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Crowded Out

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.

1

A Detective Story – One Part

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.

0

Senseless Sensibilities

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.

0

Cocktails

I’m bored of being pretty. I tell Cleo I’m going to start a girl fight club. She smiles at me over her vodka cranberry, (sourdough bitch), and tells me I’m not supposed to talk about it. I can see the ovation in her eyes. I want to scrape the smugness off her with the painter’s trowel she used to put on all that makeup. You should try exfoliating, I tell her, if you want to get rid of that snaky complexion. She’s already not paying attention, her face buried in the fluorescence of her phone.

Mother superior of a digital mass, Cleo needs to check on her parishioners every few minutes in case their devotion starts to wane. I tell her if she checks me in I’ll eat her first born child. She laughs by pushing air out of her nose and tells me I’ll have to ask the clinic if they still have it. I ask Cleo if she ever gets bored of being apathetic and she shrugs out her response. My phone vibrates in my pocket but I leave it where it is. I’m not hungry enough to follow through on my threats.

Jessie and Dylan show up dressed like yacht club DJ’s, sock-less feet in seasonal shoes, rolled up khaki’s and V-neck cotton affectations. Cleo turns each cheek to receive their thin lipped tributes. I listen to them tweeting their intentions at her in sentences without character. They chart the night out for us by way of invitation. Seismic Collapse are playing a secret set, they say, in a warehouse in West End. Dylan winks at me through his bangs and asks, would I like to come? I can feel my vagina drying up like a salted slug. From underneath the table I text Cleo, no, with seven exclamations. I hope she’ll get the message, but telling Cleo what you don’t want is like chumming in the ocean.

0

Feeding Flamingos

Ugh, I had coffee with Jamie today. She’s such a bitch (you know it’s true, Jamie). We went to that Flamingo place in the Valley that takes too long to give you your shit. I kind of hate it there because everybody is either beautiful or oppressively different but it’s kind of cool in an uncomfortable secondhand way. Everybody’s big into that at the moment, which I really hate. I overheard somebody say that apathy is coming back. They could have meant a band.

Jamie told me she was thinking about breaking up with Dylan and I told her I thought he was cool, but if she isn’t into it then just fucking do it. (You have to now, bitch). Anyway, I think they’d be better people without each other. I listened to her shoot holes in her relationship with small calibre bullet point frustrations for fully half an hour. As far as I knew the barista was still out the back growing my fucking mocha beans.

Everybody’s either breaking up or getting pregnant at the moment. I feel like this should make me feel something but it doesn’t, not what I think it should. My ex keeps texting that he’s been dreaming about me lately. It means he’s single again. I don’t go back though. It never works out because it didn’t work out. Also, The last time I saw him he’d gotten kind of fat.

My friend Sharon keeps telling me to watch that movie Feed. It’s about guys who get off by feeding chicks until they become fucked up obese. Like, some of these chicks can’t even move and I think maybe some of them die and maybe there’s some weird sex kink in that too. How do people switch off that voice in your head that says you look like shit? I can’t eat a thing once I’ve got the taste of guilt in my mouth.

3

The Jenkins Contract – 1

It was raining halfheartedly and Julie stood there feeling appropriately soggy. The body of her husband inert and unreachable under the ground at her feet, while the constant drizzle turned the freshly filled plot into sludge. It was a miserable day, cold, damp, uncomfortable and seemed about right to Julie. It feels like its been raining all my life, she thought, why should it be any different now that he’s dead?

There was a hand on her shoulder.

‘Mrs. Jenkins?’ the hand said.

‘If you’ve come to say you’re sorry then don’t. I’m not sorry and I don’t care if you are.’ She turned to face the hand. There was a handsome looking man attached to it. She looked at him through tired eyes. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

‘That’s quite all right, Mrs. Jenkins,’ the man said, offering his hand.

It had been an exhausting week, arranging the burial of her husband. Julie never understood before how much work it took disposing of the dead. Her husband’s complicated life had extended itself into the grave, leaving her alone with two kids, streams of paperwork, a slew of family and friends and their unrelenting condolences. She found it hard to raise the energy for formality.

