Tarmac.

SHE

I am the girl you met at the bus stop, the train platform, the corner store with unflattering lights. If asked who I was waiting for, I would simply reply: A friend.

A friend.

Perhaps you were a friend, come to save me from the strip mall wonderland that was my life. A bold, black tuxedo that broke the waves of my Midwestern slumber. As it stood, every event was momentous, and every word a promise. When you first met me I was down and out, a discarded set of limbs on patchwork cement. You prodded me gently, asked if I was okay. You stood up to the brute who had so generously spilled purple bruises along my back and took me out of what now feels like a faraway dream. But here I am, forever indebted, waiting. Always, waiting. Waiting for when you will call for me. Waiting for when you will need me. Unashamed of your shame, unabashed by the way you disguise my existence. It is of no importance to me.

“There you are.”

Smirking, the summer sun reflected on your shades, your car. A raise of your brows and that easy, easy way you moved your hands. Everything else around us was brown dust and flat gray road. “You getting in?”

I smile. “Of course.”

You drive me to a motel, atwo-star pledge of permanent sex-object status. We make love. You smoke a cigar, I stare at the ceiling.


___

SHE

That was great.

In a sense, you were half the men I’d ever met. You are exhausting, a never ending goddamn cliff that just goes on and on, up and up. What was it that Einstein once said? “The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits”?

Haha.

Limitless, that’s what you are. And as you stand, light-eyed and untouchable, I realize that I hate you.

It is slow and sweet, pressing softly against the neck that you have just sucked, burying itself into my throat and flowing down the pit of my stomach. I hate you.

Your back is wounded from my nails and my voice is young, hoarse: “You’re leaving?”

Hate and exhaustion, one after the other, over and over again, looped like a badly chosen playlist on the radio. Still, I want you to stay. Still I want you to turn and smile, tell me you want to have coffee with me. That your castle is my castle and you are interested in my miserable existence. But unlike those who burn from within and insist they are ice externally – you insist you are alive but inside, you are fucking gone. Empty, was that the word?

“Wanna go grab coffee?” The words were out my tired mouth, lipstick smudged with your kiss.


___

SHE

I swear I could have mouthed your words as you said them. I am a puppet injected with your voice. I am a blank canvas marred only by your name. I am your grandmother’s Absinthe, your mother’s overzealous pride. I am every woman who overlooked you in childhood, and every woman who claws their way into your exquisite four-poster bed. I am the taste of bile as you double over, drunk. I am the curse of boredom as you realize you cannot escape your own mind. I am that smoke on your fucking cigar.

“There’s never a good time, with you.” The words were a murmur, lost in the mass of hair, cheap pillow cases, peeling walls. I am not sure if you hear me. Feigned ignorance is your strongest hand and your watch glints in the setting sun. Winks, chuckles. I realize what it is really telling me: I am only 6:00 to 6:30, nothing more.

Did I really just ask so that you would say no?

At times I feel like a snake, hungry to be left behind, begging you to crush me beneath your heel in order to
feel something, anything. I stand naked, walk in front of you. Stare at you for the most fleeting of seconds before bending over and picking up my dress, worth only a fraction of the cologne you wear. Self-pity is unattractive so I bite my lip, ignore my wounds.

“Here—your collar.” And I fix it, gently.


___

SHE

The first time you drove me anywhere, you told me about a girl you’d met in Paris. Blonde, you said. Amazing blue eyes. We would walk, talk for hours. In the end—

“In the end, what?”

“Well, I left. I never saw her again.”

The lingering taste of candy bought half-price at some desolate gas station fuels this calm night. Those locks, blanched in the same devil-may-care shade of your Parisian bitch, flickered casually on your car’s exterior and just like that, the calm is broken.

I walk right past you and at first you do not notice me, your cigar nestled comfortably in the corner of your mouth. Your lips, a childlike bow. Your face is young, so young, as if age found it too strange to alter. Her, your good girl—her door shuts. Yours doesn’t. Your silver eye is caught in my reflection.

I was a child, licking honey from your fingertips, fed by your frightening dreams. You had never once tried to hide glances for other women from me, yet I had hidden them myself, satisfied with how little I knew. The walls around me, I had built myself, and in my hatred of you, I had glorified you. Look at me now, nonsensical. I owe my thoughts to a million coffee dates without you, a thousand books whose pages have been abused by my incurable case of insomnia. Tonight, I am wild. Tonight, you are—

You smile, or perhaps it is nothing, and I have imagined it. You understand my track record, the stumbling,
bumbling list of men besides you and the only difference between you and I is that you find pleasure in pushing your women away.

Unexpectedly, you call out.

“Hey.”

My chest is deciding whether or not it is a hammer. I turn, despite my good intentions. Your blonde is waiting behind the tinted glass.

“Hey,” I reply.

You nod and get in, shut your door. I remain standing. Your car does not move for a while. When it does, the night is a little more alien, a little more cruel.


___

SHE

If you were an animal, you’d be an octopus.

Let’s skip the long limb jokes for a second—let’s even give your ego a rest and forget about how intelligent they are. They are masters of camouflage, distractions—illusions. They protect themselves by hiding who they are, changing their colours, their textures. They will even go so far as to cut off their own arm in order to stay protected. And—

They have limited hearing.

I am sure, would I to relay this almost childlike insight to you, you’d chuckle, label it as a forgettable fact. But you, my dear octopus, are one of a kind, and I would love to threaten you strongly enough for you to severe your own arm.

Your words splay out, crawling on my telephone screen: What’s up?

What’s up? What the fuck is up?

