THE DRESS

She wore out that little black dress as if the very fabric of her life depended on it. She wasn’t a seamstress, not by any means, but whenever tears would appear at the touches of seams, she’d grab the little sewing-box kit kept at the bottom of the Miscellaneous Drawer, and get to work with a fervour edging on fanatical. It was almost impossible for her to not draw blood when doing so, for the frantic impulse to repair that aged old rag replaced any desire for the maintenance of health.

For she treated it like a talisman; an object or omen dictating her luck. For when she’d wear the dress, she found herself attracting the glimpses of passers by more frequently than was usual. For she was not of an exceptional beauty; her face really melted into crowds, but that dress in all its simplicity seemed to add a complexity to her rather hum-drum self. That dress, wrapped tightly around the plumpen edges of her form, seemed to bring wanted glances her way. And so, through the depths of steel-blue winters and the heavenly heights of drunken silver summers, she wore it without fail or question.

Drifting through the labyrinthine shell of her empty thoughts, she found herself replacing stitch by stitch the contents of her personality with that little black dress. Without it, she felt as vaporous as air. That there was simply nothing of worth or note to contribute from her mind to the daily-workings of everyday life; that everything had already been decided for her. Life felt, as it always did — excruciating, punishing, pointless. The axis of feeling that held onto her with an iron-clad grip always tilted downwards into the abyssal shelf of 17-year old nihilism fused with that deadening fear of growing old and useless.

And so, she understood that there was nothing left to experience but the feeling of that shoddily constructed dress against her skin. Everything outside of that experience was a mere coincidence not worth thinking about. She never once dreamed of laborious gardens or thickets of brambles flowering winter raspberries, or catching burs on her tights and twigs in her hair, she had never once considered that she’d never seen a Raven, nor had she ever thought of dipping her toes in the frigid foam of the Atlantic. For stealing the glances of weary men with weary bones gave her the only thing close to a satisfaction that the entirety of the natural world had never achieved within her. Sitting with legs clenched together in that childlike pose, in that seat we take on in the manner of receiving Christ, she’d search for the eyes of her sullen-sunk men anywhere she went. There was no wander into the dense thicket of This Great City that did not urge her to pursue the wilting glances of men with blue-or-brown-or-grey-or-bloodshot splattered eyes. Deep in that disused hole of hers cawed a magnificent screech of pitiful fury that to the ears of those primed to hear it; appeared like the apparition of some wraith-like siren down in the depths of some black sea.

That silent siren-song was the only noise she felt capable of making. In the dark, wrapped around the flailing limbs of a man, his sweat dripping like liquid-gold down her back, she wouldn’t make a sound. Rigid, lifeless, doll-like under the weight of human toil. Eyes half-mast as if drunk on wine, she’d lie there in a silence that made the room thick. Brain-dead, half-empty, she’d let the sounds of flesh-against-flesh ring through the lonely apartment as sweet as unheard birdsong in the night. She wouldn’t want to ruin it by the broken-notes of her voice. And so, lying under him, whoever he was, she would imagine herself as the threads of fabric ruched and pulled and stretched to expose herself in all the right places. She would picture herself bent-double, folded and crooked, forever at the mercy of another’s touch. The dress stayed on, always.

The only time she’d make a noise, is if any tried to make a movement towards removing it, a guttural snakes-hiss would pull itself out of her throat and fill the space between her and him. Usually, that was enough to dispel the other. It stayed on, through the depths of blind fingers in the dark, fumbling through the rumpled gathering of fabric round her waist or thighs, through sweat-slicked pleasures of the flesh, through the numb rushing of dead-sensations prickling from the base of her spine through the very delicate crown of matted hair on her head. There was nothing, not even the eternal rapture we must all face, for she had on several occasions dreamt of being buried in that dress, that would compel her to take it off.

Most of the time, she liked to find her men in inopportune places. The more the place lacked any discernible sense of sensuality or sex appeal, the more likely she was to score. Libraries, butchers, on the bus (the less travelled the route the better, the smaller the bus the better, a double decker reeked of chance, the word that she hated above all other words in the entire system of language), filthy forgotten pubs drenched in must and piss, work toilets, park-benches carved from rotting wood. She kept a thumbed and yellowed notebook in her fake designer bag, filled with lists of the best places to find these men. She’d spend countless hours roaming through the copses of steel and glass, empty headed, trailing vapour, in an attempt to document the spaces ripe for plucking rotten fruit. She and the dress had orchestrated an entire cartography of pleasure, held in the cheap-nylon threads of a pocket that held all that she had to offer in life.

On one of these cartographical excursions, fingers held tight between the softened paper of the notebook, she finds herself snaking down a colourless high-street. Bleaker thoughts bleed themselves into even bleaker territories of mind and spirit when, staring down the barrel of this desolation—a sight made gauzy from the thick drapes of grey that hang heavy from the sky, clinging to the flat roofed terraces—she experiences that curious sensation of having been there before. She reaches for her notebook and begins tearing through the scribbles on the pages. But no, she hasn’t been before. Goose-prickled skin rises like a wave of hives across the skin of her biceps. Nothing but dead space and even deader thoughts. She weaves brushed yarn through the throngs of elderly ladies with carrier bags that sag limp to the side, through the ant-lines of truant children pilled up outside the corner shops, through that interminable beeping of stolen electric bikes. The smell reaches her before her stained eyes have a chance to latch onto it. The smell that reaches into the very folds of her grey matter, the smell that clutches onto her tongue, the smell that sucks the blood from her strangled heart.

And so she turns into the open-doored shop without thinking. Chlorine, vinegar-glass cleaner, ground-up entrails of dried shrimps and squids, algae, fertile swamps, raw flesh, salt and sea. Rows and rows of disordered glass-tanks fill the small box-shop from foot to head. Clusters of goldfish, butterflyfish, tiny catfish and even tinier sharks, tetras, water-frogs, axolotls with their dead little eyes. She reads a label on an empty tank which reads, Burton’s Mouthbrooder. Toward’s the shops end, a hand-written note on a scrap of cardboard reads—EXOTIC FISH, ASK—in a scrawl that in its faint lines and strange angles transmits an aura of deep insecurity. The lights are dentist office bright. The mosaic of glass and water shimmers violently beneath the carpet of pole-length LEDs mounted to the ceiling. Faint splashes and water bubbles.

