When she hugs me goodbye I count the seconds between the thunder and the clap, glad I didn’t hold my breath. I don’t know when it started raining. I think it could have always been this way. Drizzle drowning the world in increments, moisture in the bones, deterioration sinking in. Sometimes the promise in the clouds is the worst. Mindfully, I romance drier days, though things were brittle then, they carried the spark of kindling, the threat of fire as purpose brushed against potential in whispered movements begging to be ignited. Dampened now, it looks like rain all week.
Not a ghostly scene, yet something more sinister. Ring of leaves, silent in respect, moved only by the gallish breeze. The smells of expended energy, exploded in tableaux, burnt out anger like the dying phosphors of a done for match. Playing cards strewn across the courtyard, empty slacks abandoned alongside a knapsack, exsanguinated, deflated and mournful. Struggle painted upon the ground and spread out in situ. In the middle sits a tin, memorabilia contained within; a stopped watch; plastic soldier; photograph of him and her, set in bliss before ruin; an earring; ticket stub, faded, railway journey; foreign currency.
Watching Dana and James make out, trying not to look or look like I’m not. The ice has made everything hyperreal and distinctly absent. I have the sensation that I’m hovering inside myself, separated by a buffer of nothing that feels like falling. Air in a vacuum.
I miss her tongue already.
Five minutes ago she has me up against the bathroom sink, her fingers slinking beneath my skirt. Her lips upon my neck, heavy petting, hot and breathy, saying, I have to have you. Panting and pawing, frenetic, messy, passion riddled moments, melding together as she moves against me, thigh parting mine, stirring my insides, jarring me alive. I shudder and lose track of time.
Somebody turns the music up and I feel myself bump against the world. ‘Is it just me or is it crowded in here?’ Nobody listens. I need to move or I’ll die, so I finish my wine. The kitchen seems so far, but it’s fine once I force my feet to work and persuade my head to stay on straight. I’m walking when somebody stops me.
‘Hey, do I know you?’
Slouched against a wall, slumped though comfortably so, Dylan, slur-smiled and easily unaware. Golden trellis hair laid in disheveled crown of thorns, framing drugged eyes that I can’t meet. ‘Not really.’
‘Nah, not so. You’re Sally’s sister, no?’
Two years ago, hiding at a seek party, wanting not to be sought but resenting the thought. Stuck in a closet, drinking to drown, swallowed by darkness. Though I can’t see a thing, I can feel the music through the floor. It moves through me like the vibrations of a muffled drum, insidious and rhythmic, frustrating itself in the stillness of my body.
‘I can’t believe I found you.’
I want anything other than this. Pressure pawing over me. Calloused hands screaming for satiation across my skin, twin freewheeling pinions. I can’t move. My mind collects my senses and projects them behind closed eyes, a vivid and ferocious, transcendental conglomerate of horrors. I wish them gone or me away. Within and without, stripped apart and reassembled against my will. I try not to think, to breathe, to survive. I hope for nothing and lose track of time.
‘Janey?’
Sitting in the shower basin, drenched and empty, salt running from her skin. Standing there, prune skinned and withered in the steaming air, looking for myself in the mirror’s fog, thinking I can’t cry again. Her words, dampened in the water’s patter, reach me muffled, out of sync, hovering in the heat.
‘Where did you go?’
Dana, standing by me with a hand on my shoulder. Mascara, run since I last saw her, darkening her eyes. Her smile still shines, lightened in relief. Pulled to her, embracing, the pulse in her neck a timpani thump I feel in my heart. I am stretched taut around her.
‘Even when I’m not here, I’m there.’
One day soon she drives us to the beach, rattling there in that old Volvo beater, listening to a scratched copy of Garbage she swears is stuck, an auditory witness to her supposed ignorance as she sings every word. Only she enjoys pretending she isn’t enjoying herself. We throw our towels down on the sand and face up to the sun, our arms outstretched and our fingers just not touching. Sedated by the crushing softness of the waves falling upon the shore with meditative persistence. When she smiles it’s genuine and I take it for my own. Nobody will ever see it again.
A little too early, nobody here and nothing to do. I pour myself a wine and wander through the house, finding James in the lounge room living up to its name, draped upon a weathered chaise and staring down the ceiling. He looks so serene, I want to disturb him. ‘Dana isn’t far away,’ he says. Neither of us does anything.
Somebody hands me something and says, ‘you’ll be fine.’ I smoke a pipe and lose track of time.
I walk out on Kirsten’s diatribe and Sarah’s endlessly bobbing head. People make me feel uneasy, my skin begins to reject the host, layers of muck and membrane and philosophy splayed apart and rewrapped about my being, slipping like loose silk upon a maypole, little by enough, tiny contrasts exposing themselves as invisible sores upon my body, itching at me in an impenetrable way. My legs shake, unsure and belligerent, taking their ragged cues from my lungs. My mind, only sluggishly, makes demands of my nerves, sputtering and cowed beneath the stratum, woven throughout the functions of the flesh.
