The apartment blocks that lined the street were repeated again and again, a copy/pasted architectural commonality that barely caused a ripple in the planning permission office. They bled into each other and drew lines of perspective that did not reach anywhere. At night, window slats lay out a jailor’s delight on the pavements. Â
A window was leaking noise.
‘If you leave me, I’ll kill myself. With a kuh-nife, a kuh-nife.’ A stutter, but not really a stutter, instead a tendency to find the forgotten silent letters in each word and give them voice, an impediment that appears only in times of stress, or when he really needs to piss, for some reason.
 ‘I’ll take it from the kitchen in the night and I’ll saw at my wrists until I hit bone.’ A rocking over-and-back motion, mimicking the curve of a cradle the same way a butcher knife left on a chopping board does.
‘You’ll be sorry then. I’ll numb them with an ice-cube, first.’ He learned that from piercing his own ear when he was 14.
A slammed door; something broken.                       Â
A man, walking down the street, sketched out in bold, with cross-hatched shadows trailing his feet. New jeans itching at his crotch. Can’t scratch, not in public. So he eases a hand into his left pocket and pinches at the itching area. Pulls out a few pubic hairs to numb the itch with pain. Better, now. Better a true pain than an itch; a pain that makes no bones about where it comes from, what it is.
 He was not one of those who considered the streets of the city to be a cesspool of crime, a warren of winding roads that stank of shit and were stained with needle-bleed, where those who took preyed upon those who gave, where teeth were bad and accents worse, where insults flew and fists followed after, and knives and syringes and worse, where ladies of the night became ladies of the morning and afternoon too, where children were weapons that spat spite at all comers, where...
No. He was not one of the people who thought like that; at least he made a concentrated effort not to be, which had the unfortunate effect of bringing into focus exactly that that he did not believe in. So he very definitely did not keep one hand on his satchel and the other wrapped around his keys, the bike key jutting out between his knuckles as the sharpest and most deadly on the ring. Well, he did, but when he realised this, he loosened his grip and smiled at anyone that happened to walk or drive by.
Under the soil are worms, a thousand wriggling bodies. If they feel the brief pressure of a tread above them, the earth is condensed, a little, into a denser interlace of roots and death and mud. After the tread has passed, air seeps back in and the pressure is reduced, the balance readjusted, and the footsteps pass from memory.
Screams in a language that is foreign, but in rage, all words are foreign, or else so familiar that they cast off the web of letters that chain them up and speak in an older, truer language. A fist, in contact with a wall, perhaps as a result of a last minute swerve that had stopped a nose from becoming broken, stopped mascara from smearing panda-like across damp and bloody cheeks. The neighbours are used to it; one rang the police in a fit of piety and self indulgent worry, but when they had sauntered up the stairs to the topmost flat they had reported nothing wrong, no pools of blood, no badly camouflaged bruises, no child huddled in the corner with his hands over his ears. The clang of a frying pan, hurled into the sink in a temper. The bottom is rusting, non stick had been too expensive, and rust turns everything cooked in it slightly brown, although it doesn’t affect the taste. Rust tastes like blood, but nobody cares.
In the flat, something is wrong, something has upset the balance that exists inside a home, the balance that can survive death or pain or grief, but not a simple thing, like the overflowing rubbish bin left to stagnate for days on end just inside the front door. The scent of rotting banana skins and the damp, sickly taste of full condoms wrapped up in tissue paper.Â
A woman, alone, in a sitting room. Pills line up like soldiers. Her daughter has been gone five days, three hours and fifteen minutes now. The pills were meant to lessen the anxiety left behind after a painful divorce and the death of a mother, three years ago. But squirreling them away had been the right thing to do. Now she counts them again, again. Sixty-seven. One might have slipped into a mouth. But that’s OK, it’s within the margin of error. Probability is the only true language, and the statistical significance of one missing pill is negligible, or so she tells herself. Count them again.
           Kettle clicks as it reaches the boil. Steam like smoke paints the ceiling and drifts sideways into the sitting room, enough to cause a mild spike of alarm in her before settling down again. She knew there was no fire, but the brief excitement of the possibility of one was too good to pass up, so she let her pulse raise itself for a few seconds before settling down into its usual sluggish rhythm. Her daughter has been gone five days, three hours and seventeen minutes.