She walks further into the shop without thinking, pulling down the fabric of her dress as it rides up the curve of her buttered thigh. The counter, the one beneath the crudely written sign, stands empty. Behind it a frosted glass door, a sticker with all caps red-and-black lettering shouts PRIVATE on the peeling wooden frame. She moves, slowly, past the counter, and pushes the door open. It’s a store-cupboard, filled to the brim with piles of empty boxes, unlabelled miscellaneous food-stuffs, papers with important sounding titles strewn carelessly into the room’s corners. Faded posters half-assedly blu-tacked to the yellowing stucco walls show a world map, the word FISH translated to 17 different languages (poisson, Fisk, psari), and a portrait of a great blue whale. A large cardboard box sits in front of another door—but this door, rather than the frosted glass that only hints towards a sense of privacy, only winks at a sense of secrecy—is metal. And it’s open. Surging electrical impulses like tiny cuts from needles take the place of cogent brain matter. She clambers haphazardly through the shrine of disorganisation, pushing past half-stamped on boxes and kicking littered styrofoam on the floor, stepping on documents and plastic packaging, and she places a calloused palm on the surface of the door’s dull metal. Resting her face to it, her left eye peers through the ajar-gap left by the stupid, unsuspecting shop-keep.

She sees the outline of another small room. But this room is darker, save for one strip of LED lights, that are affixed to the far northern edge of the room. A cold air flushes against the growing pink of her cheeks. Lighted by this meagre strip of LED, she can see the edge of what looks to be the largest fish-tank she’s ever seen. Her face is pressed against the cold door, lips open, tongue searching the corrugated roof of her mouth. Sounds of mechanical water-bubbling blow a muted death-march rattle that saturates the atmosphere, that vibrates through the rubber soles of her shoes. She’s squinting now, furrowed brow. On a sharp inhale, the flick of a pearlescent tentacle strikes a lightning bolt into the vague centre of her being. Something akin to ecstatic pleasure starts ruminating in the bottomless pit of her soul. She sees it, only for a second, before the tentacle moves out of her sight. She laughs, softly, imagining plastic shopping bags being dragged through the blackened river.

Without thinking, she pushes the metal door open.

A gelatinous mass, bursts of purples, pinks, blues, shades of grey, impossible colours, an horrifically bulbous air-filled head perched on the water’s surface. The thing’s head is so big that the tank’s lid is cracked open. A string of feathery tendrils float like a mass of coiled hair in the bubbling water. It’s just floating in the centre of that ginormous tank, barely moving. Paroxysm of the flesh has frenzy coating the tips of her fingers, as she rubs and pulls harder and harder and harder at the stretched fabric on her legs. In that heap of a body, she can’t see a single thing, not a brain, an eye, a stomach, not a stitch of life that she can recognise. The coiling tendrils wrap snakeskin through that thick water. She can feel them pulsing—she can hear them talking.

She starts taking off her shoes and peeling off her cotton-blue socks. The floor is cold against the hardened soles of her feet, cold against the crooked tips of her toes. She rips the elastic band holding up her long fine hair. Noticing a plastic foot-ladder in front of the tank, she takes thoughtless steps towards it, her mind filled up with the sounds of water bubbles. The plastic is wet and slimy against her skin, as she clambers slowly to the top of the four-stepped ladder. The tanks height now rests at the crux of her clavicle, the height where the seam of her dress dips down to reveal the slightly sagged contours of her breasts. The thing glugs and pulses beneath her, shimmering like coins at the bottom of a dirty fountain. She shadows a hand across its skull-less head, its empty face, its body like a sack of air. She plunges both forearms into the thing’s water-bed, grabbing its jellied head and crimped mane, and with the strength that has seemingly been conjured from all the grimoire’s upon the earth, she heaves it out of its tank. She falls backwards off the stool, its mass of tentacles knotting and flailing atop her. Water pools around her like a chalk outline. Burns ripple throughout her fleshy body, scraping, biting, burning, stabbing onto every slab of skin. She doesn’t scream, she doesn’t breathe. It’s stinging coils wrap themselves around her, snaking around her limbs, choking her bare-throated neck. She writhes in frantic ecstasy under this great thing, this great mass, this great heap of fat and jelly. And, as its burning kisses rip through the fabric of her being, she imagines peeling off her little black dress, sinking.

OSSUARY

See that mess. All those folds of cheap fabric knotted and clumped and strewn about — polyester mixes, cotton blends, nylon stretched beneath holed-out tulle. The stained rings of half-finished coffee cups smothering every smooth surface: the dresser, the craft table, and the bed frame somehow. A smell, a smell like the stale print of unwashed clothes sat on unwashed skin, suffocates the room like I imagine holding a damp cloth over the mouth would feel. A stillness like thick unmoving fog in some weird forest, deep in some weird country plagued with pagans and rituals that everyone far away from there thinks of as a lingering joke. I don’t even want to think about when that window was last opened — never, given that carpet of dust that clings to the air and sits cross legged on your chest, wrapping thick fat fingers around your neck and squeezing until your face turns blue.

What a mess, such unbelievable mess, I can’t believe I’ve fucked in a place like this. It’s even worse thinking of making love, worse still to imagine I thought of it so. Love could not possibly fester in a place like this,. A cheap radio crackles in the corner of the room, spitting some glob of Greatest Smash Hits spitting from its mouth. What a stupid song.

He’s reading Gillian Rose on his sheet-less mattress. It looks like he’s on the first page. His housemate let me in — Sally Bowles hair, 5’2, blonde, architect — as she normally does, wordlessly. We have some sort of unspoken acknowledgement of each other. I don’t know why I never feel embarrassed when she answers the door, but I think it’s because I know nothing about her. In the months and months I’ve been coming here, she has never once asked me a question, and I’ve not asked her one either. There’s something about the way she moves, almost ghostly around the walls of her own home, as if she’s some unwelcome guest or pest hiding in the fabric folds of the sofa. I move past her and make my way to his room. The sheets are bundled in a heap at his feet, and so he’s lying on the bare mattress, the puffs of frayed cotton billowing from beneath his weight. His feet, pointed towards the sky, pinked and calloused, hide his smirk from my glare.

I’m not in the mood, he says, eyes unmoving from the first page. I haven’t even said anything, I say. I know, but I can tell you’re after something. You can be such an ass. A whisper of a laugh seeps out of the corner of his full lip. He still doesn’t look at me. You can’t just turn up at people’s homes uninvited, it’s not normal. But, don’t you want to know why I’m here? Not one fucking bit. Fine, I’ll leave. Close the door on your way.

