All that blood and fat and bile wrapped in translucent shower curtain skin like a poorly rendered sausage casing, he already looks like meat, now Laura wants to cut it up. ‘It’ll make him easier to move,’ she says, dismissing the effort of severance, ‘then maybe we can feed him to some pigs.’ Doubtless she imagines that somewhere in the city is a poorly guarded piggery, full of famished swine with a stake in ironic justice. I run my hand across the bath’s enamel lip, the perfect porcelain craftsmanship, and tell her, babe, there ain’t anything eats the teeth.
Before the little death takes me, I look down and realise, the other girl, she’s just a fuck-toy now. I run my eyes around the flesh puzzle, trying to untwist its kinks. Dana looms above the girl, enraptured, one hand clutched upon her breast, artisanal fingers masticating greedily, the other, thrown behind her, dug into the sheets, a sutric pylon. I trace my hands within the decadence of skin, finding them grappled to hips like rubenesque gymnasium rings. My thrusts are parried with expert riposte, sweat covers us all and as I shiver, the girl is truly lost.
This is the best mask I could find and still it won’t quite fit. Other people have been wearing theirs for years and it seems like second nature to me. I know some folk never take it off, wearing it to bed, waking and walking around the day fronting fatty tissued grimaces rendered into appropriate composite sketches; contorted, really, to suit a social whim. Suffocating, I should think, the wearer dead like an inside-out puppet, the mask gasping to blend into the atmosphere, exposure a faux pas. I struggle just to put mine on and regurgitate the lines.
‘I know the scale you’re sliding down,’ she tells me. ’I have a metric for your happiness.’ I imagine her with callipers placed gingerly upon my person while I sleep, little tickers and a digital graph pinging astutely from the eaves while she nods with satisfaction. You can’t annotate my soul, I say, but she smiles, winsome and detached. ‘It’s all just data, infinite numbers and floating point existentialisms.’ Magician’s jargon dripping from a pipette. Guesses strapped uncertainly to truths, I tell her. ‘More, inductive plotting.’ So, tell me how this makes me feel, and she consults her notes.
I’m almost done preening when Tenielle swoops over dramatically and perches beside me. I can feel the bough bend and sway as she ruffles herself in a perversely uncomfortable way, making irritable clicking sounds in the back of her throat. It’s with the self assured certainty of the wilfully ignorant that she chirrups bluntly into my silence. ‘If you ask me, there’s a reason for all those blackbird stereotypes.’ I bury my beak into the underside of my wing, imagining how very occupied I must look, knowing you couldn’t drown an ant in the depths of that girl’s mind.
It’s worse because she looks right at me and says ‘I can’t see you anymore,’ with an anvil weight that would be comedic in a cartoon scenario. Little pressures build at unused points within me, acute punctures that target and release specific amorphous emotions. All I can muster is a lacklustre why? From inside emancipation she tells me, ‘I don’t own you, I don’t want to, but the need is overwhelming. Knowing you exhausts me in a way I can’t commit to anymore.’ I tell myself that I should cry but I don’t even have the moxie to submit.
Apparently his footprint was too big, so Caleb closed his Facebook account and started using mine. I’ve never been so popular. ‘You got forty new likes from that post,’ he tells me. ‘Something about cat videos they can’t satiate.’ I don’t sign on anymore, Caleb does my digital accounting and CC’s the reportage to my phone in case of real world enquiries. ‘Can you take pictures of your food?’ He asks me. ‘People love knowing what they’re not eating.’ But I haven’t eaten in days, so he says ‘Forget it, there has to be something tasty on the net.’
The shames I feel from the things that bring me joy are not exclusively limited to pleasure, every action I take elicits some guilt or another, yet, I feel no hand in choosing this struggle, the daily contention with the singular challenge of simply being myself, though, I do truly despise the constant battle with vanity, the pain in presumption of knowing anything at all, the uncertainty at the periphery of the certainty of any fact, being driven by the doubt written in my programming. The whole thing makes me want to die so bad I could kill myself.
Charlotte keeps spinning that Lana del Ray album, telling me it’s stuck on repeat. It’s great in the same way that getting the Borg Collective to chair a symphony orchestra produces a rich emotive sound. There’s no throbbing but the pounding is relentless. It’s making my skull feel wrong, put together so that the space without the pain is causing the distress, like being headacheless, an awareness of black absence, the third degree fringes of burn victim skin on a universal scale. I beg her to make it stop but she just shrugs, throwing more nothing onto the void.
We never stayed in touch but communicate absently over time, drawn messages in obscure sigils that must be deciphered, yet can’t truly be. Occasionally I take out the memories of us, turning them over like scarred souvenirs. Dog-eared and dirty, speculative relics, there’s very little value left behind, the lessons in each given over to history and all consumed by the past, their meanings beholden to the era of crafting, once chiseled implications lying chipped and dated, faded inferences in disconnected states under laminated strata, artefacts garnered to show that, now as then, still I know such nothing.
The little ford boy struggling with purpose and metaphor, playing children’s games in his head, making himself a conductor and empathetic martyr, a dreamscape crafter. The rally point for so many lost boys, clumped together like sodden matchbook heads, each preaching disparate callings. The same boat riding different waves. Subjective voices whitewashed in Times New Roman, reading woe is me, with the italics changed, so woe is me and woe is me, but the principles remain the same ‘Where is all of this going?’ they say, ‘How do you catch your meaning in the midst of all this maize?’
It feels wrong to take the lead, makes me blanch, though I have always depended on that kind of strangeness. We ride the midnight trams, the street grinding by under phosphorescent lamps. Home in time for collapse, her crumbling and distracted, agitated in drink. She looks like the Stanley to my Stella, pensive in deadbeat denim and tight black jeans, white wife beater singlet and lean silhouette casting just the right kind of dark. I lift her up and she grumbles into my chest, a far cry from desire, nothing but background rhubarb in the lounge-lit sepia atmosphere.
She squirms against my body with an eagerness that belittles the character I’d sketched and starts pulling back slightly, not disengaging but subtly leading, so I push her up against the wall. It’s exciting and empowering and only a little staged. I work my hands over her hips, looking for zen in the curves. The awareness of my self detaches into third person with disquieting swiftness and I close my eyes, imagining I’m still me in this moment and not just an arbiter of impulses. From behind my lids I watch everything I’m doing and look for something more.
Every evening as I trudge homewards there’s one window that reminds me of you, always lit with a starry night hung behind its pane. There’s such majesty in its strokes, even through its printed ink facade, a beckoning reminiscence captured in reproduction. This luminous forgery seems so apt in the darkness, I find myself beguiled by its solicitations and begrudging of its evocations. I want to celebrate the truth of its existence but the fact of it makes me love hating the knowledge of the lie, breeding such swirling conflict that the piece is now my favourite ruined thing.
A Few Short Words 