I lean my hip against the rail and look into the complex, something like two dozen apartments arranged in an irregular square, four squat blocks sharing a Sierra Leone stare around a communal courtyard, all done up in Mediterranean faux deco painted pastel terracotta stucco. Nothing moves but the fourth story wind and the scant ambitious leaves thrilling themselves in its breeze. I hear Dane muttering nothings to nobody inside and turn to watch him shuttling knickknacks between nooks with perfectly suited idiosyncratic randomness, complementing each piece on its place as he goes. Everything looks the same to me.
Under the mask she smiles. The guests natter around her, crowding the apartment and making sounds like summer crickets. Their mingling measured, scene but not herd. Brazen gestures shade furtive glances under idle lighting hiding busy hands. Dust addled speakers push a slow Miles Davis around the room with the grace of potato mash through a tin colander. Dignity disguised, she moves to its strains, her dress flowing around her as she sways and twists, roses in the fold of clouds dancing to the missing notes of an unheard melody. Her feet remember the way, she lets them be.
Perched above me, knees braced against the outsides of my thighs, she sighs. I knead the ball of her foot with my thumb, my fingers splayed between her toes. The smell of rain and desert sage couch themselves around us in the stillness. I smile at her with the corner of my mouth and she steals it with a kiss. The pulse quickens in my neck. Steadying herself on my chest with one outstretched hand, like a traffic warden’s warning, she tames a drift of hair. I watch her hard eyes soften under the gypsy lights. ‘Fuck,’ she sighs.
There’s a breeze lingering by the window sill and she rubs her arm in defense of the chill. I ask her if she’s cold. Her reply sounds on the inside of my head, making me wonder if either of us had really spoken. Wrapping my arm around her waist I raise her up and carry her to the couch. There are blankets if you need one, I tell her. She only stares into the corners of the room. This time I feel her silence against my skin and I shiver as if she had spoken the chill into life.
‘Get out of my bed,’ she said, while he lay there, inert. ‘I said get the fuck out of my bed.’ She pushes him and he tumbles to the floor, landing with a sick thud that she feels in the pit of her stomach. For a while he just lies there, making her worry that she’d done some actual damage. As she reaches a hand towards him he slowly drags himself upright and looks at her, his eyes red and puffy. He’s been crying. After a time he sighs, walks into the hall and starts putting on his shoes.
It’s always the same. She asks me to come and I tell her maybe, knowing that I will. I waited once, for almost the passing of the sun, for her to come to me and she never did. As I sat there, waiting, I thought about her eyes and the softness of her skin. I go to her, labeling my feet betrayers as they move, though they follow my command. My sins coalesce into shadows, tethered stalkers closing the gap as the day wears on. I weigh my heart in her hands and find them wanting for its weight.
Convened in a court of accusations, my point is that it never happened but my refusals only seem to make it true. I tell her that, but she props her indignation up with other peoples lies like wadded paper jammed underneath an uneven table leg. I feel so frustrated then that I could cry, which makes me angry, and when I take it out on her I know I’ve gone too far, though it doesn’t stop me. I’ve painted her face with a pastiche of pointillist swatches in shades of anger and betrayal, stained by watercolor streaks of sorrow.
Julie comes over to borrow a cup of sugar, which seems so far fetched I laugh right at her, but she tells me no, she wanted to bake cookies and thought she had enough because who runs out of sugar anyway. I tell her that I only have the synthetic stuff now since Darren’s diabetes and she deflates a little as she remembers, so I ask her in for coffee which tastes a bit like old dirt, because I don’t have any real sugar, and I find myself apologizing to her even though I know I don’t really care.
The time we lay in bed, making love as the afternoon sun cascaded through our window. Old vinyl jazz and the hum of traffic mingling with the tang of sweat and salted air. Summer breezes like childhood whispers, drifting languid through laced drapes, over tangled sheets entwined with limbs like M.C. Escher prints. Impossible promises spelt in whispers, warm breath on cooling flesh and sighs like sybaritic siren songs. Electrical storms raging under each fingertip, charged with spent kinetic energy. The way you held me as we fell asleep, wreathed in satisfaction and the flitting shadows of the clouds.