Emotions knotting like matted hair, just waiting to be frantically sliced with kitchen scissors. I normally don’t mind rejection. I’m not one for lingering, it only hurts more to dwell on it, like noticing a splinter that’s been in your finger for hours. It’s the nonchalance, the pure indifference, the sheer apathy of him. It makes me feel sick. I leave the door open behind me, passed the always locked door, down the once carpeted stairs. It’s a pretty house, a nice little house for a little family. As I pass through the kitchen, the housemate is there. I make my way to the front door, past the lined prints of plants and anatomical figures, brutalist pastiches and countryside vistas, and —

I don’t think I know you’re name. Her voice startles me, not just because her speaking is unusual, but the texture of it. It’s deep and honeyed, with a raspy coat that lightly dresses the sugary undertones. Almost quaint. What’s yours? I’m Nuala, as in, Fionnuala. I want to laugh. Fionnuala. Magda, as in Magdalene, named after the one and only. How come Magdalene, and not Mary. Well, you see, my mother didn’t want to name me after the Virgin, she thought that was too lofty, so she settled for the next best, the Woman of the Night Mary Magdalene. Although, it’s very unlikely she was actually a Woman of the Night, that was some old joke that made its way up to truth, like most truths really, they’re all jokes in the end. She laughs without breath. Also I was born on Good Friday. Wow, what a namesake. Actually, it’s the first year since my birth that Good Friday falls on my birthday again. I didn’t expect you to be such a talker. I’m not usually.

Then a silence so thick it appears to morph into a tangible, graspable object of awkwardness.

You should come to this party tonight. Where is it? Here, it starts at 9. Can I bring a friend? Well, it isn’t really that sort of party, it’s a private event. What sort of party is it then? The sort where you definitely don’t tell your friends you went to it. Are you a satanist? I wish.

It’s probably a fucking orgy, I think to myself, grin outstretched to the dip in my temples, as I wander down the market road. Orgy or Satanists. The air is dry and cold, too cold for an April afternoon yet no one seems to notice. Little dogs in little jackets and little owners in big jackets. Reddened circles squashed by neutral knits. Enclaves of waterproofs. Mummies and Daddies and Babies and Doggies. What a trip, what an absolute fucking farce. Daniel stops me for a cigarette, sand I oblige, pretending to listen to his obligatory spiel about his days as a painter-decorator. I make those gestures, the ones we all do, and Hmm? Ah yeah! Oh man, at the required points. The gestures make people feel listened to, even if quite frankly you couldn’t give a shit. I’m very good at that. Really, people say English isn’t mimetic or expressive, and it’s a load of horseshit really, because if you smile and shrug and move your eyes right then everyone will know what you mean. You don’t even need to listen! Daniel’s talking about my rings again, and says I could knock someones teeth out with ‘em, and I say as I always do, who’s to say I haven’t already, and he howls in a sort of agonised laughter as if his stomach is riddled with ulcers, and that browned-and-blackened mouth gapes open like a trap door. See you later Danny, keep well you old fuck. I leave him but really I have’t got anywhere to go, so I keep on, hands in my pockets, twirling the flint of my lighter between my thumb and forefinger.

Everything plastered in golden-blue light. The sun’s air has burnt into an arid dryness, blistering the skin into a carpet of eczema. I like looking at people. To wonder about their empty mysteries. It’s easy to presume that no one is really thinking anything, but that can’t be true. Then again, I rarely think of anything important. I imagine other’s minds lacquered in lights and colours and indescribable shapes, meadows and dew-drops and sex and filth and pain. My mind’s colourless. I’ve got whatever the opposite of whatever synesthesia is. Trying as hard as I can stomach, I can’t conjure the shape of an apple, nor the view of my own palm, nor the face of someone I’ve fucked. It’s like memories simply sift themselves through the pores of my brain, into imperceptible specks that jolt or die with language. I know I can tie my shoes because I do it everyday, but, if I tried to explain to you how I do it I wouldn’t be able to. I know I’m walking because I’m doing it right now, but what if I started running or floating or what if I fall on my face and break all my teeth?

I’ve been looking for a Spanish language version of Antwerp forever. I like reading in Spanish. I can’t speak it very well though. All those little words slip out through the cracks of my mouth and end up pooling at my feet. It embarrasses me to hear it, a gloopy sticky mess. No one where in the whole of this stupid city seems to sell anything other than English language books or the occasional travel guide. A desert of Boredom. I walk through backstreets, terraces with flat roofs, dying houseplants hung proudly in perfectly dirty window frames, bins with the council’s logo sun-faded and weather-worn, a small fenced park. But there’s no grass in the park. Instead it’s a blanket of mud, hoed by the trampling of morning runners, churned and razed and destroyed. These empty backstreets. Someone must live here, but why does it feel like I’m the only person alive? The sound of the urban fleet dissipates and dilates through the forest of houses and cracks of trees, and its silence flattens the atmosphere with the pressure of the deep sea.

An offshoot from the main road, the amber metal-work of a forgotten estate hangs above the entrances of the isolated shops. Wait? The wooden facade of a shop, painted black. PARACER. I gaze through the windows, and I see books. A creeping smile prickles the crackling skin of my lips. Surely, on this miserable fucking day, have I not found salvation? I didn’t think I’d know what salvation would look like, but the golden glow of the warm yellow lights spilling out to the half-damp pavement feels a lot like God has kissed me. There’s a ‘NO PHONES’ sign on embossed yellow acrylic that hangs immediately at eye level. I swallow laughter back into my chest as I’m greeted by the clerk. She’s warm, and the light bounces from her and makes her seem to glow. The room is long and thin, with books lining the side walls and filling the interior on pedestals and tables, marked with little yellow paper signs. Gentle sweeping music, a drinks fridge with half-open bottles of orange wine, a disconcerting mirror at the back of the room that makes the room feel indefinitely long.

A nausea starts to seep into the curling knots of my insides. ‘Sea-faring’, ‘Wanderlust’, ‘Bad Feminist’ (featuring Simone Weil (?) next to Anaïs Nin (?)), ‘Nostalgia’, ‘Utopia’ (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is here, next to The Road), ‘Poetry’ (I don’t know why Poetry gets a formal separation, confusing), ‘Indie’ (again, what does that mean, judging by the section it just means Fitzcarraldo Editions), ‘Identity’. There’s no Spanish to be seen anywhere, either. I feel like I’ve been inhabited by someone else’s soul. Sin appears as salvation to the wicked. I ask the glowing clerk about Antwerp, and she looks at me with a forced smile stuffed with vacancy. Why doesn’t anyone have this book? I decide it doesn’t exist. I try imagining what it would be like to hold it in my hands, but there’s only that wretched fuzz. I try to morph the edges of my eyesight into the Colima, Anáhuac, de Providence, Carnicería, Azokekale, Ruysdaelkade, Altweixdorf, Kildare, Des Roses, but I can’t, and I drift into the consciousness of a spider-crab.

