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.
She goes down on me then blows me off. I’ve barely got time to sigh and dry out before she’s kissing me on the stoop. You know, I don’t really mind, it’s just weird that it happened so early in the day. Normally I don’t get into complicated post-sex shame until after the sun’s gone down. So I stand on her street looking at the afternoon sun and wondering what to do with myself, now that I don’t feel the need to. There’s a couple hours left until hard liquor, but I think a beer would be okay.
She watches him go, slightly bored, with an onset of the musty disappointments you find at the end of dreams. Her thoughts a slithering question mark. Under the surface she says, surreal, full punctuation unseen. She washes her hands of electricity, fingertip sensations tightly strung end to end in to a webbing that she rubs free of care. Stung now empty, watching at nothing, she captures the wait. Tapping tap tapping, heels’ rapping kinetic, churning the water wheel. Under the surface she says, refresh, zero punctuation clearly heard. Rising she goes, following a stream of consciousness, only flotsam now.
I prowl through Sasha’s bookcase while she cooks, fingering the philosophers couched between the classics. There’s something purposefully eclectic in her selections, Kafka and Satre cuddled up to Caroll and Chaucer. I trace a line down The Catcher in the Rye’s spine and ask, how many existentialists does it take to screw in a light bulb? She does that little laughing sigh thing that sounds like resignation. The question is irrelevant, she tells me plating another pancake, the answer is in the question. Fish, I say hopefully, and this time it’s all sigh and the smell of burning sugar.
You can do anything you want, she says, and I could have died right then, instead I run my tongue from her collar to her chin savouring the taste of caramel and sin. I move my hand against her hip, braced and grinding, her splay legged wrappings around my waist. Anything, she says, and my hands make memories and break promises, our intentions hard between us in the heat of the moment. She tastes my lips again for seconds at a time that feels like the finite spread from one end of forever to the present. Anything, she says.
They watched each other through the open wedge of door and jamb, both seeing the end. I’ll do it, he said already lowering the knife, I’ll fucking do it, but the heat was gone. His threats condensed, wavered and dissipated, only as real now as the breathy steam their shouts had purged into the chill winter air. I’m tired, she said, do it or don’t but be done with it. And the knife clattered with a shrill tinny trill upon the blackened white and unfeeling linoleum. Silence then, tears after that, and finally an end to all that was.
Sammy puts the beer down beside me and retreats into her smile, folding herself up on to the chair, compliantly pliant. She’s so young. I want to suck out her innocence and smear it over my decaying life. I don’t look at her while we’re talking so I don’t have to think about it. She tells me about herself and I dredge up comparable miseries, silt covered adolescent syndromes, dirty and malnourished things that look better deteriorated. Don’t worry about me, I tell her halfheartedly pained, I always make the most out of the worst that I can find.
We sat on top of a mountain shaped like a molehill and looked over each other’s vistas, you through your lens and me through the soft pink haze of adolescent love. Every time the shutter whirred I wondered what you saw, considered the treachery of images, and shrugged my inner monologue. Every time you paused I scrawled, with shaky butterfly fingers, notes on admiration that read like playground sonnets. I used my pen to stem the pent up and sketch an allegoric sunset, which you drank with our draught and laughed over, wondering that love could be so young.
I can feel my skin wearing me, even after all this time it feels borrowed, like an Amazon meat sheath delivered to the wrong door and not returned out of necessity. It doesn’t even look like mine, but I’ve been hauling it around so long it’s gotten hold of familiarity and keeps wringing the thing every time somebody sees us. I can’t peel it off or pry me out of it, even if I could how could I choose a replacement, I don’t know what I should look like. I resign myself to it and all its incumbent tortures.
These days I have to watch art house porn, I can’t get off unless it looks like it was shot on a budget. Not that hand cam kind of shit though, the real life of fucking market that isn’t real or lifelike, I need something that smells of misguided integrity, filmed at obscure angles in front of improbable scenery, with tattoo wielding fringe girls smiling like the Mona Lisa’s pallbearer, and all those grainy lo-fi filters that make it look like someone handed Instagram your fetishes. I guess it makes me feel better knowing the director’s wanking too.
I bite my lip so hard while we’re fucking that a drop of blood falls on her cheek. Focused on other feelings, her eyes are closed and she doesn’t notice. I can’t concentrate but she’s moaning, don’t stop, and pushing me into her. I try to wipe it off but the blood just smears under my thumb and makes me think of cartoon Indians in some dark initiation, tribal rights of passage and the drumming of her heart, a fleshy sick percussion that lays under her moaning, her breathy chant and vehement hands forcing me to be a man.
I walk in on Caleb watching this compilation tape of women licking things, ice creams and lollipops and fruit and even one girl lapping happily at her mobile phone. I assume it’s hers. In contrast to some of his other peccadillos this one seems quite tame. I wonder out loud how such a thing gets made and he tells me reverently, these are women that he used to know, not girlfriends necessarily, or even good friends, just women that he knew. Apparently it reminds him that everyone’s the same. I don’t ask him how he made them do it.
The wind is warm and dull and makes my skin feel like pipe tobacco crumbs, crumbling, bitter and maligned. These days my enthusiasm wallows like water pooling in a basin, evaporating slowly, leaving the surface scorched, barren and longingly deprived. I’m sick of planting crops of hope that wither on the vine. Rakish, pallid and untended things, with the texture of dreams and inherited ephemera. I think if I could only immerse myself, maybe my landscape would flourish and grow some verdant purpose. Would that it would rain, wash the sallow from my skin and renew the whole again.
Jonah stares into the mirror with magnetic repulsion, scowling joyfully at the reflection of his nemesis. I hate you so much, he says. The words leave a bitter ambrosial tang upon his tongue as he repeats them with a steady mantric affluence. I will kill you, he ventures and the nemesis just smiles, benign, leaving Jonah feeling defeated and resentful. He turns away, seeking solace in absence, but still he sees those eyes that read like a why and hears the voice delivered in his tone, holding disconcerting diatribes that he keeps trying to disown. Together they are alone.
A Few Short Words 