There’s a thing called an upper decker. It’s where you leave a shit in someone’s toilet cistern so that it will rot. Every flush will only bring the passing of decay. This is a terrible and confusing thing. I had it done to Cleo once, by a boy named Chip, of all damned things. I’d found him at the markets three days before and let him follow me home, as long he slept at the foot of the bed and promised not to bite. After I got him housebroken I didn’t see the point, so I put him down.
I tell myself I perform retaliations upon Cleo, not guerrilla actions. There are seventeen separate instances I can remember in which she has damaged me, and many more, I’m sure, that lurk underneath my memory. None of this matters to her. I know this, not in the way that depreciating people expect the direction down, but as a certainty. She flits. She’s a flitter and it shits me. I watch her weightlessness with that brand of jealousy that grows in the shape of anger. I resent my resentment of her. I wish that she could mean nothing to me.
Every time Jamie tells his story he gets a little more innocent, as though guilt were washable in rhetoric. I listen at the corners of the conversation, tired of his inflation, and search myself for some barb to bring him down. All I have is my own indignation and a weary knack for self-depreciation. Jamie orders another round and goes back to polishing his lies. I tell him I’m going to kill myself and he says, oh yeah, in a milk with two tone that makes me want to switch my target. Sometimes I wonder why I’m here.
We’re drinking bourbon and cola, with more water than either, while top forty pop sleazes over us. The girl is Moroccan. It sounds exotic. Really, it only means a tan, an accent, a certain fullness and some unusual piercings. I watch her crawl down stage, her dark green eyes sketching back and forth as her lips move out of synch. Colt slips a five into her garter as she passes, and whispers to me that Australia needs dollar bills. Staring down the barrel of her womanhood, I wonder if we really need more ways to pay these women less.
Her hands move with a swift artfulness in the candle light. Gently roaming the plains of his skin,
The sun shines, its magnanimous warmth intercepted by a series of worldly filters.
across an expanse of back and softly around the set of his neck. He slips his hand around her waist,
Clouds and trees move in unison to stifle its glory. A lone ray breaks free of its shackles
urging her closer. Leaning into her arms, he lets his lips brush lightly against her earlobe,
and strikes down upon a solemn spider’s web, illustrating its ingenuity. The spider, a dark creature
up to and slowly around the contours of her neck, coming to rest against the press of her collarbone.
by nature, scrambles into hiding, abandoning the web it toiled so hard to design. Having had its fun,
In the flickering light of the candle, their hands find each other, fingers twining. Their lips meet,
the beam moves south, looking for fresh amusement, weaving in and out of jealous impediments.
slowly parting, tongues darting, pressing and probing. The mingled taste of milk and honey.
Sliding gracefully across the lawn, it prods the grass awake, photosynthetic breakfast in bed.
I tap the dead woman’s leg with my toe tip and tell Laura, I don’t want to be here. She wrings her hands in an average Lady Macbeth and stretches her face into a little sorry about my friend look. I don’t know who it’s for, the dead take no courtesy. I shouldn’t have answered the phone tonight but I thought it might be important. Laura’s music is shuffling lethargically in the other room, Morrissey whining after Joy Division, and I tell her again, I don’t want to be here. This time it feels like I’m talking to myself.
If I were a camera man her look would have said stop filming. As it was, I shrugged and put down my notebook, sticking my pen behind my ear. I don’t think she gets that there is no off switch for what I do, only different ways of remembering. Still, her guard lowered along with my pad, earning me some small trust that I would spend later. She relaxed into her chair and practiced smiling at me. Between grin and grimace she told me, ‘It’s not easy being somebody.’ And I wondered how hard it would be being nobody.
Ugh, I had coffee with Jamie today. She’s such a bitch (you know it’s true, Jamie). We went to that Flamingo place in the Valley that takes too long to give you your shit. I kind of hate it there because everybody is either beautiful or oppressively different but it’s kind of cool in an uncomfortable secondhand way. Everybody’s big into that at the moment, which I really hate. I overheard somebody say that apathy is coming back. They could have meant a band.
Jamie told me she was thinking about breaking up with Dylan and I told her I thought he was cool, but if she isn’t into it then just fucking do it. (You have to now, bitch). Anyway, I think they’d be better people without each other. I listened to her shoot holes in her relationship with small calibre bullet point frustrations for fully half an hour. As far as I knew the barista was still out the back growing my fucking mocha beans.
Everybody’s either breaking up or getting pregnant at the moment. I feel like this should make me feel something but it doesn’t, not what I think it should. My ex keeps texting that he’s been dreaming about me lately. It means he’s single again. I don’t go back though. It never works out because it didn’t work out. Also, The last time I saw him he’d gotten kind of fat.
My friend Sharon keeps telling me to watch that movie Feed. It’s about guys who get off by feeding chicks until they become fucked up obese. Like, some of these chicks can’t even move and I think maybe some of them die and maybe there’s some weird sex kink in that too. How do people switch off that voice in your head that says you look like shit? I can’t eat a thing once I’ve got the taste of guilt in my mouth.
Cleo kicks my castle over with such languid apathy that I want to strangle her for it. She walks away with three hours of work wedged into the treads of her Havaiana’s, while I think of places to hide her body. I throw myself onto the rubble, thinking about fucking her boyfriend. The taste of chlorine and the bite of tile in my back as he worked at me with a graceless lack of friction. I push my hands into the sand, making fists of its grains and thrust my hips against the sky. The tide is coming in.
If I close my eyes hard enough I’m not even here. There’s the sound of a waterfall draining over the horizon, the smell of peonies and the softness of mossy rocks. There’s somewhere else where real things happen inexplicably, the sound of grit and the colour grey. There’s sunlight everywhere, though poured in different measures over different regions. Sometimes I wish there were less, unless it looks too beautiful and then I find it excuses itself. If I open my eyes I will see dust forming in the wake of the day as it wears itself down into nothing.
Everything’s out of focus and I can’t stop blinking. There’s still blood in my eye. I want to wipe it on my shirt but I can’t reach with my arms tied down. My head aches. Penelope is pacing in front of me, a stinging blur. The knife keeps catching the light as she turns, piercing me with its silvered glints. She points it at me while monologuing and stamping her foot for punctuation. Really, she’s not making any sense, but I guess I can understand that. I tell her she can hurt me as much as she needs to.
Sometimes late at night I like to scream really loudly and pretend it wasn’t me. I used to swear into the universe to see what would happen. Nothing happened, nobody even told me no. I broke my voice once doing this. After that I had a whiskey mellowed, middle aged jazz singer screening my words for me for a while. I fell in love with the sound of it. I whispered for the joy in it and talked myself to sleep. When I started to sound like me again I realised that you can’t always keep what you love.
The future of the past is definitely going to happen. Once, I spread my life out in front of me like ransom note clippings and jumbled it all up. I pulled bits out and stuck them next to other bits. Randomly really. Everything looked the same. I tried a few from the pile that hadn’t happened yet and that was hard. It didn’t look like much, sort of like your brother’s son who you haven’t seen in ten years but then you run into them in the street, in the dark, and they look really familiar, only, obscured somehow.
I’ve always been jealous of people who can do great things. I tried to be great once when I was younger. Then I got so sick that for a while I had something like food pushed through a tube that was pushed up my nose and into my stomach. Daily, all day. I don’t think you can live like that. When I learnt to use a knife and fork they let me go for walks and encouraged me to buy candy. Cherry cola and sour lemon sherbet things with the hard coating on the outside. Sour, I loved that.
A Few Short Words 