Back on the main street, one foot in front of the other. The possibility of the foredooming orgy consumes every moment. Orgy or satanists, I correct myself. If it’s Satanists I have to come to terms with potentiality of A Demonic Sacrifice. I wonder what it’s like to sacrifice an animal? To kill something with the hands that God gave you. Well, they probably don’t use their bare hands, I don’t think I could kill a goat or sheep or whatever people sacrifice these days with only my hands. I’m looking at them now, rusted and cracked, chewed skin, jagged half-ripped nails splotchy with black varnish, not the tools of an executioner. Although I think I’d prefer using my hands over shooting something. It’s more intimate in a way, more humanised, more decent. But, if it’s an orgy, there’s other elements to consider. The Limbs? The Odours? The Etiquette? The Codes? The Words? The Rules? What if I don’t want to fuck anyone there? What if I become pudgy under the weight of the expectation? Can you just stand in the corner quietly? There’s nothing I love more than staring into the window’s of strangers houses, but imagining it reverse hollows the marrow from the meat. Once, he crafted a rudimentary camera stand on the edge of the bed, digicam pointed directly at my ass, and told me to Be Natural, Be How You Would Normally Be Baby, Pretend It Isn’t There Baby. But how could I pretend, with that glass-eye boring into the curves of my flesh, flattening myself into an image cast in stone.

The street din flattens into a monosyllable. A drawl, a droning mechanical hummmmmmm, a noise empty yet consuming, a fluttering of debris willowing like petals in the pink afternoon sky. Why is there always building work here? It’s not like anyone actually lives here anymore. But there’s always people. People people people people. The world’s a black hole. Gluttonous yet smaller than a white-blood cell. Where did everyone come from? And why the fuck are there so many people walking about, careless and joyful? Doesn’t everyone know the world’s about to explode, and I’m about to murder a goat in some living room? I walk past the Adrienne — the black-metal fronting holding the glass panes in place appear like a giant gorging mouth, like the mouth of a whale filtering metric tons of waste. Fairy lights of false prismatic flare like baubles of infected tonsils, the corridor leading toward the tiny basement a squeezing throat. There’s a new person working the bar, it seems the staff changes more than usual these days. It’s suspicious, but I let those suspicions melt fast, for new staff means new opportunities to fuck. Not that I ever actually have fucked a bartender here, in fact, I’m pretty sure Lion hates my fucking guts, but they still press their tits together by the corner of their elbows when they lean over to talk to me. I open the door and smile widely at the person behind the counter. Small, thick-rimmed black glasses, a crown of loose-brown curls collecting at a soft-mullet sweep at the nape of their neck, a faux-leather jacket dotted with various pins: FILTH IS MY POLITICS, SHE/HER, a pink triangle. A pang of a certain sorrow worms its way into my fingertips. She can’t be more than twenty, twenty-one at a push. I made a vow that I wouldn’t fuck anyone two years younger than me, and seeing this child I see the years of my life stretch out and fold, like some moth-bitten concertina. What a fucking waste of my time, most of this has been.

What can I get you? A shrill voice, like two balloons rubbing against each other. An absolutely horrible fucking voice. Pity sags in my throat. Is Lion here? Yeah, she’s just downstairs — do you want me to get her? No that’s okay, I’ll just wait for her, but um, I’ll have a pint anyway. The child is eager to please. She runs around the bar at a pace bordering frantic, and by the time I’ve turned around the beer and card-reader is squarely positioned underneath my nose. Far too eager. She hasn’t yet learnt that eagerness is closer to the devil than heaven, she hasn’t learned to ice that eagerness out of fear of failure or rejection, and she hasn’t yet learned that an open smile gets you nowhere. And for that, I can only envy her, and in my mind I try and I fail to conjure the image of wrapping her in a cocoon of soft-knitted blankets. I pay for that overpriced piss and sit down in the corner seat. The small hardwood table lacquered in sticky residue, rings of cups, the faint traces of tobacco. I breathe in the air punctuated by yeast, limes and lemons, the sweetness of tequila. The child’s is firmly fixed away from me, although I am practically sitting opposite her, and I am the only one here. She looks at her dirty fingernails, checks the drinks fridge twice, organises and re-organises the garnishes, checks her phone four times.

Lion’s voice echoes from the basement, shouting distant profanities. The clobbering of her wonky gait reverberates throughout the whole bar as she clambers up the staircase. I can see her forehead slick with salty-sweat, to which the laminated curls of her black baby hairs stick too. She’s wearing an oversized boiler suit which shrouds her body in a mass of canvas. Bettie, can you help me downstairs? The fucking lights won’t work. Lion’s gaze shifts from Bettie to me, and her expression waxes into one of forced joviality. To what do I owe the pleasure so early in the afternoon? I’m killing time. Killing time until what? A stiff laugh that I don’t mean breaks out from me, as Lion shifts a hand onto her waist. A party, of some sort, I’m not entirely sure, she told me I couldn’t tell anyone about it. Oh wow, sounds fun — her voice like a flatlining heart monitor. I’m thinking it’s either an orgy or some satanist ritual (disgust moving up my throat like acidic bile). Bettie’s high-pitched laughs rings genuine in my ears, and I flash a subtle smile her way. All I know is I shouldn’t turn up sober.

Lion shifts to face Bettie, but before she has a chance to open her mouth, I feel the words coming up from out of me (like some sort of horrific hive-rash forming on my skin), and I say, and (I don’t even know why), You should come with me Lion. A second too long for her to turn towards me, a second of that shame eating at my intestines. What time? (A taste like violets on my tongue). Well, she said it starts at 9. I finish at 11, we can go after. Cool. Lion turns sharply toward the staircase and as she moves, shouts, Bettie, help me with these fucking stupid lights. Little baby Bettie bounds down the stairs after Lion with an awkward self-conscious stomp.

The bar is full now, and I’ve sunk five pints. Clusters of friends, couples, a birthday-party, maybe two birthday-parties, fish-net, latex, pink flouncy polyester dresses, sequins, bad makeup. Lion has already kicked out a hen-party. (I don’t even know why they fucking come in, this isn’t even a good fucking bar). The child is running around as if time works differently for her, (it’s never okay to slow down, not even for one minute, you have to keep moving otherwise the world will collapse), but, (we’re always moving on an axis that we can’t see or feel and entire plates of the earth’s shell crash against each other with incalculable metric force yet), drinks have to made. There’s a quiet panic on her face, embroidered sweat on her brow, reddened prints of rosacea flowering on her cheeks. I get up for my sixth pint, and before I’ve even reached the bar, there’s a pint in front of me. She smiles awkwardly as she hands me the card-reader, and I smile back. I can’t tell what my smile looks like.