Let-me-in, let-me-out. Let-me-in, let-me-out. In the alley, a cat scratches at a back screen door. The cat belongs – as much as a cat can belong – to a man who has dementia. He doesn’t mind opening the door for the cat three times an hour. The cat doesn’t mind that he doesn’t mind. They live together in a happy circle of not-minding.  Every day, goldfish swim to the end of their tanks, turn, and discover the world anew; what joy, what joy. The cat has taken to pissing in the man’s flower beds. The begonias don’t mind either.
There is a body in the canal.
Nobody knows.
Someone will find out eventually, and call the police, and they will arrive with their yellow tape and little white tent. The news outlets will pick up on it, and issue an appeal for information. Nobody will come forward; the pathologist will rule it a tragic accident. No family will be found, surprising, in this day and age, the papers will say. There will be an editorial or two on the loneliness of modern life, on those left behind as society rockets forward. A letter to the editor will call for security fencing around all canals. For volunteers to form a suicide watch patrol. It will all be forgotten, in a month or two.
Flotillas of beer cans and reeds and styrofoam. They ripple with the wind.Â
The reason for the huddles, for the lumpy up and down shapes that the groups of people were making at eye-level, shadows oscillating up and down in righteous fury, was a man. Although he wasn’t really old enough to be called a man. He had been tried as a minor, incarcerated as a minor, and yet had murdered like a man. That’s what Frank used to say in the pub, anyway, when the topic came up. He thought it sounded wise, and would repeat it a few times to make sure everyone had heard. Perhaps it was wise, who can tell. There were a handful of stories that would be tossed out at a time like that, when the mood was melancholy and they remembered themselves enough to agree that Stevie Og was missed. They had considered putting up a plaque to him, something tasteful in bronze with a wooden backing. There had even been a collection box on the bar for a while, but it had disappeared and no one was bothered enough to launch a man-hunt for the thief of six euro seventy six cent.
Nobody had particularly liked Stevie Og. But the case had made the national news and a few locals had been manhandled in front of the cameras to say a few kind words about him, and words like that, once released into the air, tended to hang around. And the image of him there, with his wrists bound and his pants around his ankle – he had been in the toilet when he was so rudely intruded upon – made harsh words all the more difficult to summon.
‘They could have at least let him wipe his arse,’ Frank was known to say after a few more whiskey and lemonades.
The other lads hadn’t been from around here, so it didn’t really matter what had happened to them. One of them had been in his twenties, but it was Connor who had been local. Connor with two ns, if you’d believe it. They hadn’t meant it. It had been an accident. How were they to know that the kids Stevie Og would boast about, a barrister and an accountant who visited every Sunday, were entirely fictional? How were they to know that he would not be found an hour later, but a week? How were they to know that he would have gnawed and gnawed at the cable ties until his gums were bloody, that he would have pissed himself again in desperation, that even if he had been found in time, his leg would have gone bad and would have had to come off due to lack of circulation?
 A pit bull mix, bred for fighting, and indeed the ears had been clipped. The tail had been docked as well, so as to offer less grip for an opponent. There was a ragged scar reaching from under its jaw, dipping to the belly, and fading before surfacing again in the groin. He had lost two nipples, but what use had a dog for nipples. He had been no good as a fighter, no matter how starved and beaten he had been.
Once, a man had kicked him so hard in frustration that he had heard the crackling of ribs and the dog had collapsed in a wheezing pile, spasming and vomiting all over itself. But the damn thing didn’t have the decency to die, and when he had come back the next morning, the dog had dragged itself over to his feet and smiled a doggy smile that was so stupid and affable that the man found himself giving the dog some water, a blanket, and eventually delivering him to his son as a pet two weeks after his birthday.
