You can do anything you want, she says, and I could have died right then, instead I run my tongue from her collar to her chin savouring the taste of caramel and sin. I move my hand against her hip, braced and grinding, her splay legged wrappings around my waist. Anything, she says, and my hands make memories and break promises, our intentions hard between us in the heat of the moment. She tastes my lips again for seconds at a time that feels like the finite spread from one end of forever to the present. Anything, she says.
They watched each other through the open wedge of door and jamb, both seeing the end. I’ll do it, he said already lowering the knife, I’ll fucking do it, but the heat was gone. His threats condensed, wavered and dissipated, only as real now as the breathy steam their shouts had purged into the chill winter air. I’m tired, she said, do it or don’t but be done with it. And the knife clattered with a shrill tinny trill upon the blackened white and unfeeling linoleum. Silence then, tears after that, and finally an end to all that was.
You’re so fucking pretty, I tell her, and she says you can’t say that, looking at me with those doe eyes that say I’ve crossed a line, but her cheeks are blushed and tell me it’s a crossing gladly borne. Too fucking pretty, maybe, but I don’t tell her that. I just look, waiting for something to happen. She lays a hand over mine and our eyes turn down to watch them twine. I feel so empty inside. Trying to escape her voice is quivered, caught and small. Do we kiss now? Maybe, I tell her, maybe another time.
Pull my headphones on like loneliness wears a cloak, watching strangers sway with pedestrian grace, all of them intent on their intentions. The Tango Saloon ply their rhythms in my ears while I apply it to the streets, dissonant beats and business feet, shuffle, mill, repeat. I make sure they see me seeing them, too scared to be afraid, but they all look away. Knees pulled tight against my chest and cross my arms about them. Feel myself fading, xylophone ribs and sallow skin. Degrading thoughts like abscesses puckered on my brain. Increase the volume, drowning out the pain.
Sammy puts the beer down beside me and retreats into her smile, folding herself up on to the chair, compliantly pliant. She’s so young. I want to suck out her innocence and smear it over my decaying life. I don’t look at her while we’re talking so I don’t have to think about it. She tells me about herself and I dredge up comparable miseries, silt covered adolescent syndromes, dirty and malnourished things that look better deteriorated. Don’t worry about me, I tell her halfheartedly pained, I always make the most out of the worst that I can find.
Secretary says she hates me. I don’t buy it. I lean against the edge of my desk and fold my arms, watching as she minces towards me, her neat little steps swinging heel toe heedlessly through the minefield of papers and notes and carbon effluvium entrenched on my office floor. Planting one modest plum coloured heel against the nearest column of detritus, she snipes me a look of apathetic resentment. Her skirt rides up on the swell of her thigh and my skin prickles with the sweet hot shame of desire and the thought of vanilla ice-cream melting on pancakes.
‘You’re twelve o’clock is here,’ she says.
When I tell her I don’t have any appointments she sights me down the barrel of her nose and chambers another citric glare, the room steeped in that venomous brand of silence only a woman can excrete. I’m sure I don’t remember but I shrug acceptingly. Secretary sighs and flicks her heel out, toppling the papers underneath and sending a domino cascading through the room. She spins around with a reckless elegance and sails back the way she came.
‘Buy a calendar,’ she says and pours herself through the door.
There’s barely time to catch my breath before Twelve strides in and takes it back. She carries the scent of camphor and herself like velvet, in a dress so honest that I’m not sure where to look. I salvage a chair from the debris and motion for her to sit down. Retreating behind my desk, I reach for the bottle of oak aged fortification I never bother to put in the top drawer. She watches me with a still, hawkish candor while I evict a family of wasted pens from a tumbler and clean it with the backside of my tie. For some reason I want this to bother her. I pour myself three middle fingers and practice looking at her face.
Sometimes I can hear Secretary scrabbling for information in the other room. We don’t talk about it and normally I don’t care what turns the girl’s key, she keeps quiet and it makes me think she cares, but her silence behind the door while I’m in front of Twelve gives me a dry, cheese grater pang of cheaters guilt. I want to take off my skin and wash it.