Put it in a plastic, I’m getting off now. Lion sweeps up from behind me, and grabs a bottle of tequila from behind the bar. She picks up a beige trench coat (the hem is patterned by laces of filth from being left on bar floors and tube-seats) from the bar-back, and wraps her neck in a printed scarf. A man with a tiny vest, faux-leather jeans and platform boots blows kisses at Lion. She kisses him gently on the cheek, and grabs my arm. Let’s get the fuck out of here.

The warmth of the sun has left no trail of its previous blazing agony and now the air is thick with a freezing wind. Nibbles of cold-bitten red blotches cover my hands. Lion’s fog-breath makes the shape of a ship’s light piercing through the waves of black.

How come you didn’t invite your boyfriend? I don’t have a boyfriend. Well, that guy you sleep with then? The party’s actually at his house, but I think it’s his housemates party really. Those venomous eyes. God you’re a case, and a complete fucking case at that, I don’t even know what I’m doing here with you. Neither do I, but you’re here now. A smile crinkles onto the paper-skin of her cheeks, but it quickly flattens into resentment. I’m here because I’m bored, not to be a toy.

The street’s fogged orange glow settles on the grey patches of concrete glistening in the sludge of dew, mud, and oil. We walk silently down the streets littered with people, people people, passing bags of rubbish filled with the remains of the market. Boxes of eaten and half-eaten food, plasticine and rubber. ‘Street food’ that can only exist on a certain day at a certain time, with the correct licenses of course, to the proper people certainly, and only ever in the right place. Cutting through the empty park, a swirl of thickening clouds dulls the moonlight to a faint fizzle of light. I want to touch her, and cup her face, and kiss her nose, and I want to hold her big eyes like globes in my hands and cut locks of her hair and stow them away in lockets and letters and boxes. I want her open mouth to swallow me whole.

The silence ends when we arrive at the house. Nuala answers. Her hair is slicked and curled, big eyes smudged in black and dark-purple, lips tinted red and bulging with glisten and gloss. Her face knots with puzzlement.

I thought I said to not invite anyone? Oh, did you? I forgot? Nuala’s face twists into one of pure discomfort as she gazes at the petulant smile of Lion’s eyes. Have you not been home? Why do you ask that? Well you’re wearing the same clothes as this morning. Is that a problem? Well no, I suppose not. After a pause, she opens the door wider and gestures us inside. We’re greeted by the filtered sounds of vague 90s pop music that lilts in the air. I hear Lion faintly scoffing behind me, as we walk to the living room. A sagging emptiness in my stomach. They can’t be a satanists, I mean what sort of satanists would listen to this shit? Lion swirls into the living room and flings that coat onto an upholstered chair. Eyes lock and shift. A few people sit on the worn red-and-yellow loveseat, engaged in boring conversation, hands knotted and crossed in the manner of receiving christ, legs childishly clamped together. Everyone is tainted in the stains of alcohol — cheeks sag, eyes half-mast. He’s there, standing in the corner, talking to a woman with an ass so enormous I can’t take my eyes from it. She’s wearing a cheap black pleated skirt, a black fish-net long sleeve with a laced bra underneath. Her hair pinned with a delicate black-bow at the nape. I can’t see her face, but her ass alone is enough for an envious streak of colour to prickle up from my feet.

Lion twists open the tequila and hands it to me, gesturing for my lips. I take it from her, and the warm-burn alleviates the ice-block creeping over my skin. I take another. She rips it back from me. Why were you here this morning? It doesn’t matter. Failed fuck attempt? I take the bottle back from her grip. Which one is he anyway? I say nothing and drink more. Lion’s pincer-eyes jot and shake around the room. She openly points at a girl sat on the love-seat, her big eyes dotted with liner and cheeks tinted pink, she comes into the bar sometimes, and she’s a right cunt. Doe-eyes pretends to ignore it, but the faint pattern of pain on her cheeks betrays her. A flushing of amber rises up to her temples, and she covertly shifts her weight to the right, locking her gaze to the gnawed foot of the coffee table. I want to say sorry, but I know Lion would never forgive me, so I smirk and choke my pity in a warm stream of liquid blindness. Nuala is constantly coming and going from the living room, upstairs and downstairs, outside and inside, left and right. Her shadowed gaze meets no-one as she slinks through her guests like a meant-to-be-invisible butler. The painted bottom lip is smudged from her biting it, a copse of blood forming at the base of its curve which she’s constantly wiping onto her sleeve. She’s an image of pure panic wrested from the very edge of full-throttle explosion. Lion’s ignoring her so I do the same, and we wordlessly station ourselves at different corners of the room, giggling.

Magda? Giggling melts into awkward throat-clearing as fat-ass turns and as it turns out fat-ass is my friend from university who’s name I don’t know when I stopped mentioning to others. But I remember that face, that pudding-soft face and crooked nose and blue-grey eyes that she always closed when she smiled. She’s doing it right now. She’s sat on his lap, arm slunk around the nape of his neck, their hands entwined. His pallid sallow cheeks ringing with fear like an electric alarm bell. Oh, hi. What a surprise, god I haven’t seen you in years, how are you doing, how do you know Nuala? That alarm bell coils to a siren-call from the depths of a black ocean, and his eyes widen with a primal anxiety of entrapment. I don’t actually, I know Milo. Oh, really, that’s funny he’s never mentioned you before, we did the same undergrad degree at university together babe, we used to be reeaaallly close, like practically the same person it was weird, but we sort of lost touch over the years, I’ve been so busy with work and everything you know. That beaming smile pierces into my heart and it splinters into a million pieces that jab into my skin. The jewel of her off-coloured teeth, the compressed dimples in her cheeks — when she slept next to me, body lifted into the state of the other-world, I would trace the notches of her spine with my fingertips spelling I love yous and forget-me-nots — the cluster of freckles like flecks of dirt on a white-cotton blouse on her nose.

Lion appears behind me and snakes her arms around the indent of my waist, clawing her fingertips into the soft-pouchy rings of my stomach. Yeah, how strange, where’s the bottle Lion? She dangles a small plastic bag in front of my eyes. Forget that, here’s some K.

