INT. WITHIN A BRIGHT CORNER, WEBLESS BUT FOR YOUR WEAVING TONGUE, THE MIDDAY GLARES A DIFFERENT CALIBRE. AN EVER-FOG LAMINATES THE LANDSCAPE. THIS UNMADE MAN ENTREATS THAT SELF-MADE WOMAN. DESPITE ITS URGE TO SAW BACK AND FORTH, THE LOPSIDED GRIT ENSCONCES ITSELF WITHIN HIS HARD-SET SHOULDERS. ANSWERED FOR MARIA SINCLAIR.
Q. THE STORIES ARE JUST THAT; STORIES.
This echo scrapes against his skin, awakening intent through scalp-nerves, like a finger-nailed slip from crown to tense nape. Your pointed gaze affixes to the mirage of her porcelain face. Unnatural. This view, and this gully it cracks, as if a pair of coastlines could delineate you, properly, from the yarn she spins. Secludes within needle-point fingertips. My threads are real, and yours are imagined. I am more than written word. He should feel dissimilar. But that should sags under its own weight, like rebirth-ed innards, blood clots and pruned lungs, collecting at the mouth of a slung pig. A stomach lining could, once, encounter a tooth, after following along the pink-bud road: to watch how life bubbles at the opposite end. Only to land, uselessly, as another droplet in the thousand-drip wide blood-pool. You know that fact like you know how to wedge your foot into a sock, and to dig bone from a heavy chicken thigh. An early lesson. Dead meat will not evade you.
She wriggles like she has a heartbeat. The question has a familiar smell—sweet without sugar, liquid metal borne of flesh—and he matches its blatant curve with one of his own. Beyond his lip: twitch in his ‘stache. Half-wistful / Half-moon. A smile, brimful of nostalgia. Of the response that has grown legs in time. You can’t stop the words tumbling from your mouth. ‘ And god is just a narrative, ’ he says without inflection. Glint in his eye. Pearl-glossed by an aged lapidary, for a crow eye’s benefit. Beady. In his head, he recites an old poem: Hail Mary, full of grace. The lord should follow, guide thine hand heavenward. To call worship those back-lit clouds. An open-eyed sun overlooks the soil’s crawl beyond its earthen grave. Roots and seeds. Blown to the sky by a child’s wishful mouth. Something else resides by her side. You. That which ends. That which takes meat from clean bucket, and cleaves it into supper. Nick ponders whether @hvnsnight would be next. His interest approaches her spoken pit-stop, hot and quick, like blood skirting along the over-iced lake. A clucked tongue. ‘ Who created you, then? ’
