I wake into her as the drowning man, gasping and lost. She strokes my hair as the seawater nightmare drains from my lungs and says, ‘Hush.’ Have I been sleeping? ‘Sort of,’ she says, ‘in a way we both have.’ My skin seems aerated, void of tension, and I worry her arms wont be enough to tether me. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, as though my thoughts were a stream running over opal pebbles and passing from her lips, ‘we have each other now and that’s all there is.’ I worried I might never wake, I say, opening my eyes.
All that shifts in the night is silence and smoke. ‘I want to show you something,’ she says. Placing my hand in hers, she lays them on the counter, placid. The smoke coils, dancing between us. Countless molecules shimmer, cavort, and graze upon their fabric. The air warms, its crisp brace shredded in a still kinetic bath. She raises her hand and one hundred trillion atoms are suddenly meagre, they burst and multiply, flitter and merge, shouting joyously across an indefinable space. ‘Can you see it,’ she asks. I tell her, I can feel it. Suddenly everything is different.
I’ve seen stewing.rainfall.eats, dreaming.munch.magnetic and best.prosper.lash, yet nothing has felt so splendid as mutual.minds.dusty, a welcoming kiss and instant ease. Being led through librarian.labels.shelf and insert.they.coherent to life.toast.think where we listened to each other, made coffee to drink and learnt strong surface depths. Moving past scare.types.reveal we lay in exist.light.drums, linked.digits.fears quelled and simply felt. Quench.lakes.giving, watching us with patience, letting in little outside lights, lives.puzzle.lush, while elsewhere the oily river babbles, struck.give.rewarding.
Standing by the cliff, she says, ‘I want you to push me first and then dive in after to save me.’ I don’t ask why and she laughs and the harness tightens. ‘Are you scared?’ Only of losing you, I say. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘after this you’ll have only lost fear.’ I can almost see her skin eating the sunlight, caramel clashing and consuming the blue. She turns to face the cliff and the future and says, ‘Now fucking push me.’ I put my hands to the small of her back and whisper in her ear, I love…
A tiny brow crease and wrinkle of the little pock that lives above the left. There’s something in her eyes. They’re glistening, not with tears but a spectrum, a fast vastness that ripples and contorts and plays across the iris like a borealis flirting upon the tundra. This thing in her eyes, it doesn’t hurt but does carry fear; it doesn’t propel, but does carry hope; it doesn’t carry her, but does makes her float. The brows push together more, increasing indent. There’s something in her eyes. There’s a word for it, wholly inadequate but labelled, an unbearable lightness.
I wonder what I’m supposed to be some times. A sin eater? A catalyst? Collateral damage? Is it one of those perception things, a parallax error where life doesn’t line up for us because we see it from different angles and they’ll always be at odds? I wonder what that means I am some times. The glass? The water? The waiter? Is it one of those preconception things, a baked-in behaviour as over cooked as this analogy? I wonder what I should say some times. I am, I am not, I may be? Yes, no, maybe? I wonder?
Billy had a penis growing on his head somewhere. Reputedly it was quite big, as people had remarked upon it many times. Unfortunately Billy could neither see nor feel the penis and its exact dimensions remained a mystery to him. ‘What a dick head,’ someone might say, with begrudging wonder in their voice. If particularly preoccupied with ire or other matters they might exclaim, ‘You are the biggest dick head I have ever met.’ Unsure whether to feel pride at its invisible splendour or shame for the inexplicable tone of exasperation that accompanied its mention, Billy was routinely confounded by the continuing fascination of others. Still, he was pleased to be noticed at all and grew to quite enjoy his phallic point of difference, though it could never be compared to his original visible member he knew deep down that it should be something special to draw such frequent and fervent commentary. Having concluded thus, that his mysterious appendage must simply be splendid to others but was quite literally beyond his grasp, Billy continued to live life as he always had, with a pride of dormant butterflies ever waiting to flutter at a friend or stranger’s utterance, ‘Billy, you are a massive dickhead.’