Moving is torture, and my brain is freed from pleasure. A pulsing headache rips the slits and stitches of my brain and I feel nauseous in my fingertips. I need to get the fuck out of here. I fumble my beaten body up those matted stairs and feel my way for the bathroom door. I trace the corridor with my hazed eye, and I see it? The door, it’s open. A hairline fracture, red light oozing from the crack between open and close, bending and breaking with the angles of light. Jackhammering stabs fizzle into crackles and pops of pain.

The door, it’s open.

The immediate need to vomit.

Treading softly on the worn berber carpet, I’m reaching my hands out into the depth of that hallway, feet following after hands, groping in the red candescence. I hear Nuala downstairs announcing the Start of the Show, the melancholy lilt of her voice dissolving in the thick slabs of dusty air that fills the house, fighting through cigarette smoke and cheap music. My hand is on the handle, Woooo Oooohhhh, and I push. It takes a second for the eyes to adjust to that wall of red that attacks the line-of-vision like an unprotected flash. The walls are bare, the floor is bare, no bed, no wardrobe, no desk, no bookshelf, no window and no curtain, no discarded sock nor misplaced sequin. Save, for the machine. Is it a machine? Colours beyond red filter in through my ears and out my mouth. No, it’s a skeleton. A papiermache skeleton made with newspaper cuttings and magazine highlights. Who even buys magazines anymore? A huge cock made from spit-and-stick paper mush extends from the skeleton’s groin like a hand reaching for more, a single eye bored into the paper skull cut with the blunt force of a serrated kitchen knife, a puzzle of long fingers locked together. I’m closer. It’s not magazine cuttings but print-photographs of the skeleton cut and slashed and spit and sawn together. I’m putting my fingers into the bottomless pit hacked into the misshapen oval head, now, the plaster rubbing and crumbling against my skin.

Whirring. It’s eye widens like a snake eating an antelope. Creaking under the weight of the plaster, the skeleton’s body crackles with its curve — the human nervous system ripped from its flesh and muscle and bone, Sansevero Chapel, those eyes bulging, held back by a thin bunch of fibres that stop the retinas and corneas from dribbling down the front — I remember saying I understood how that must feel — and bends further still, until the papiermache cock is enveloped into it’s hollow burrow. Not an eye, a mouth.

(Por los labios de tu herida

Silban rimando los viento

Y el agua gime al caer

En tus abismos de fuego,

Through your wound’s lips

The rhyming wind whistles

And the water moans

As it falls into your fiery abyss,)

I’m running out of the room and the force of the pressure means I’m now vomiting all over my shoes and the carpet. I look up, now, and they’re all there, mouths open like the slacked-jaws of some ugly fish, frozen solid in some form of pity-soaked shock. Lion’s face blends in amongst the shoal like an eel amongst rushes, and I’m trying to reach out my hand to touch her and I’m trying to speak to her but my voice is siphoned into silence and my hands are left empty and waiting like a child begging for food.

PHANTOSMIA

I suck her aftertaste from the crooks of my fingers; a delicate musk, sour-sweet, rosewood slicked with honey. Her smell lingers for hours after she leaves — my white linen sheets soak up the infusion of her body, the blend of sweat and synthetic tinctures. She saturates this space, as an unseen cloak smothering the stagnant air. She never wears the same perfume twice. Today’s polluted air had stripped her skin bare, and only the faintest whisper of cologne left it’s unmistakable trace nestled on the outline of her body sunken into the bed. Bergamot, lavender, patchouli, lemon, and salt. I breathe in dinner at a fish restaurant in Capri — sex in a lavender field — a failed 60s poet — empty revolution. 

I never wash her clothes when she leaves them puddled on the floor. I scoop them up and bury my face in the folds of cotton, and breathe her in so hard it resembles sucking. I breathe in that golden miasma, the sweetest fruit that hangs onto each cotton fibre. I push the fabric against my nose and mouth. I speak fancies and whispers into the ribbons and straps. I let the waving wash of scents and colours lap against the shores of my senses, white and frothy — like a bundle of lambs. I breathe her in so deeply that the particles of her melt into my lungs. I want her smell inside of me. 

The first time we met, I smelled her before my eyes held her. Civet, sweetened-sangria, strawberry, orange peel, maple sap, pomegranate, patchouli, tobacco, benzoin — deathly sweet, musky, and animalic. Eucharist. A smell like the Holy Mountain, like Suspiria, like Vertigo. Painted red-pink-purple flowers mutating into strips of ripped fabric, a dyed-red screen, unshakeable images. She smelled like a version of sex touched only through cinema; like a desire only produced through art, only made through making. She smelled like a time I don’t remember in a place never founded. She smelled like The Maiden. 

We were at a house party hosted by a mutual friend, whom I had long held disdain but never dislike for. His lips were constantly seer-suckered, as if lemon rind coated the inner ring of his mouth. He spoke with a falling cadence wrung with a faux-insecurity, and he always wore a thin solid gold cuban link chain. He was always trying to convince me that I was wasting my time with psychoanalysis, it was dead thought, I was better than that sexually-maladjusted tripe, why not do real philosophy instead? He was undertaking a PhD at Kings, in metabolic thought in philosophy. When conversations at these parties inevitably turn to Marxism, he would bring up Marx’s ‘metabolic shift' awkwardly — as if he’s too worried to get the words wrong, or to breathe at the wrong points. Not for a lack of confidence, but for a fear of exposure. His parents are rich, I don’t know what they do, but he always hosts parties in flats dreamt up by some yearning architect. 

Standing in the kitchen, with slanted ceilings punctuated with glass and wooden beams, I fiddle with a menthol cigarette brought back from a conference in New York. The French windows of his apartment house a view of London I’d rarely seen — the centre, with it’s beacons of trade, littered with firefly street lamps oozing a red-orange glow, a carpet of false stars — the wafting sounds of a new-age jazz band drift upwards from the nearby concert hall, embroidering the night-air. It would be beautiful if I could see it so, but instead it makes me nauseous. I step out, folding the concertina doors, onto the balcony. It stills does not seem beautiful to me. Through the wafts of menthol smoke, I smell her. That blood soaked eucharist, that choir of sexual depravity singing a hymn unwritten but felt in the vibrations of the air. I feel frozen by it. She stands next to me and pulls a rolled cigarette from an engraved silver box, gesturing for a light. We say nothing, and she makes no inclination that she will try. We puff in a suspended silence, accented by the whistle of nearby buses and the clamour of brass and drums. With a slight flicker of the lip corner, she throws the cigarette end off the balcony, and moves inside without glancing back. Her smell, that rapture, clung to the inside of my body like a worming parasite. Her smell left a trail of herself wherever she went like breadcrumbs to the witch’s house. And I could not but follow. 

