I keep on crying while she sighs, my head pressed hard against the porcelain. ‘Do you remember Esperanto?’ she says. I try to respond but my neck’s bent wrong and my mouth keeps making this gluggy, short-cut sound like a wail that’s been harpooned mid moan. ‘It’s dead now,’ she tells the ceiling, ‘nobody used it.’ The faucet dribbles and the air vent mutters. ‘Language is universal, only there’s no universal language.’ Somewhere behind her words is the white noise humming of electric beetles thrumming through our walls. ‘Funny, I just don’t understand you.’ My ducts feel dry.
Caleb leans back in his chair and fingers the neck of his beer, threading me with his hook. I’ve met magnets with less pull. He smiles at me with dentist perfect teeth and says, ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ which means I’ll want to, ‘but you strike me as the kind of guy who always gets the bill.’ Sure, I say, I get charged a lot but I rarely have to pay. Fisherman eyes, he slides a fifty at me over the table and points towards the bar. Somehow, under his patronage I feel like I’m the one being used.
Folded arms across my waist, she tastes the sweat upon my belly and looks at me with feline eyes. ‘I wish that we could be together,’ she says. Dulcet, matter of fact. She hums. Sinatra maybe, though who knows. Between the air con thrum and traffic’s rumbling, not to mention my heart’s fierce pumping, I can’t be sure of anything. ‘Sing,’ I ask, but she just laughs like sunflowers fornicating, coruscating facets. ‘I have a wish,’ which she confides, ‘that you were only mine. That time were dead and distant. Folded in upon itself and doled out more consistent.’
We sat on the old corduroy mess I called a couch, a third or fourth hand Salvation Army salvage, watching something indie I’d dredged up from the net, eating takeout Thai and drinking winter wine. I poured myself another glass and enquired my eyes at hers. She shook her head over the quarter serve and I didn’t fill it in, just sipped my own and soaked in the mundane. After dinner we smoked cheap tobacco cut with weed and listened to Tom Waits wail his whiskey etched Americana epitaphs, promising never to forget what it felt like to remember.
The condom she gives me doesn’t fit and I’m too embarrassed to say anything, so I just deal with it, but it keeps slipping away whenever I pull out. I end up wedging my fingers either side of my thing like a backwards version of the knife game, perpetrating the thrust instead of avoiding it. My free arm aches from balancing and I wish I’d done more push ups, ever. I can feel her body growing tense beneath me as she moves towards the edge. I see myself fading from her world, a vestigial body attached to an appendage.
I just want to feel normal, I think, or not abnormal, something other than the abortive chemical intrusions that constitute my emotions. My doctor gave me these pills to level me out, demure little blue things barely bigger than my pinky nail. The side effect sheet reads like an apocalyptic to do list cataloguing third world contagions. I may experience some or all of them. It’s supposed to be a tangible response to an intangible problem, it’s like the emperor’s new clothes if the dude was into skeet shooting, you know. Though, you can’t kill what you can’t see.
The three of them draped around my lounge in various states of disrepair, two bottles of wine and three hourglass figures. I’m trying to teach them how to smoke, how to get high really, all of them failing with saccharine adolescent resilience. Sarah pulls out the Velvet Underground and holds it up like a boxing ring round girl. Maybe when you’re older, I tell her, and she pouts, puts the record back and continues not to care. The other two tangle on the couch, blowing full-stop smoke rings at each other, laughing the way rain feels in summer.
Silence for days amidst the noise of the machines, bubble, drip, rattle and beep, as they orchestrate my husband’s final days. I take his hand in mine and squeeze, searching for life under the callouses and indifference. It all feels so familiar. There’s nothing left but cold comforts offered in consolation and intravenous platitudes. Thirty years of stone crumbling beneath starched white sheets, while I wait for the dead to die. It isn’t right. So many accidents never happen, he would have understood. I can’t be alone any more. Silence for days and then he calls out her name.
Inspired by the story An Accident by mridula
The rain keeps falling like a heavenly suicide club, so eager that each droplet barely leaves space for individuality, all the water in the world condensed into a sheet, flagellating itself against the ground. Liquid corpses pool in immortality below my deck, their moaning susurrations drowned beneath the familial patter-splash drumming of the departed. I watch with envy while the water grows, puddles of kismet formed into a body of one mind denied. I’m fascinated by their solidarity and long to acquiesce. I lay myself upon the ground and stare into the clouds, wondering what evaporation feels like.
She wraps her little hands around my throat and I push myself into them, feeling nothing. They’re so delicate, paper thin instruments unused to violence. I want you to hurt me, I say, and she squeezes, firm but uncertain. You can hit me if you like. Her cheshire smile wavers, a heat haze mirage, and she shakes her head. No, there’s no pleasure in her eyes, only the hope of mine. Candles go out one by one until the dark lays upon us with an unwanted suitors charm, and I tell her, I can be hurt in other ways.
You never look back when you walk away and I always wonder if you have to think about not caring like that. Afterwards I list the things I didn’t say and listen to how they sound in my head. All the things I don’t, filling little tomes like a library of missed opportunities. Some of them are great and none of them would have been any good. I don’t say that I’d rather be lying in bed with you somewhere, listening to records and finding out which part of you is my favourite. I don’t say or do anything.
Hours before the day crew found his body, the old man walked. The silence of the night broke under the shuffling, pad and hush of his threadbare nylon slippers. He walked on into the dark suburban stillness, where winter’s future wove itself through the fabric of his flimsy woolen shawl, though futures didn’t matter, he was padding through the past. Somewhere beyond the fingers of the frost, over dunes a decade old, she called to him. She was where the cherry petals flew, pink succulent blooms carrying the sweetness of days since gone. He walked on into her arms.
Inspired by the story Final Destination by Mridubala
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.
A Few Short Words 