A code for come over, I’m already halfway there. My heart has decided on being a hammer—no, a marching band—and I am counting each step towards your place in hopes of perhaps saving some sliver of dignity. I am betting a few hundred dollars that your blonde is out the door (nobody has been worthy enough to stay a whole night, in your own words), and I am not surprised when, your composed yet sleepy drawl on the
intercom, you tell me to come on up, you’re alone now.

‘Now’? You’re always alone.

You open the door, clean-cut in your thick robe, a king of overpriced everything and cold, cold hands and I enter, main meal to your entree. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

You slam me against the door, push your mouth on my mouth and I scream inaudibly, lips moving of their own accord, uncontrollable. You pull at my hair and rip my dress as if clothes came easy for me and I am not sure when it happens but I push you, I push you away, and I keep pushing you, and I am crying and no sound is coming out my mouth and my teeth are tight, suppressing any words, all words.

You stare at me. I cannot breathe.


___

SHE

You’re the problem—

I’m the problem.

I wish I could tell you that it has been a long time since I have believed in love. I wish I could tell you that, by some haphazard butchering of my childhood, the belief had all but decayed. No, what I have is infinitely worse—a persistent belief continuously demolished by that cruel candor in your voice.

I am frozen while you clink about. I notice the small scar on your right hand that you said you acquired when playing soccer in Barcelona. Who the hell would notice that? Who would even remember such a minor detail, except me? Me, the indelible print on your otherwise flawless script. Me, the accident. Me, the mistake. Me, the spell you cannot break. I laughed when you said I was a spell but baby, I remember. I remembered that night, you being drunk in this very apartment, spouting words that would make Shakespeare blush. And that was that. That was all. How could my life hinge on one drunken night?

I run trembling fingers through my hair, darkness itself, the depth to your light.

“I love you,” I said, and I wasn’t sure if it was truth or a plea.


___

SHE

You hand me my drink and I throw it in your face.

I feel old, I feel ancient, the ocean before it let her grasp on land go. My mind is lapping, overlapping, water, water, water. Water, on my fingertips, water like alcohol like water and alcohol on your face, your chiselled, beautiful face. Each angle, carefully measured. Each curve of bone, delicate. I spill alcohol on your face hoping to mar the beauty but instead you just turn, all you do is turn, and I spit at you, dare you to hit me, slap me, strike in vain at the match that held no fire at all.

“You are so full of shit,” I say, voice low. “You have no fucking idea what the hell you are doing.”

My dress is torn and your gaze gravitates. I make no move to cover anything—I am already stark naked before you. I always have been.


___

SHE

And whatever morsel of dignity I was gathering failed me—

“I’m saying that this is the last night.”

I was a scavenger, hungry for any remaining justice, my hand on the nape of your neck, your hand grabbing my thigh, my leg on your waist, and I just—

Bury me, tonight. Make love to my ghost for years to come.


___









___

HE

My eyes swallow pyramids, my body a crypt. Valley of the Kings, robbed of its wealth and burned in deserts. The years have been good to me, they have sunken into my soul and feet; I dwell on the edge of indifference.











The day is a devil.

I’ve found that with each passing month, I have slept with more women, sought more solace in buys. Luxury items – high-end sports cars with custom modifications; leisurely expenses – weekends in high rise hotels. I found myself rising to the pinnacle of a precipice, a granite quarry that I filled with valuable rocks. I found myself hurling hundred-dollar bottles of gin at walls, hoping that a match would flutter in the glass’ wake.

King Louis built the Palace of Versailles. I had constructed a castle around myself.

Years ago, I knew not what drove me, what pushed me at the heels with enough force to carve shallow trails in asphalt. All I knew is that the quaking of my mind sought to burden my future down. I tried to quell the spirits, tried to overindulge them in my successes; they slipped out of my eardrums onto my shoulders, and dragged me deep into the ground.

I’ve spent the last year overseas, after selling everything I had come to remember. The rooms I’d fucked fifty blondes in, gone to people whose names I would never know. The last car I had owned I had crashed on the Pacific Coast Highway; I hoped they would blame a celebrity, as I left it rotting on the coast. A thirty-thousand dollar Rolex Yacht-Master…

…and time again, it swings doors shut.

The dusty part of my mind is waking, and my voice recalls old vigor. A youthful arrogance that sold my heart and made me Athens’ child. I call her, standing in the town she lives in with my hands in shallow pockets. I feel like I can taste her on the air.

It rings once, twice – will she answer unknown numbers? She does –

“Hey, you.”


___

The world drowns beneath his feet.

Sometimes, he sees the cataclysmic rise of his actions. The ever flowing ebb and tide; the waters recede with his every breath, disentangle themselves from kelp and broken starfish, smothering sand. He captures the crescent of the moon on a fingertip – spins it, roughly – feels the splash of stars within his wake, sucks the sight of twilight cascades into his eyes, flowering bursts.

The galaxy diminishes within his grasp. He enraptures it, caresses it from calamity to calm. The universe is his pillowing bed rest, a billowing of clouds that seek to build his form of inexplicable essence.

Sometimes, on nights like these, he wraps his fingertips in blades of grass. Feels them curl around his nail beds and roughened knuckles, the tickle of green that splashes color over the pallor that flushes his flesh. He breathes in deep, and grows Japanese gardens with every exhale. They blossom from his eyelids, a current of crimson that flutters in tidal winds.

He is a gardener amongst the insanity, and beauty flourishes beneath abstract cries.

When the sun topples over the horizon, he hears it calling, distant. The chatter of birds clutters his head; his ears are hollow, bouldering giants. Syllables categorize distinctly, a scrolling screen of numbers a collapsing roll of skyscrapers that sink beneath branded waves. The ocean is filling his veins, a babbling creek, an echoing sigh – dehydrated doubts.

The world turns over, finds itself comfortable, mutters in its sleep. The people are alive and waking; they know nothing of this beast.