedding. As only humans could, or would, seeking comfort for the psyche with physical succour. It eases what’s needed, he said, to feel alive. I find the little things to be the most humane. Still, even though I was prepared, I was unsure how to take direction from myself. I replayed my father’s final words, his crystal commands running as clear as summer sky in my mind, crisp and present and equally unreachable. Take my soul, he said. As though it were that simple
I lean my hip against the rail and look into the complex, something like two dozen apartments arranged in an irregular square, four squat blocks sharing a Sierra Leone stare around a communal courtyard, all done up in Mediterranean faux deco painted pastel terracotta stucco. Nothing moves but the fourth story wind and the scant ambitious leaves thrilling themselves in its breeze. I hear Dane muttering nothings to nobody inside and turn to watch him shuttling knickknacks between nooks with perfectly suited idiosyncratic randomness, complementing each piece on its place as he goes. Everything looks the same to me.
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.
A Few Short Words 