I was looking for a cardigan when I found it, a small wooden chest in the hope style, filigree inlay with beautiful detail, velvet lined and carefully partitioned, not yet full but still thoroughly occupied by more than two dozen vials, each beautifully labeled in private school cursive. Name and date, rank filing of precise chronology, a planting calendar of seed that never bloomed, millions doomed, dead since laid to bed. Laughing pridefully below the surface of her wit, Cynthia calls it the cream of her crop, a sick deciduous harvest, chilling even in the growing warmth of spring.
There’s Caleb staring at a stovetop covered in pots, each full to brimming with water, a stopwatch, pad and pen held in an arrangement of fingers, shuffled amidst them with the delicate alacrity of a seasoned croupier. ‘I’m seeing if its true,’ he says, eyes intent, ‘if they’ll boil.’ Everything still but for the pensive agitation of the water. ‘It’s always yes,’ he says, ‘I can’t tell if it’s me or them or time itself.’ I wonder what will happen if I make him look at me. Have you seen how long it takes without watching? I ask him.
Something changes in the night so that I die a little, more than ever through the day. Irredeemably alone, my thoughts, crept in from dark spots and sat upon our bed. Her head wedged in my pit, my arm locked above us lest it pincer down to nut-crack her sweet face. There’s a divine innocence in her repose, elevating her above herself in sleep. An unseen surrender that truly makes her beautiful. It’s in these moments I want to hurt her. Gigil, the Filipino’s say, or some such variation, unheard though whispered with my hands upon her flesh.
Standing there in Batman’s silhouette, an itch over my skin. Her laughter saws against the night, sharp and disquieting. I slip the cowl off and sit beside her on the bed. The stiff synthetic mask, cold clutched in my hands, is dead now emptied, caved into a rictus grin. Smirking, as if my intentions mock me. ‘I thought you’d like it.’ She softens her laugh and lets it taper so that it slips away soundlessly, leaving mirth and supplely dimpled humours in its place. Expressions play acting emotions with silent cinema grace while searching for a genre of reaction.
Cold and inert, my father’s chassis laid upon his bed. A quirk, he always said, bedding. As only humans could, or would, seeking comfort for the psyche with physical succour. It eases what’s needed, he said, to feel alive. I find the little things to be the most humane. Still, even though I was prepared, I was unsure how to take direction from myself. I replayed my father’s final words, his crystal commands running as clear as summer sky in my mind, crisp and present and equally unreachable. Take my soul, he said. As though it were that simple
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.
My hands haven’t trembled in the longest time. I miss that feeling, not of settled fears and soiled familiarity but of reaching out with uncertainty, of electricity and promise and the sense of something other, ready, attention present below your prints. Moments yet unsavored, sensations to be delivered by osmosis and stored within your veins. That explosion of not knowing, Midas’ promise within your fingers, strange alchemical urges pushing adrenaline surges all throughout your body. Bloody and distinct, pulsating quivered impulses shaking you so hard that surrender sounds like bliss. I miss that feeling, of reaching out for something.
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.
Dana takes my hand and pulls me into the crowd, through a collision of skin and denim, clashing rhythms and thrashing bodies gnashed together. Chest against flesh, I can hear the music through her, finger pulses typing code into my limbs. I sway, rocked in the crush, hemmed by the gentle ravening. Moved to move and led astray, I listen to Dana’s steps and dips, watch each beat breeding a syncopated beading upon her brow. Sweet, glistening moments, tussled into tempo and thrown with little twirls. Elsewhere in the gaudy ruckus, all else fades away until only she remains.
I point to the handgun working its paperweight charms on a stack of Vice magazines. Caleb picks it up lazily and tells me he’s trying to prove a point. I tell him I always thought Chekov used a menacing and specifically destructive tool as an example simply to whittle the chaff from an otherwise nebulous theory about the importance of foreshadowing and loop closure played out by overlaying plot elements within traditional narrative structures. Caleb flicks the safety on and off, toying with a light switch that only brings the darkness, and tells me, ‘Nah, it’s just a bet.’
‘You’re the most exquisite thing I’ve ever seen,’ he says. I don’t sigh or tell him he’s wrong or accuse him of lying. I say, thank you, which I’ve always believed is the appropriate response to a compliment, whether you believe or not. It’s important not to devalue a person’s sentiments. My mother taught me that, I think. ‘I mean it,’ he says, thinking my thanks is a no. ‘I know,’ I say. I can tell. The truth of it is there in his eyes and that half crescent smile that rises with his happiness. It breaks my heart.
A Few Short Words 