The mother had been furious. He’s all busted up, she said, and I bet you’ve been fighting him. He’ll have the fingers off us. But the dog had smiled its plank-thick smile and had found a home, or half a home, in the abandoned pink child’s playhouse that took up half of the tiny yard. The father had been chased off with no offer of tea, or, as he had been hoping, a plate of food and a tidy fuck, one that didn’t involve removing his shoes or even trousers all the way. But the dog was given fresh rashers and smiled its dopey smile until it fell asleep.Â
To assume that the inner workings of the mind can be reduced down into a sentence that ends with ‘he/she thought’. That isn’t how the mind works. The mind is a constantly receiving aerial. We can’t turn it off. Ideas and notions ferment, sometimes rising to the surface, sometimes allowing us to get our nails into them and drag them a little ways out of the swamp, but mostly they are intangible.
With all this churning, pulsing, connecting and disconnecting, the probability of one particular thought arriving is unknowably large, and yet we are not surprised when they turn up and present themselves for articulation.Â
Oh, a mouth is a terrible thing. There would be a moment, then, when each person on the bus, each person on the street, in every damn tiny office and alleyway and apartment block would all turn their heads in unison and look, just look, at what lay over there beyond the vanishing point, to see what it is infants see. And the hinges that keep the mouth together and the self cooped up within would snap, and the upper jaw would flop backwards until it was a flat plane of a maw, and something would leak away.
And then they would return to their chores, to typing and pissing and shouting, and never mention this little anomaly, and nothing would have changed, except that the churning great entity of the city would have recognised that something, some thing, lay just out of sight and needed to be acknowledged.
It was silent that evening, or as close to the breach as silence can get in the press of humanity; grazing its fingers along the plastic sealant on windows, over neon lights and dull chalkboards advertising today’s specials, before stooping to cower in the gutters, scratching at ankles and disregarded shopping bags. But there were pockets of noise that could be approached and broached; spillings of noise that were there to be claimed.
A mouth is a terrible thing. To look at, it is a gash across the skin, a slit that has been widened and then healed so that two lumps of scar tissue trace the wound on either side. And inside, inside, some instinct has caused lumps of calcium and carbon and bone to protrude out, sprouting in some awful facsimile of symmetry; each lump pointing upward, anchored with a cruel hook below the jaw, their surfaces blunted and ground down into flat planes that can crush. And the tongue – that flopping, shape shifting, pocked muscle – oh, the tongue. And surrounding it all is a liquid; not the primordial liquid of the sea, or some fresh mountain spring, but a glooping, filmy lubricant that ebbs and flows like some unholy tide; gushing in the present of an enticing aroma, and fleeing in time of stress. Oh, a mouth is a terrible thing.
And the things that can come out of a mouth, they have no power, can have no power, when you see that they are wrenched from a slit in the very self; puked upwards and rolled around those awful teeth and bulbous lips.Â
To speak is to operate a hinge, a frightful one that separates the face and gapes and distorts to produce sounds. And the worry is in what shape those sounds will make? Why not worry that all there is to stop the top of the head continuing to rise and flip back, until a terrible 180 degree angle is created, is a few flaps of muscle and a stubbornness of bone.
Approaching the stop for numbers 23, 40, 16 and 2, he saw the bus turn the corner and willed himself not to run, knowing that at his current pace he would reach the designated waiting area just in time to join the queue, which would have subsided to just two or three fellow travellers at that point. He was correct, and decided to stand for the journey, despite the few tempting seat vacancies that his dalliance after work had provided.
The brakes screeched horribly at each junction. Those on the back seats were uneasy, raising their faces a few degrees each time a cyclist veered into the bus lane and the brakes were applied, willing them to sound more like the aging hydraulics they were; too afraid to look out the window in case they saw toes caught under wheels or little fingers lodged in screw-holes, screams teased out on the evening air as the bus pulled off again.
It was silent, or as close to the breach as silence can get in the press of humanity; grazing its fingers along the plastic sealant on the windows, over the handrails and before stooping to cower under the seats, scratching at ankles and disregarded shopping bags. But there were pockets of noise that could be approached and broached; spillings of noise that were there to be claimed.
They trundled out of the true heart of the city and into its arms and legs. Laughter trickled down from the upper level, slopping and overflowing downwards a step at a time in putrid waves of glee. A twenty-something in a stained hoody and a prematurely receding hairline looked up in barely suppressed rage, furious at missing out on the joke. His hands disappeared into his pockets and the gentle thud of a bass beat rose up to keep time with the thrumming of the bus. The woman beside him slowly raised a foot to wrap the strap of her handbag around her ankle, a gesture too close to the dividing line between furtive and obvious to be deemed offensive.