‘People just call me JJ,’

The man smiled delicately, with only the corners of his mouth. He was somewhere in his late thirties judging by the slight wrinkles around his eyes. There was a certain lonely look to him, but his voice was soft and kind as it tried on her name.

‘JJ, then. Please, call me Hemingway,’

Julie took the man’s hand and shook it briefly. ‘You knew my husband?’

‘Yes, in a way. Though I only met him twice. I worked for him in a small capacity for a good many years.’

Julie turned back to look at the muddied plot. ‘He never mentioned you.’

‘I can’t imagine he would have.’

The truth was that Carter had never talked to Julie about anything. He was as much of a mystery now as he had been in the beginning. She had loved that at first, there was something so reassuring about a man who acted without need for conversation or deliberation. Carter was a stone wall that she had built her life around.

Julie sighed over her dead husband. ‘It’s too late for him to say anything now.’

‘I’m sorry, JJ.’

‘So am I, but not for him.’

They stood together in the hush and patter of rain, coming to terms with their own thoughts. Hemingway spoke first, his voice, softened in the falling water. ‘JJ, there’s something I have to tell you that may not want to hear.’

Julie spun sharply and stumbled, her heel sinking into the damp soil. As she fell forward Hemingway stepped in, bracing her by the elbows. He steadied her on her feet, smiling apologetically as though for his own clumsiness. She looked at the man with a mixture of embarrassment and anger, silently daring him to speak.

Hemingway stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coat and let his eyes drop. ‘I need to tell you about the work I did for your husband.’

It was getting cold and Julie was soaked through. She ran a hand through her hair, leaving tracks in the wet blonde mess. It was done for now and so was she, he was in the ground. All she wanted now was to shower and sleep. She didn’t want to do this today but the man in front of her meant to say his piece. Better to get it over with.

‘If you want to tell me why you killed him,’ she said, ‘then I think we should go somewhere dry.’

0

Masquerade

Under the mask she smiles. The guests natter around her, crowding the apartment and making sounds like summer crickets. Their mingling measured, scene but not herd. Brazen gestures shade furtive glances under idle lighting hiding busy hands. Dust addled speakers push a slow Miles Davis around the room with the grace of potato mash through a tin colander. Dignity disguised, she moves to its strains, her dress flowing around her as she sways and twists, roses in the fold of clouds dancing to the missing notes of an unheard melody. Her feet remember the way, she lets them be.

0

Since

Perched above me, knees braced against the outsides of my thighs, she sighs. I knead the ball of her foot with my thumb, my fingers splayed between her toes. The smell of rain and desert sage couch themselves around us in the stillness. I smile at her with the corner of my mouth and she steals it with a kiss. The pulse quickens in my neck. Steadying herself on my chest with one outstretched hand, like a traffic warden’s warning, she tames a drift of hair. I watch her hard eyes soften under the gypsy lights. ‘Fuck,’ she sighs.

0

Temperate

There’s a breeze lingering by the window sill and she rubs her arm in defense of the chill. I ask her if she’s cold. Her reply sounds on the inside of my head, making me wonder if either of us had really spoken. Wrapping my arm around her waist I raise her up and carry her to the couch. There are blankets if you need one, I tell her. She only stares into the corners of the room. This time I feel her silence against my skin and I shiver as if she had spoken the chill into life.

0

Out

‘Get out of my bed,’ she said, while he lay there, inert. ‘I said get the fuck out of my bed.’ She pushes him and he tumbles to the floor, landing with a sick thud that she feels in the pit of her stomach. For a while he just lies there, making her worry that she’d done some actual damage. As she reaches a hand towards him he slowly drags himself upright and looks at her, his eyes red and puffy. He’s been crying. After a time he sighs, walks into the hall and starts putting on his shoes.

1

Ingenue

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.

2

Heresy

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.

0

Saccharine

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.

0

When

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.

2

Blind

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.

0

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