Twelve breaks my mood with a voice that’s somehow wide and warmer than I’d expected, gravelly eclectic like rain falling on limestone. ‘I love the decor,’ she says, not looking around. ‘How do you find anything?’
I tell her I use hard work and diligence and she makes a little humming sound like a stovetop element warming up. Maybe she would have preferred luck. I watch as she slides her fingers into her tiny pink clutch, probing for her desire, amazed that she can fit anything in there. I don’t ask if she would like a hand. She comes up with a menthol Kool and slides it between her lips.
‘Can you light me up?’
I dig a box of Redheads from my tool drawer and toss them over. There’s a reckless elegance to her movements as she catches the matches, the liquid rhythm of a wave riding its surfer. I’d prefer to watch.
‘They told me you’re the best.’
I’ve never met them but I know the type. It could be true but it’s probably all lies and accusations. I stare into her silence, sipping rum from my tumbler and listing the names of sins in my head. I’ve always liked sloth but I never get time for it, I’m always too busy avoiding other things, like people who might feel the need to talk about me with dangerously attractive women, or tigers, which seems easy but requires the same level of vigilance.
‘Most of it was better than worse,’ she says finally, using my floor as an ashtray.
That’s still no reason to believe it.
We sat on top of a mountain shaped like a molehill and looked over each other’s vistas, you through your lens and me through the soft pink haze of adolescent love. Every time the shutter whirred I wondered what you saw, considered the treachery of images, and shrugged my inner monologue. Every time you paused I scrawled, with shaky butterfly fingers, notes on admiration that read like playground sonnets. I used my pen to stem the pent up and sketch an allegoric sunset, which you drank with our draught and laughed over, wondering that love could be so young.
I fucked Dylan last night. I know, right? I totally shouldn’t have, then three Long Island’s and a tab of what the guy told me was LSD but was really more like MDMA (or whatever, something just as cruisey), and I’m thinking fuck it, I don’t have to suck his personality. Sometimes you just want a guy to hold you down and press all his manly shit against you while you writhe around beneath him shouting the names of Jane Austen protagonists at the ceiling. Really though, it was a mistake, even if it was suspiciously good.
I don’t like sleeping in foreign beds or talking to my sex toys, so I wake up while Dylan is still dreaming about beer tastings and MMA fights or whatever homoerotic shit guys like him dream about. I try to leave and get half way free before I notice my right hand is still cuffed to the bed head, which is something I don’t remember being involved in last night but is totally a thing. Most midrange love cuffs have a quick release switch on the side of them (which always blows me away. If you’re going to put yourself out there, fucking commit to it). After a minute of fuzzy, incompetent pawing, that makes me picture something out of Jigsaw’s spring break, I get my hand emancipated and slither upright.
Of course that’s when he wakes up, as I’m standing there, inconsolably naked, wondering which part of his adolescent pit has swallowed my clothes. His face is wrapped around this prissy, lion’s pride grin, as if I’m some endangered animal he just brought down. I push my hair back on my head, hoping it stays there (it’s the only hair left on my body and it fights me so hard I wonder why I keep it), and glare at him with indentured defiance. I ask him if he’s seen my shit and he laughs so softly I have to strain myself not to kill him.
Eventually I find my clothes and slink away. I had to leave my dignity behind, though honestly I can live without it. Dignity is just something people drape over you for not spilling drinks down your dress, making out with bass players or vomiting out of cab windows, and you can still be plenty indignant without it. What I can’t live with (or don’t want to) is knowing that everybody is going to find out I let Dylan stick it to me. Social networks and strangers with drugs, I always get burnt by the things that I love.
These days I have to watch art house porn, I can’t get off unless it looks like it was shot on a budget. Not that hand cam kind of shit though, the real life of fucking market that isn’t real or lifelike, I need something that smells of misguided integrity, filmed at obscure angles in front of improbable scenery, with tattoo wielding fringe girls smiling like the Mona Lisa’s pallbearer, and all those grainy lo-fi filters that make it look like someone handed Instagram your fetishes. I guess it makes me feel better knowing the director’s wanking too.