Someone sneezed. It was loud and wet, and it was hard not to feel the germs creeping up the back of the neck, multiplying in the damp warmth of the inside windows, a wave that would travel out to the steamy windows and press against them, latching on, waiting for an idle hand to rest itself upon the surface. ‘Bless you’, murmured a voice or two, but the sounds didn’t get much further than a foot or two outsides their mouths and were embarrassed. There was a woman, middle aged, although from looking at her you would have thought she was nearer to the beginning than the end, two-thirds age, maybe. She was the loudest and most unabashed of the bless-yous.
The bus pulled up at the next stop and the door sprang open for a moment, and air poured past us, into the cracks and wedges between arms and feet and torsos. No one got on; the red button had been pressed and the driver fuck’s sake-d loud enough for the lower level to hear and join together in a reflected collective shame at having caused this minor distress to the driver. A pigeon, made bold from a concussive encounter with a car or some inherited stupidity, hopped onto the bus, looked briefly up and cocked its head to one side before the doors snapped closed and it danced away like an overweight and aging boxer.
The three-quarters aged woman spoke, addressing the bus at large. ‘Hate them. Ugh. With their deformed feet? And they eat anything. I saw one picking at a pile of vomit, once. Urbanized, that’s what they are, what kind of wild animal does that? Rats of the sky,’ she noted, pleased with her observation. ‘That’s what pigeons are.’
A man with a melted face – perhaps from a burn, or an accident, or simply old age and gravity had caused it to drip and slide so – shifted in his seat, raising up on one hipbone to release a gentle flow of gas that was inoffensive enough to go unremarked upon. Â
 ‘Ugh, yes, rats. We had an infestation when I was in school. We ran from class to class with our skirts tucked into our socks in case they tried to run up our legs. Melodramatic as always. Comes free with the Catholic education, that. A taste for the obscene and a flair for theatrics.’
Someone pictured rats climbing the legs of squealing schoolgirls, delicately caressing the image and storing it away for later use, and waited for her to continue. She tidily arranged her shopping bags; two plastic and one paper, the paper damp and close to tearing from the moisture on the floor.
 ‘One girl was off sick for a week. We told everyone she had the plague, and we washed out her desk with bleach while she was away. Turned out she was allergic, or sensitive, or something. We all got detention.’
She smiled and opened her mouth to continue, another stray thought having passed by and dipped in under her skull and pressed itself forward for articulation. Instead, she frowned and seemed confused; confused by her hand grasping the bar above her and the almost-but-not-quite stranger at her side, confused by the people and the sounds and the time of the day.
But of course, Piers very carefully saw none of this.
He stepped out of the Centra, coffee slopping over the white plastic rim and catching in the cleverly designed furrows, outlining the admonition CAUTION: HOT that was stamped in raised letters, so that only a few drops actually reached his hand.
Piers paused in the doorway that looked out onto Dame Street, so joyfully busy, but joyful in the sense that isn’t pleasing at all, but almost sacred in its sublimity, the kind that makes you shield your eyes for fear of being burnt.
And then he succumbed to one of those uprooting moments where everything is heard, every screech and bark and word falls on the eardrum in equal, terrifying intensity, upsetting his balance, causing the liquids in his inner ear to swirl uneasily. And because everything was equally loud, everything was equally soft, and the gaps in the noise weighed heavier in their echoing emptiness, a vacuum that sucked at the ears, begging to be filled, please, with anything, anything to stop the silence from spreading like a grotesque fungus.
So he cleared his throat, and again, the muscles in his neck clenching and unclenching in a racket that sounded loud, so very loud, in the confines of his head.
After work, he decided on a whim to buy a coffee, one of those takeaway ones in the red crinkled cardboard that made the bearer look too busy, too important, too validly occupying their place in the universe to be stopped. He paid before he filled his cup, internally cringing as what he expected to come out as the familiar ease of the store-brand coffee connoisseur instead came out in an arrogant jumble of words that he had to repeat twice more before it was rung up.