When she opens the door I swoop in and lift her in my arms. She clasps her hands at the back of my neck and crosses her legs around my waist, her buttocks resting against my hips. Our momentum carries us into the hall. As the door closes behind us her back hits the wall. She barks in my ear and I dig my hand into her hair. The touch of her lips to my neck writes braille desires on my skin. I feel her body against mine, hard under the fabric of her shirt. I can smell strawberries.
She moves so softly I don’t know she’s there until she slips her hand into mine. ‘Come on,’ she says, and leads me towards the cab rank. I let myself go with her. I don’t want to be alone and I don’t want to be around people. There’s something empty about her that makes this feel like getting both. It’s wrong, but it’s easy.
In the back of the cab she takes my hand again. She’s telling me about her night and all her friend’s problems. I listen dutifully, detached. The way she talks about them I can tell she thinks we’re perfect. It feels like her hand is getting tighter the longer she talks, like cranking a vice. There’s no air in the cab. I wind down the window and press my face into the breeze.
Of course we sleep together, but I can’t switch off. I don’t feel anything, my thoughts override my senses. Afterwards she slides across the gap between us and lays her head against my chest. ‘How long have we been doing this?’ She asks.
Fucking? I say.
She slaps my thigh playfully. ‘I mean all of this.’
I’ve been doing this my whole life, but I know that’s not what she means, so I grunt. She goes quiet. I can hear her breathing in and out in a sharp little staccato that punctures the silence around us.
I tell her I know, trying to stop her saying what she wants to.
She lifts her head up, startled, and raises an inquisitive eyebrow at me. ‘How do you know what I want to say, huh?’
I tell her that she’s most transparent person I know, that I can read it on her.
She throws her head back down on my chest with a little huff. ‘Well, I want to say it,’ she says. ‘I need-’
I tell her she doesn’t.
I push her away and slide to the edge of the bed. She looks so small, when I look back at her, lying crumpled in the sheets, wearing only a look of sad resilience. She catches my eye snorts defiantly. ‘I don’t care. I love you and I want to say it.’
I tell her she shouldn’t be in love with me, that it was never what I wanted. I don’t realize I’m shouting until I see the look on her face. She’s fragile, but somehow I’m the one who starts crying.
I shouldn’t, but I stay the night. I have strange dreams.
When the morning light pries my eyes open I try to sneak out, but she stirs as I’m halfway through the door.
‘I want to talk about this,’ she whispers.
I know you do, I say, closing the door.
The first time I died I was sixteen and learning to drive. I was getting good too. I tell myself now in the middle of the night that it wasn’t my fault and it’s probably true, though I’m not sure I believe it. I don’t remember much, just dad eternally dialing at the radio presets as though they might start broadcasting new stations if he came around one more time, and mum chattering in the back with one eye in the rearview mirror and the other on the neighbours lawn. I remember waking up and knowing things were different.
I take the pamphlet from her and let the spiel go over my head. There’s a scar crossing her nose like a spectacle bridge, I want to run my thumb over it when she smiles. I rest my eyes on her lips and ride the cadences spilling from them, rollercoaster consonants powered by enthusiasm. Her voice feels like melted butter smells. She stops when I take her hand and put the pamphlet there. Even in the shadows her fingers are warm. When she retreats, there’s an apology in her movements that doesn’t show in her eyes, so I smile.
Colt sits down with his usual heaviness, spilling beer onto the table. I blot at it with a coaster but it just herds the beer around into little Moses channels. Colt slides the low tide drink at me through the streams and nods over his shoulder. I finish off my beer and raise my eyebrows at him down the length of the glass. He leans over the table, his slender fingers plying unseen pockets, and manifests a cigarette. In conspiracy tones he tells me I should fuck the bartender. I tell him beautiful women make me want to die.
The air is thick with the threat of rain. Shadows wander the streets in the auspices of a vagabond sunrise. The baker’s ritual clogs the alleys with olfactory rolls and damper scones. A depression in the street has become a burrowed slice of haven, clouded with refused takings and the leavings of scavengers. In the last dead end, Junk Struck Larry lay his head, his lip curled in imitation of his body, a freshly milled pout made with an old recipe. A discard ragged wraith haunting a stolen castle, lain in a bed built of goodwill and bad intentions.
A Few Short Words 