I bite my lip so hard while we’re fucking that a drop of blood falls on her cheek. Focused on other feelings, her eyes are closed and she doesn’t notice. I can’t concentrate but she’s moaning, don’t stop, and pushing me into her. I try to wipe it off but the blood just smears under my thumb and makes me think of cartoon Indians in some dark initiation, tribal rights of passage and the drumming of her heart, a fleshy sick percussion that lays under her moaning, her breathy chant and vehement hands forcing me to be a man.
I walk in on Caleb watching this compilation tape of women licking things, ice creams and lollipops and fruit and even one girl lapping happily at her mobile phone. I assume it’s hers. In contrast to some of his other peccadillos this one seems quite tame. I wonder out loud how such a thing gets made and he tells me reverently, these are women that he used to know, not girlfriends necessarily, or even good friends, just women that he knew. Apparently it reminds him that everyone’s the same. I don’t ask him how he made them do it.
The wind is warm and dull and makes my skin feel like pipe tobacco crumbs, crumbling, bitter and maligned. These days my enthusiasm wallows like water pooling in a basin, evaporating slowly, leaving the surface scorched, barren and longingly deprived. I’m sick of planting crops of hope that wither on the vine. Rakish, pallid and untended things, with the texture of dreams and inherited ephemera. I think if I could only immerse myself, maybe my landscape would flourish and grow some verdant purpose. Would that it would rain, wash the sallow from my skin and renew the whole again.
Jonah stares into the mirror with magnetic repulsion, scowling joyfully at the reflection of his nemesis. I hate you so much, he says. The words leave a bitter ambrosial tang upon his tongue as he repeats them with a steady mantric affluence. I will kill you, he ventures and the nemesis just smiles, benign, leaving Jonah feeling defeated and resentful. He turns away, seeking solace in absence, but still he sees those eyes that read like a why and hears the voice delivered in his tone, holding disconcerting diatribes that he keeps trying to disown. Together they are alone.
Janey sits beside me, seeped in the scent of coconuts and honey. I dig my hands into the beach and try not to pay attention. I tell myself it’s the sunscreen not her skin. I want to lick her to be sure. Probably she doesn’t want that. I’d say her boyfriend and my girlfriend wouldn’t care much for it either. I’m the only person who wants it and it’s something I don’t do. I lay back on the sand and let the sun close my eyes. The tidal hush strokes across the pads of my feet, cooling my heels.
I’m bored of being pretty. I tell Cleo I’m going to start a girl fight club. She smiles at me over her vodka cranberry, (sourdough bitch), and tells me I’m not supposed to talk about it. I can see the ovation in her eyes. I want to scrape the smugness off her with the painter’s trowel she used to put on all that makeup. You should try exfoliating, I tell her, if you want to get rid of that snaky complexion. She’s already not paying attention, her face buried in the fluorescence of her phone.
Mother superior of a digital mass, Cleo needs to check on her parishioners every few minutes in case their devotion starts to wane. I tell her if she checks me in I’ll eat her first born child. She laughs by pushing air out of her nose and tells me I’ll have to ask the clinic if they still have it. I ask Cleo if she ever gets bored of being apathetic and she shrugs out her response. My phone vibrates in my pocket but I leave it where it is. I’m not hungry enough to follow through on my threats.
Jessie and Dylan show up dressed like yacht club DJ’s, sock-less feet in seasonal shoes, rolled up khaki’s and V-neck cotton affectations. Cleo turns each cheek to receive their thin lipped tributes. I listen to them tweeting their intentions at her in sentences without character. They chart the night out for us by way of invitation. Seismic Collapse are playing a secret set, they say, in a warehouse in West End. Dylan winks at me through his bangs and asks, would I like to come? I can feel my vagina drying up like a salted slug. From underneath the table I text Cleo, no, with seven exclamations. I hope she’ll get the message, but telling Cleo what you don’t want is like chumming in the ocean.
A Few Short Words 