I tap the dead woman’s leg with my toe tip and tell Laura, I don’t want to be here. She wrings her hands in an average Lady Macbeth and stretches her face into a little sorry about my friend look. I don’t know who it’s for, the dead take no courtesy. I shouldn’t have answered the phone tonight but I thought it might be important. Laura’s music is shuffling lethargically in the other room, Morrissey whining after Joy Division, and I tell her again, I don’t want to be here. This time it feels like I’m talking to myself.
Cleo kicks my castle over with such languid apathy that I want to strangle her for it. She walks away with three hours of work wedged into the treads of her Havaiana’s, while I think of places to hide her body. I throw myself onto the rubble, thinking about fucking her boyfriend. The taste of chlorine and the bite of tile in my back as he worked at me with a graceless lack of friction. I push my hands into the sand, making fists of its grains and thrust my hips against the sky. The tide is coming in.
If I close my eyes hard enough I’m not even here. There’s the sound of a waterfall draining over the horizon, the smell of peonies and the softness of mossy rocks. There’s somewhere else where real things happen inexplicably, the sound of grit and the colour grey. There’s sunlight everywhere, though poured in different measures over different regions. Sometimes I wish there were less, unless it looks too beautiful and then I find it excuses itself. If I open my eyes I will see dust forming in the wake of the day as it wears itself down into nothing.
Her sobs are wilted, withdrawn things, though her tears are fresh and pool at the base of my inadequacies. I sail my hand across her shoulders, riding their whimper sympathetic ebb and flow. I feel queasy. We can fix this, I tell her, everything will be okay. I wonder if you can die from crying, whether it would be dehydration or an atrophy of the soul. I offer to get her a glass of water but she shakes her head. Probably she’ll die soon, dried up and ashen like a Pompeii person. Everything will be okay, I tell her.
Everything’s out of focus and I can’t stop blinking. There’s still blood in my eye. I want to wipe it on my shirt but I can’t reach with my arms tied down. My head aches. Penelope is pacing in front of me, a stinging blur. The knife keeps catching the light as she turns, piercing me with its silvered glints. She points it at me while monologuing and stamping her foot for punctuation. Really, she’s not making any sense, but I guess I can understand that. I tell her she can hurt me as much as she needs to.
Candii, who I adore, used to let me win when she thought I was into that. Now she doesn’t hold back and I haven’t won a game in weeks. She’s nice about it, though sometimes I wish I knew how to be better. I told Roxxii that strip clubs have the densest population of superfluous vowels in the country. She just withered and walked away, but Candii laughed and told me she needed two eyes to see. I didn’t laugh until later. I told her the next time I saw her and she smiled her winning at pool smile.
Sometimes late at night I like to scream really loudly and pretend it wasn’t me. I used to swear into the universe to see what would happen. Nothing happened, nobody even told me no. I broke my voice once doing this. After that I had a whiskey mellowed, middle aged jazz singer screening my words for me for a while. I fell in love with the sound of it. I whispered for the joy in it and talked myself to sleep. When I started to sound like me again I realised that you can’t always keep what you love.
The future of the past is definitely going to happen. Once, I spread my life out in front of me like ransom note clippings and jumbled it all up. I pulled bits out and stuck them next to other bits. Randomly really. Everything looked the same. I tried a few from the pile that hadn’t happened yet and that was hard. It didn’t look like much, sort of like your brother’s son who you haven’t seen in ten years but then you run into them in the street, in the dark, and they look really familiar, only, obscured somehow.
I’ve always been jealous of people who can do great things. I tried to be great once when I was younger. Then I got so sick that for a while I had something like food pushed through a tube that was pushed up my nose and into my stomach. Daily, all day. I don’t think you can live like that. When I learnt to use a knife and fork they let me go for walks and encouraged me to buy candy. Cherry cola and sour lemon sherbet things with the hard coating on the outside. Sour, I loved that.
I worry that reality doesn’t exist, or that time is built wrong. I know the definitions aren’t right but I can’t prove anything. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m afraid of and most of the time I feel like I’m carrying around a sack full of existential guilt. I try to explain myself to people that I know so that I will know how to explain myself. It doesn’t work, I keep finding hurdles built out of the gaps in our experiences and the absence of appropriate language. I stutter before I speak and my meanings come out jittered.
I cried for fully fifteen minutes today. I told Sarah I had smoke in my eye and went into the bathroom to look at myself. Once, I was reading Huxley in bed and I felt myself starting to cry, so I turned off the light and pretended to sleep. Sarah must have known because she spooned up to me and slid her arm under my neck. I spun into her, hiding my head against her chest and tried to be quiet. In the morning there was a face stain on Sarah’s singlet. I told her she makes me drool.
I’m trapped in this artificial bubble. I keep pointing at it and asking questions so everyone can shrug and tell me, it’s life. Sometimes I’ll stand right at the edge of a curb, the toes of my worn out converse poised on its precipice, and think about not being dead. I like the way I feel as the traffic slides by. When it’s something big like a truck or a bus I can feel the wind drive through me as it races to catch up. It makes my spine tingle. I’ll stand there until I know I can walk.
I draw the shades when appointed and lumber before sleep, where every night I cut my wrists and bleed into my imagination. There’s a war waged there I correspond to and fore. The me voice tells me things I don’t want to hear and his council of cuckoos mimic taunt me while I look for pieces of my argument. When I wake I die a little anyway. Early morning emptiness, embracing alms of broken bread with my parasitic cohorts and their slumber driven drivel rambling docile replays of last night’s torments. Daylight grants me recess and I listen less.
Even though the woman led, it was the man Sarah noticed first. Confidant in a bodily way, he moved through the room as though the room moved for him. They took a window booth and Sarah took them in. The woman wore her beauty the way a tree accepts its rings. The man smiled slowly and admired with careful eyes. They talked, he gestured and rummaged at the base of the woman’s stone countenance while she threw him withered looks like scraps. Sarah could tell there was no clue. It’s weird, she thought, normally it’s the guy who’s oblivious.
There are scientific methods for measuring glacial displacement. She says a lot of it relies on friction, so we shouldn’t have a problem. Then she presses the back of her hand to my cheek and asks if I can feel the ice running through her veins. I tell her ice doesn’t run until it’s warming on your tongue and she whaps my face with her hand, pouting as though she wanted honesty from her inquiry. I offer to make her melt but she tells me I’m lukewarm at best. Sometimes I wonder if tepid isn’t better than icy indignation.
A Few Short Words 