Time stops while I look around the room at all the nothing. A still life tableaux. Cup with rim of coffee rind. Cigarette case with cancer council warning and Bic lighter mooring. Origami paper cranes and crumpled mistakes. Affluent layers of dust and ash. I drag my fingers across the table scraping patterns in the silt, they mean nothing but my mind refuses to admit it. I trace them out, feeling for meaning with a desperation I’m not used to. These final moments should mean something, if not for me than for somebody, but there’s nothing here to decipher.
Danny hands me the macaroni abomination and says, this is a picture of how much I love you. I take the thing and hold it in front of my face, blocking his view of my confusion. I say, thanks kiddo, and try to mean it enough for him to feel it. I have friends with kids that play the cello, cook gourmet meals, read at adult levels and see their parents psychiatrists. I have Danny who makes gluey, macaroni messes, can’t remember half of the alphabet, loves me unconditionally and makes me feel like I got the better deal.
Dean’s sugar mellowed smile bores down on me and I have to act. I start in Midsummer, slide into one of the soliloquies and make my way into Macbeth. I try not to let my Horatio die, even as I am pierced by the acerbic plastic rustle of Dean’s foraging, his thick, somnolent fingers prying the bag on his lap for fresh candied pray. I hear him chewing between sonnets, his smacking lips palpating over my punctuation. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments. Some Caliban betrays me and leaves me limping to a close amidst the winter of our discontent.
I watch her etching graphite moments in her notebook with tender unawareness. Pouting heavily, she rubs at her mistakes with a forlorn fervour. She wears her sadness like a starlet’s custom cocktail dress, it fits in all the right places, revealing only intrigue and the temptations of the viewer. I want to help her, but all of my mistakes have been carved in stone and laid as markers of my past, leaving me without faculty or future. All that I could offer would be ways to shade or bury and wouldn’t fit the moment without marking out its grave.
Janey sits beside me, seeped in the scent of coconuts and honey. I dig my hands into the beach and try not to pay attention. I tell myself it’s the sunscreen not her skin. I want to lick her to be sure. Probably she doesn’t want that. I’d say her boyfriend and my girlfriend wouldn’t care much for it either. I’m the only person who wants it and it’s something I don’t do. I lay back on the sand and let the sun close my eyes. The tidal hush strokes across the pads of my feet, cooling my heels.
She’s talking to me and looking right at the diamond. I can’t, she says. I tell her she deserves nice things as much as I deserve to see her have them. Go on, I say, try it on. There are a thousand facets to her smile, all of them etched and precious, captured forever upon her finger. She asks me if I’m sure and I tell her I lost my uncertainty the day that I found her. I can see myself reflected in her pleasured crystal tears. I never knew my face had room for showing so much joy.
She says not to worry about her friends, they’re just overprotective. You guys seem nice, she says, but she really doesn’t know. I feel bad for her in that moment, in her innocence. I want to tell her she should run. When she turns away I tell Jamie that she looks like the Joker. Jamie laughs and says he’s going to fuck her anyway. Sometimes I wonder that I don’t die for being me. I think that I should spontaneously cease for being the way I am. It never happens and I want to die for that reason alone.
I like to watch her while she sleeps even though I know it’s creepy. I’m not being a creep about it though, I’m quietly in love. Sometimes I get this weird feeling like I want to taste her soul. I want to place each part of her in my mouth and savour its complexity. If I could subsume her I would, even knowing how sad it would make me, not being able to look at her any more. She would always be a part of me though and I think it would be enough to know we are together.
Karl bit the tip of his tongue off last summer during one of his seizures. There was nobody there to hold him down or help him out and he’s lucky he didn’t die. He’s been bitter ever since, on account of those being the only buds he has left to taste with. We all joke about it with him even though we know he doesn’t like it. Dylan always salts Karl’s beers if he leaves them unattended. That used to make me laugh, but Karl doesn’t smile anymore and the whole thing leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
There’s a thing called an upper decker. It’s where you leave a shit in someone’s toilet cistern so that it will rot. Every flush will only bring the passing of decay. This is a terrible and confusing thing. I had it done to Cleo once, by a boy named Chip, of all damned things. I’d found him at the markets three days before and let him follow me home, as long he slept at the foot of the bed and promised not to bite. After I got him housebroken I didn’t see the point, so I put him down.
I tell myself I perform retaliations upon Cleo, not guerrilla actions. There are seventeen separate instances I can remember in which she has damaged me, and many more, I’m sure, that lurk underneath my memory. None of this matters to her. I know this, not in the way that depreciating people expect the direction down, but as a certainty. She flits. She’s a flitter and it shits me. I watch her weightlessness with that brand of jealousy that grows in the shape of anger. I resent my resentment of her. I wish that she could mean nothing to me.
Every time Jamie tells his story he gets a little more innocent, as though guilt were washable in rhetoric. I listen at the corners of the conversation, tired of his inflation, and search myself for some barb to bring him down. All I have is my own indignation and a weary knack for self-depreciation. Jamie orders another round and goes back to polishing his lies. I tell him I’m going to kill myself and he says, oh yeah, in a milk with two tone that makes me want to switch my target. Sometimes I wonder why I’m here.
We’re drinking bourbon and cola, with more water than either, while top forty pop sleazes over us. The girl is Moroccan. It sounds exotic. Really, it only means a tan, an accent, a certain fullness and some unusual piercings. I watch her crawl down stage, her dark green eyes sketching back and forth as her lips move out of synch. Colt slips a five into her garter as she passes, and whispers to me that Australia needs dollar bills. Staring down the barrel of her womanhood, I wonder if we really need more ways to pay these women less.
Her hands move with a swift artfulness in the candle light. Gently roaming the plains of his skin,
The sun shines, its magnanimous warmth intercepted by a series of worldly filters.
across an expanse of back and softly around the set of his neck. He slips his hand around her waist,
Clouds and trees move in unison to stifle its glory. A lone ray breaks free of its shackles
urging her closer. Leaning into her arms, he lets his lips brush lightly against her earlobe,
and strikes down upon a solemn spider’s web, illustrating its ingenuity. The spider, a dark creature
up to and slowly around the contours of her neck, coming to rest against the press of her collarbone.
by nature, scrambles into hiding, abandoning the web it toiled so hard to design. Having had its fun,
In the flickering light of the candle, their hands find each other, fingers twining. Their lips meet,
the beam moves south, looking for fresh amusement, weaving in and out of jealous impediments.
slowly parting, tongues darting, pressing and probing. The mingled taste of milk and honey.
Sliding gracefully across the lawn, it prods the grass awake, photosynthetic breakfast in bed.
A Few Short Words 