two characters
two of them fur in fur baby rising falling breathing bathing baby holding tight tight white tight fur white tight breasts squeee squeeze spurt gurgle gargle hold on
ivory slivers, slints of light, of white of danging participles dangling dangling hair matted bloodied hair ivory stained white light brilliant lights clutch nails blood bleed stain, metallic blood, ivory stains, matted fur
no more baby
no more milk
i am lonely
you tell me you have the cut-key for the ignition
the curved metal sprocket which halts the go
you tell me you own the keys to the castle
you liar
you are the gas
you are the verb in the motion forward
if i wrote more descriptively would you love me better?
would you swallow this (all encompassing ___) and stop hitting back?
if i could tell you in colour, in form, in texture, in feeling
might you stop
and start
and bring us back to the beginning like little kids with fallen pink ice cream cones
but if i could write better, then i couldn’t be your kid
she doesn't know that the ice cream cone is only the beginning
of being left with a sticky mouth and sticky fingers
You’re right Frank.
it would be.
except that the smoke hits the ceiling.
and in the end, all you really need to do is pee.
I'll find my forgetting somewhere else.
what is it if not slightly less full than when you are here?
if only i knew, could taxonomize what i have bubbling up
into a string of coherence
something speakable
comparable to you when you soliloquize
but did the expression make it better?
tell me djuna
tell me what you discovered when you made the two inextricable?
tell me what you discovered when you made her into prose and verb and object and adjective?
did the leaving fly into the canon with the emptiness upon it's shoulders?
did it fill up the bed?
“I want to do something important”, the girl says carefully. Her fingers pick absent-mindedly at the ripped lace of her tights. She sips her tea, savouring the milky residue and the crystalline left-overs. “I want to do something significant, something that means something. But I dont know how.”
“We all do”, he says
“No, but you don’t understand”, she says again. “I deserve to do something like that. I was born to do something like that.”
She puts her pale hand on the table and extracts a crumpled cigarette from the red and white box resting against the sugar bowl. She places it in her mouth, the lips pursed in a way that only he would notice.
“You smoke too much”, he says
“Shut up” she replies, and she lights the cigarette, inhaling quickly and then blowing the smoke about 3 inches above his messy head of chestnut hair. “I was born to do something significant”, she whispers again, almost to herself. “But I feel like something is stopping me, you know?”
But he didn’t know. He didn’t know why he was at this girl’s shitty apartment, above a Chinese restaurant, drinking shitty tea out of some old broken mug that read ‘Happy Birthday Sheila”. Her name wasn’t Sheila. He didn’t even know anyone named Sheila. She was so annoyingly bourgeois. She tried so annoyingly hard. She smoked so much,
purposely one might say. He wondered if maybe she was trying to get lung cancer so that she could ‘do something significant’. Lung cancer was definitely a big deal.
“Do you have anything stronger?” he asks.
She rises, quickly, and finds him an old bottle of whisky from behind the fridge.
She fills up his mug, distracted, still smoking and muttering to herself about New York, and the Pulitzer Prize, the whales, global warming.
Tea and Whisky. “Well”, he thinks, “it could be worse. I could be drinking the last of the schnapps”, which was all he had left behind his fridge was probably worth at least 10 times as much as hers.
“You would never know she came from a wealthy family”, he thinks. He watches her for a few moments. She was on the sofa now, wrapped in her ratty old mink; her knees tucked neatly under her. The bones of her face give him a hard on, and he watches her smoke her cigarette almost manically, and suck on the dregs of her milky tea.
“I really think I could have done something, if I had, like, put my mind to it, you know? I really think I’m worth something.”
“WE’RE ALL WORTH SOMETHING” he wants to scream, or maybe he wants to tell her to shut up. She is starting to irritate him and so he gulps his whisky a little faster, refilling it when necessary from the ancient bottle resting on the dirty pink flowered tablecloth.
“Hold on,” she says, “I’ll be right back.”
“Sure,” he whispers, slightly drunk now. What time is it? Quarter to 11. And it’s Saturday.
“Are we going out?” he yells after her.