I remember as a child, waking up to the smell of a hung death that clung to the air of my bedroom. A fouling wisp of flesh, an ember of the once-living permeating every inhalation. A rotting stench, obscene in every conceivable manner, that rose from the hidden geometries of cheap wood nailed together haphazardly in the shape of my bed frame. It was painted white. After some time battling through the smell with each breath, I curled up from bed, sliding my little body out from the starched sheets. I wanted to find the source. It appeared to me as a beating heart, clutched from a chest, pulsating and ululating with a mutated scream dissolved into odorous malady. My bare feet, already littered with callouses from the summer’s sun-soaked liaisons, touched the dark wooden floor. Bent at the knees, my bones felt weakened with a rising fear — a sunrise bruised and bloody pushing itself through a dense thicket of black clouds, scorching the network of my arteries. I felt fear. Fear without sight is a carnal primal thing. A dark corner, a deep recess, an unknowable copse of cluttered corpses violently entangled at the unseen edges. Sweat pooled at my base of my neck. I bent down to croon beneath the half-broken slats that supported the mattress. There it was, in the far corner where the walls touch, in a flattened heap of half-dissolved flesh. Gelatinous matter seeped from a deep cut that split it’s pouchy stomach in two. It’s rosy-coloured tail spiralled inwards like the shell of mother-of-pearl, delicately resting on the wood beside the gaping wound. Vomit rushed to my throat. How did I not notice this before slipping into bed? Did the sun’s beating pleasure whip me into such a youth-cozened frenzy that my brain could not comprehend such a scent? How long had this thing been decaying underneath the very pillow that my dreams sink into every night? I swallowed the bile back down. I left my bedroom and with urgency went into the kitchen. I searched for a vessel in the heaps of rubbish that had accumulated by the backdoor, and found a brown paper shopping bag. Returning to my bedroom, I grabbed a wooden hanger from my cupboard, and leant down once again to see the thing. With the hanger, I reached underneath the bed and fished it with the hook. It came back to me, leaving a thick stream of sludge like the viscous underbelly of a slug or snail. It was now at my feet. It’s eyes had turned milky at the edges, and whitened tears collected at the ducts where flesh became fur. A strip of white hair collared the creature. I laughed at the sight, as I imagined the thing donned with the finest set of pearls passed down through generations of royalty. I reached my finger out to stroke the length of it’s back, and the flesh gave way to the soft pressure of my touch — leaving a rivet in the rotting shape of it’s body. What a thing, to see death. To hold it in your hands. To feel the viscid knots of flesh. To imagine what it’s life had been, before it’s torturous end. I leant closer, and noticed the lattice of nipples that dotted down the length of it’s stomach. A Mother Rat. Vomit rose again. I pushed it into the paper bag, and rolled it up tightly, leaving no space for air. I sat with the bag huddled in the gap between my crossed legs for some time. What a thing — to have her death leaking from underneath me. After a while, I rose with the bag clasped between my pudgy fingers. I moved silently through the house, and left through the backdoor. Sitting on the grass, I begun to dig and scoop the dried out earth with my fingers. Night still grasped the cloud fettered sky, obscuring the clusters of stars. Who knew how far away they really were, and who knows how small I am right now, and how small she is, dead in my garbage. I dug a hole. Carefully unrolling the paper bag, I tipped her out into the hollowed gouge of earth. She landed with a thud. Her eyes, black and white, milky and pearled, gazed up at me. I quickly covered her with the dug earth, piling and piling and piling earthen mud and stones upon the form of her body. Mud and earth, worms and beetles, garbage and crushed coca-cola cans, and now her — with her whitened eyes facing the stars that behind those thick clouds, could not shine back. 

I nuzzle my cheeks into her breast bone, the soft curves of her breasts smothering my face. Her skin smells of synthetic mango, sweet but juiceless and flattened with chemicals. A slightly milky tone sits soured beneath the sweetness. The cold metal of her St. Christopher’s pendant touches my forehead with each shake of her neck. She never sits still. She wriggles and worms beneath me, whether through awkwardness or pleasure, I can never tell. I place my mouth on the outline of her nipple, and dance my tongue around it’s centre — that little mountainous zone, dotted with raised mounds and protruding skin. She squirms compulsively, her breath coarse and jagged, sandpaper thin. The curves of my breasts rub against the folds of her stomach, as I suck and kiss, leaving trails of glistening skin upon her. I notice the flat-earth between her breasts is beaded with sweat, slicking the soft-brown downy hair to the skin. I breathe her in, her fleshy impasto forming inside my nose and throat. Her hands, dotted with gold-and-green jewelled rings and bracelets, make their way to the sides of my face, clasping onto the shape of my jaw. She pulls my face up to hers, and our eyes link. An expression bleeds inside of me, traceable only through the small quivers that seep out from the corners of my lips. My inward face, that uncontrollable edge, writhes in a cringing discomfort. My body, suspended in some unknown shape, locked in borrowed time, floating some thousands of feet above us, dancing atop fighter jets nestled in the toothed notches of their tails, shooting poisonous gases from my mouth. I laugh — I am laughing with the doves, pigeons, and parakeets, who preen my scaled skin dutifully. I fight — no, I am dogfighting — dogfighting in the waning of the moon amongst derailed satellites, careening into distant edges and corners, tangled in a thicket of mechanical debris. Muzak from the downstairs bar seeps into the single-glazed windows of her barren bedroom, a lilting jolt, a context-less mass of notes strung from a simulated instrument. The language of a secret proof filters through my caught breath. Awkwardness shifts into my fingers and mouth with an anxiety that rips my body from my own touch. I feel severed in two as my body plunges back to earth, to this shallow bed frame, to her soft palm reaching it’s way towards my epicentre. I place my head above the site of her heart, curl my arm around her waist with my nostrils perched on the soft edge of her armpit. Salted mango. 

‘Have you ever wanted to be someone else?’ 