Of course there were darker times, late at night or whilst dwelling in a pit dug from indecision and inner derision, occasions when Billy wondered why it was he could not see what others saw. What lack might he have, what missing sense or unintelligence was inhibiting his perception? When these niggling threads would irritate the mind, Billy found it soothing to unravel them to their fullest. The midnight oil burnt quick in deep rabbit holes, as he wandering through wiki warrens and endless YouTube tutelage, where an article on auras might lead to an excerpt on extra sensory perception, essays on the collective unconscious drew magicians and medical doctrine together, philosophers and philistines held court over soothsayers and sense memory in discourses that ran a roughshod gamut from zeitgeist and eyesight. Billy grew dizzy with knowledge and an increasing absence of clarity, his head hurt and he would often dwell in a migraine inducing fugue of phallically focussed phantom limb symptoms.
Having exhausted all internal and online avenues, inevitably Billy turned to back to the world for answers.
It wasn’t the knife or the way she held it that scared me, it was years of experience and the absentminded way it undercut her words, waiving it limply along like a conductor‘s baton on a broken wrist. ‘Did you lie to me because you’re an asshole or because you thought you’d get away with it?’ Neither, I say. A bad answer for a worse question. She had me backed into an actual corner. ‘So, what, you just did it for fun?’ I felt the absurd teeth of semantics closing on me and nearly laughed myself to death.
James lay on his back, writhing, and wondered if life was hell. He had eaten part of a page of a Kafka novel and thought it might mean something. It did not. Expelling his supply of futility in parallel with his desperation, James writhed some more and snagged a mesothoracic leg on a linoleum knot, leaving it detached and autonomously alarmed at his side. He couldn’t feel its absence and was shocked at the hole that made. Midst thorax contractions came fatuous lucidity. I should have eaten Joyce, James thought, it might have changed something. It would not have.
‘Like eighty percent of what I say just comes out as ash and lands at my feet so you can kick it around and complain about choking on the dust.’ Sometimes while Jo yells I like to trace the path of my life. I picture little stones placed on a sea of fog and I tiptoe over them, making light little leaps where necessary and cooing at the ruined splendour lurking in the haze. Nothing we tell each other will build me a stable path. ‘Well fuck that,’ he says, ‘don’t light a fire and bitch about the heat.’
Are you seriously asking me if I’ve heard about god? Have you heard of the fucking internet, of art, of television, of books, of fucking humanity? People have been batting that shit over the net for as long as we’ve been scared of the dark. Yeah, I’ve heard about god, and his miraculous cuckold baby. If they have a plan for us all, for me, and it includes the devil and all that rapture battle crap, then it definitely includes me being miserable and screwing up and sinning like, well, every other damned human since the apple was bit.
Waking might be the end of me. It’s the moment a balloon breaks, slowed to a handful of agonising frames. Stretched beyond the tenable, then shredded by tension, a normally elastic composure separates into disparate shards. If you pause in that moment you lose all catharsis, it becomes the overwhelming evisceration of one element over another, pressure versus restraint, but if you press forward you lose both forces. One freed by its molecules, one bound by them, equally stripped of purpose by form, one dissipates and the other dies. All of this happens before I even open my eyes.
I cancelled my date with Ashleigh because I didn’t want to shower. The idea of putting effort into myself on behalf of another person seemed as repellent as the cavalcade of odours gentrifying my being. Easier to keep rotting awhile than resort to self-esteem. I texted to tell her I wouldn’t make it again, I’d had a mild emergency, some family trouble, a soft sell she returned by telling me to go fuck myself with firm creativity. I spent the night wallowing in the pit I’d dug, a bad choice made right, and never did have that shower.
She’s got one of those out of date names like Claudette or Glenda but I miss it for the lipstick on her teeth. Staring herself, she asks if something’s wrong in the style of spun yarn. I lay a finger to the bruise on my cheek and say I might not be coping. She smiles, sharing that porcelain stain again, and tells me she might have some literature about the possibility of help. I think about practicing origami in school when they still thought an education might help. I tell her I’m grateful and leave her to her teeth.
I can sense a rime of salt caked into the upper rim of my ears. After tears. I shouldn’t cry on my back but I like the way it feels, a milder misery than the wracking hunch or mirror stare manoeuvre. The tears run of course, down my cheeks and into the auricles, crusting, sometimes for days, as though the sandman had missed his mark, wept and moved on. I do feel tired though, which is different from sleepy and accrues an internal kind of crust. I cup my hands around my ears and listen to the ocean die.
A Few Short Words 