Probably not. Going out makes her anxious these days, so she says. She likes to sit in her apartment and drink tea and chain-smoke and think about how to make something of herself. He doesn’t have the heart to tell her that she’s failing.
This is ridiculous, he thinks, I’ve indulged this stupid ritual every Saturday night for the past 2 months. I’m a real person. I need to go out. I need to see people. I need a proper drink. I won’t stand for this shit anymore. I’m going to drag her out.
And so he follows her. She keeps all the lights off to ‘save the planet’ she says, and thus is snaking her way to the bedroom holding a little white tea candle.
“She is so incredibly affected,” he thinks to himself. “She’ll never do anything with her life.”
Her bedroom is still one of the strangest places he has ever seen. The first time he saw it, they were 17. He had been standing outside her building, waiting for his take-out wonton soup to be ready; desperately trying to keep warm by gulping down a coffee. And then she had appeared. She was impossibly thin, impossibly frail looking, dressed head to toe in material whose origin was uncertain, and wearing her giant mink. And she was smoking, of course. Her teeth were slightly yellowed and so were her fingers. But he remembered thinking to himself in that moment that she might just have been the most hauntingly beautiful girl he had ever seen. She invited him in, being young, he could not say no. Up the dark steps to her shitty apartment. They had gone straight to her bedroom, she didn’t use lights, even back then, so she had lit long white candles and sat them on the dresser. And then he had seen her room. Back then he had found it charming. The dried roses pinned almost obsessively along the edges of the ceiling seemed to him marks of a romantic eccentricity. The empty bottles filled with quarters and nickels, which littered the floor made her into a pirate, surrounded by loot. The miniature glass unicorns set up in elaborate scenarios on all the tables, even this charmed him.
And they had made love that cold winter day. She had pinned him on the bed without knowing who he was and she had stripped his jacket off him, and his sweater, and his shirt, and she had unzipped his pants, worked her way inside his flannel boxers. But she had left his socks. And she had removed her tattered blue dress, and the mink, and she had stared at him wearing only her pink lace underwear (she needed no bra), and then she had stuffed his dick inside of her and she had fucked him until he came hard, shooting deep into her.
And then it was done. And she had made him a cup of tea. And she had smoked a cigarette.
And because of this strange act on a sleepy winter’s afternoon, he had always felt somehow bound to her. And so he returned day after day. Sometimes she fucked him on the bed. Sometimes she fucked him in the bath and her orgasm would take the place of an underwater scream. Sometimes she would let him pin her up against the wall and fuck her with her face pressed against the wallpaper until it bruised. Sometimes she didn’t even take off her dress, and he slid into her through layers of second hand clothing, and they rocked together until she moaned and ran her yellow nails up and down his sweaty back. And some days she did not fuck him. Some days she would not look at him. And everyday she smoked. But he always came.
“That was a long time ago,” he thought to himself as he now watched her begin to undress beside the bed.
He had always felt strangely bound to her because of that one day.
She turned. “Do you want to?” She asked. “Is this what you’re looking at?” And she points to her now half naked body, her erect nipples, and the hair on her pussy.
He has a hard on, but he won’t fuck her to make her feel like she has done something important.
“I don’t know”, he mutters, “I need a drink.”
She shrugs her shoulders and sits down on the bed; it creaks as she sinks into it. They stand there for a long time, unmoving. He watches the edge of her shoulder blades rise and fall as she breathes in and out, and he asks himself as he does every time, what the fuck he is doing on another Saturday night with this mess of a girl who thinks that she can somehow write a fucking award winning novel, or come up with the cure for AIDS if she sits in her dingy apartment in the depths of winter and drinks enough tea, smokes enough cigarettes.
“Y’know…” she begins, watching the snow fall from the window.
“What?” he asks.
“When it snows, it looks like how I imagine the world must have looked, when Pandora opened the box and all the sins flew out.”
His grasp of mythology is not great, not like hers, but he remembers the story of the beautiful woman whose curiosity killed it all. And he stares at the constellation of freckles on her back.
And he looks at the snow outside. And he looks. And he looks. But he cannot see what she sees. And all he can see is snow. Just plain snow.