A pearlescent glow hangs in the room as filtered sunrise seeps through the gauze of the netted curtains. I wrench thought after thought from folds in my memory, and cast them out with heavy blows of breath. Curled in the corner of my kitchen, knees pressed to my chest, I pick the dirt from underneath my fingernails. A slick film of icy sweat puddles at the corners of my body. Soft butter, cocoa, vanilla. A lingering sourness from yesterday’s bread dances through the house. I cup my head into my little hands, and trace the outline of my features with a bloodied finger. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears, lashes and brows. All mine. An unknown feeling tears into my skin — something like sulphur bubbling on my surface. Tomorrow casts a bleeding edge into the dotted corners of my vision. An unreachable itch in an untouchable place, a darkened burden bundled into the fibrous bunches of tightened muscles forming across my chest. How small I am, how small my body is, how weak and feeble. I raise my head and take in the shapes of the kitchen. The terracotta floors, cold and always dirty. The white oven, always broken yet never fixed. The amber wooden cabinets filled with pots, pans, plates, bowls, cups, glasses, forks, knives, spoons, eggbeaters, scourers, lemon juicers, measuring jugs, rolling pins, plastic bags, elastic bands, pens, paper, dish-soap, receipts, vouchers, phone numbers scrawled on ripped up envelopes, bulk-ordered toilet roll, olive oil and salt, arranged and re-arranged, put back together and torn apart. A projection of myself glimmers in the shadowy angles of the kitchen. A glittering holographic membrane, a silhouette, a shiver. Oh that pudding face, soft and unbroken! A plush fabric stretched across stone atop a shrinking mound of dirt. How small she is. Somewhere in the rusting grass of the garden, a fox screeches, high-pitched and unruly as the sunlight thickens into dawn. I suck on an ulcer forming in the soft wound of my mouth. 

I start wearing mascara and dark kohl eyeliner smeared half-heartedly at the corners. My professor’s face is stained with a mixture of confusion and disappointment. This is not who he thought I was — not the strong, individualistic, hard-headed, unwavering inverted image of himself. Before I was an impenetrable Venus, now I form a shoddy Sheela-na-gig, masked in a thin veil of someone else’s body. I start wearing vintage dresses cinched at the waist, covered in ugly flowers and patterns, layered with cardigans and coloured tights and mismatched jewellery. The confusion steeps. My work slips into unrecognisable pretension, completely useless and formally defunct. I start layering garish perfumes — bitter upon sweet upon musky upon floral. Languid jasmine sits sweet on a bed of dirtied tobacco. I can never get her balance right. 

We sit in his dark and cluttered office in silence for some time. I run my fingers through a matted lock of hair collecting at the base of my neck. After spending the last two years visiting this place, I’ve come to understand it well. He believes that the contents of his office chart the corners of his inimitable mind, a psychological cartography of his impressive ingenuity. The fingered and bent books, carefully arranged in order of preference and cultural weight, hang on the shelves above eye-level but within his reaching distance. Don DeLillo sits atop his head, either as a crown or halo. He sits like dust clinging to his treasured trove of words and letters. Shuffling in his wooden chair and stroking the ribs of his olive-green corduroy trousers, he asks me in his pockmarked tone, how I am preparing for my viva. I pause for a breath that never seems to make it up from to lungs. I say, I haven’t. A pitiful and pathetic downturn of his yellowing eyes strikes me harshly, and I feel the prickles of goosebumps rise on my sternum. 

‘You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about Katherine. I know it is the moon, then it is the blessed sun, but the sun it is not if she says it is not. Who am I if not the moon or sun? Who am I? Who are you?’ 

He suggests I should seek counselling. I feel a throaty laugh start at the base of my chest, but it dissipates before reaching my mouth. I look down at my hands, and see the dirt and blood encrusted under the rims of my fingernails. I see that glittering presence of my childhood body, held in the upper corner of the room, gazing down at me with doe-eyes and a docked tail. She blocks the sun, moon, and stars — she chokes the air, she punches my stomach and shoves her fingers down my throat. I am eating myself like a dying snake. 

She wears green and so do I. She is wrapped in a silken chiffon dress tied at the waist with a ribbon. Her mascara and eyeliner has smudged in the infernal downpour that cloaks the morning-bell city in a shroud. Vetiver, oak-moss, and juniper. An astringent chemical odour from the rain soaked concrete hangs like a sodden cloth in the air of my apartment. A fresh garden slicked with varnish. I’ve let my hair grow long, and whilst mine matts and knots in protestation, hers falls and sways faithfully. I toy with the matted texture engulfing my hair like a trellised weave of browning shoots. She places the loose strands of her golden tinted hair behind her ears as a weak smile rises through her face. We sit on my unmade bed, as our hands move over the contours of each other’s shapes — guiding fingers and palms to forgotten clefts. The silken folds of her dress fabric billow under the movement. With our eyes not meeting, we kiss. I feel the sublime energy of my skin melt under the pressure of her touch. The dance of fingertips across my drying skin, the flutters of wet kisses planted on the crevices of my neck, the deepening pleasure filtering up from the base to my crown. I feel weakened. The wretched September wet-heat claws its way in the spaces between our mouths. A fistful of blood rushes into the darkened parts of my system. My bones sit heavy in the pudgy sack of my flesh. The air is saturated with the eroticism that coats all that which lives and dies on this infertile earth, and I breathe it in. The air is colourless, the colour of everything and nothing, the colour of my body. That unseen poison enveloping the membranes and sacks and fluids and cells and fibres and vessels that make myself ‘whole’. But my wholeness is an antithesis of her wholeness, full and ample, glittering and twinkling with the prickles of the first mottled light that pokes through broken curtains. My wholeness means nothing. I breathe her in, and breathe in the mossy undergrowth of a woodland clearing — I breathe in green and yellow. 

And I breathe out sticky black tar. I breathe out gasoline, I breathe out butane, I breathe out diesel. I breathe out the death that perches on the hook in my throat. I expunge all that festers within me, and replace it with the subtle sweetened greenness of her flesh. I wrap myself in the grip of her grin, and feel the elastic blades of my limbs dissolve. I turn myself into dust. A blossoming garden blooms from the rippling fabric of her untied dress — an artificial orchid entombed in a glass case. I reach for it. I want to perfume my insides with that unfolding purple corolla locked inside it’s own death chamber. I want that bud of ecstasy. I want it to be mine. Her eyes, brown-and-green with a golden ring, are downturned and filmed with a melancholic sheen. Those eyes meet mine, and an lagging awkwardness hangs in the distance between us. A vituperative venom pierces that melancholic film, and bleeds into the soft muscles of her plump cheeks, stained red with recent pleasure. An attempt to burrow the emotion bubbling behind the glassed curve of her eyes is betrayed by the wilting corner of her lips. Tears form a silver puddle at the corners. She reaches her jewelled fingers out to me, and smears the dark eyeliner from my eyelids. 

I melt, and I mould, and I make. 

I sit in the deepened nook imprinted on the bed for some time after she leaves. The dark thick clouds of imminent thunder wrestle over notches of blue. I am covered in her still. After some time, I move over to the mirror that sits covered with a dusted white bedsheet. I have forgotten. I rip the cover, and I stand in front of the mirror to see her in the place of where I should be, or where I once was. 

I put on my pearl necklace.