It’s a dangerous thing to ask a woman for the truth, their barbs are shaped differently than those of men and have a tendency towards the infected prickling of a forgotten splinter. ‘You are too nice,’ she said. I doubted it with the severity of a lifetime’s intimacy, but she continued explaining in her oddly erotic, stiff Scandinavian diction. ‘You are very small and too gentle, I think. Too kind, also? Usually I like a man who is strong, but this was interesting for me tonight, to try what is not normal.’ I’ve since grown to love their lies.
There wasn’t enough of them left for the ground, so they weren’t put in graves, just commemorative boxes bricked in a wall, memories with matching plaques. What remained didn’t need two spaces, two names would’ve been enough, would have been right. Both of them had burnt together, blended by the fire, their love sealed in death. It should have been romantic. Separating them had felt disrespectful, desecrating the wishes of the deceased, yet it was done, the living’s behest sifted into equal piles of mourning and distributed. Though, who could ever be certain how much of them was them.
I say friend and she hears lover. I no longer own the meaning of my words. She gets to make them what she wants. The truth grows from there. A strawberry seed blooms into a citric orchard. Bitter fruit harvested for desire. ‘What do you want?’ She asks me for fertiliser, to tend her. Our foundations are corrupted, bitter to the bedrock, all that comes from it are twisted thickets with thorny convoluted trappings. ‘What do you really want?’ Endemic rot grafted through translation. I wanted only to put down roots, let nature take its course. ‘Is it me?’
It comes on strong. Hope sucks out of the room and takes my breath with it. My mind becomes a physical pain, a weighted thing that transcends its dimensions, drawing away into a black chasm that is the absolute of all things and the absence of anything. I lie on the floor, gasping and panting, sodden with sweat and tears and salt and surrounded by the absolute knowledge that the only way to feel ok is for me to die. Every time, I don’t die. But I could. I want to. I’m not sure how that makes me feel.
The ward my sister gets her treatments in smells like disinfectant and waning hope. I used to walk the grounds while I waited, but it made me feel guilty smoking cigarettes and being healthy. Sometimes I’d walk to the valley and hang out with the Cabaret girls. The first time I went, there was a girl named Simba doing her routine to that Elton John song from the Lion King. I thought it was really depressing back then, now I think it’s kind of empowering. If I really tried to, I’m sure I could find it depressing again soon.
The horrors follow me to bed, their call becomes inescapable and loops inside me like an empty chant. Wind in the darkness. I press myself against the crags of my partner’s sedation and look for comfort, digging at her rocky stillness. Mountain dwellers carve their homes out of the inhospitable. They find their peace in equalling adversity. You can’t be mad at nature. It is inscrutable. I apply myself again to the cold rigidity and say this into her hair. You are inscrutable. I love her for having no blame in this and fall asleep thinking of the knife.
I was wearing underpants, she was wearing a singlet. She pressed her buttocks against my crotch. I wrapped my arm across her breast. It didn’t occur to either of us to be aroused. ‘Remember when we were in love?’ She said. I nod into the scruff of her neck and make a sound. It’s enough. She laughs, light and sharp. ‘It’s like a fantasy now. Sickening, don’t you think?’ I can’t breathe. If I open my mouth I will choke on her Rapunzel fantasy. ‘We never would have lasted. I mean, we didn’t did we.’ I feel so tired.
There’s one shot in the Parisian metro where she’s trying not to smile. It’s silent beauty composed through bearing and spoken by the eye, known but not tamed, lucid but aloof, like a corset on a cloud. Only, that doesn’t sell the elegance of the moment. She looks at me through time and space and all of the humanities. She sees a world where I am nothing and I am everything. I am always present in each of my absences, an unseen object become subject. There’s one inescapable moment where I look and long. In it, I am there.
I only show her a few times before she asks to have a go. The knife, so small in her hands, still drives deep, its cool flatness pressed into and parting the meat of my left flank. Our fingers cross upon its hilt as she tilts her chin to face me and then I see the sunset rolling its dusk across each iris. She says, ‘I thought there’d be more bleeding,’ before the light fades out completely. There, in the following night, starts some new fire. Burnt between us and sizzling in the air, a scorching promise to engulf.
If I were a camera man her look would have said stop filming. As it was, I shrugged and put down my notebook, sticking my pen behind my ear. I don’t think she gets that there is no off switch for what I do, only different ways of remembering. Still, her guard lowered along with my pad, earning me some small trust that I would spend later. She relaxed into her chair and practiced smiling at me. Between grin and grimace she told me, ‘It’s not easy being somebody.’ And I wondered how hard it would be being nobody.
Gritting his teeth, he watched it draw closer. Watched the monstrosity drag itself across the cold linoleum floor. Watched it working at words through a palpating mess of blood and gore, what once was a mouth. He listened. A raspy hiss, a sound like cutter but more familiar, slurred and husky, sickeningly percussed by a slippery snick of teeth on bone. It was trying to say his name. He tightened his grip, shut his eyes and brought the axe down hard against his wife’s freckled neck, a mottled target. ‘I’ll always love you, Sunshine,’ he whispered into the silence.
A Few Short Words 