He chose rich roast, but hesitated over the sugar, seeing a new slot filled with yellow packets featuring a smiling young woman, one of those that you can’t imagine ever having a real life; ever waking up hungover or taking a shit or losing her keys. The thing about artificial sweeteners, he believed, the thing is that they try to convince you that you need them, that you should dump a load of this white powder into your coffee and you will magically become that size 8 that you were at 17, before your tits came in and your arse started to crinkle and bubble under the surface.
Piers wasn’t aiming for a size 8, but the sweat patches that began in the embarrassing crease under his breasts were beginning to cause him concern, especially since they showed up if he wore the colour grey. He was pissed about that, you’d think grey would do a better job of hiding shame than white or black, seeing as it occupied that middle ground between colours that people had put a name on for fear of it going around unchained. Sometimes it was just ten thousand tiny white spots and ten thousand tiny black spots, laid down in alternating patterns so that the eye did the hard work of mushing them together, and sometimes some faithful dyer, or more likely some faithful machine, had already mixed them together into Cloud Grey or Steel or Metallic Sheen, before dipping the cloth in and letting it soak up the stain. He told himself he hated grey, but bought grey-coloured clothing more frequently than any other shade.
He would start running, become one of those people who find joy in exertion, who compare race times and runner brands and muscle supports. For now, he upended the garish Splenda packet into his coffee, stirred, and then licked the edges of the wooden stick, despite knowing that the saccharinity would cause his face to screw up and his tongue to cringe and lap at the sides of his cheeks in an attempt to clean away the horribly unnatural intruder.Â
A poem of mine, entitled ‘Where the Lost Ones Dwell’, has been published as part of the Fossil Lake anthology from Daverana Enterprises, and is available for purchase via this link. Check it out if you can!
The heater’s on. It’s not one of those proper ones, with a timer and a dial or a boost button. It’s not even one of those storage heaters, the ones that nobody seems to know how to work but everyone definitely knows they eat money. It’s just a thick white piece of plastic with a fan inside. Just two hands tall. But it takes the chill out of the air, if you blast it for ten minutes. It probably eats money too, but you’re too afraid to look at the electricity bill, you just click delete every month when your e-bill comes in (you switched last month in a stroke of lust for modernity) and hope that the money comes out, and you won’t do any differently until either the angry phone calls begin or the lights go out for good.
The heater isn’t helping. The swatch of heated air sits on top of the rest like a block of aging cheese then dissipates outwards; meets the cold, sees up-turned collars and bulging sleeves, and decides to slink away. The result is a 5 cm square patch of warmth on your legs, just above the ankles, no where near close enough to your toes, which don’t feel anything very much at the moment, actually. You’ve always had bad circulation.
Your mother will be calling soon. She hasn't said so, but you can feel the little flickers of attention on your skin as she contemplates you from across the country, just passing fractions of thoughts that will eventually come together and join up into a I-Should-Call-Jordan whole.
You wondered if you'd tell her about the murder. Only if the conversation got truly stale. Not that you didn't want her to worry - you just didn't want the weight of her care to reflect back on you.
That reminds you - there was a note on the carpet from the neighbourhood committee, if you would believe such a thing exists. It had been hastily formed and had met to discuss the increasing 'roughness' in the area. They used that euphemism so easily, every single one knowing exactly what it meant, despite never being able to put correct words around it.
You walk out to the hall to collect the leaflet from the mat and feel a thrill as the brush carpet rakes your feet; your feet aren't quite numb enough to be unable to feel the scraping in the hollow between your heel and the ball of your foot. It's a strange feeling, like the one you get when you finally get to pee after walking around with a full bladder for a whole morning. You scrape your feet up and down, one at a time, balancing on the other with a lazy wobbling. You feel slightly bold for doing it. The words "Committee Minutes" are on the top of the letter that has fallen partly open from the letterbox onto the carpet. They are framed by unnecessary quotation marks, slinking into place like dogs that have been away for some time and their return is just odd enough to cause a pause in a scan of the room. To you, their gums are blood-stained.
Martha Lucker thought a lot about barriers, about boundaries. When she watched her hands, they would speak to her. Not literally, of course, but they told her something; of a map, a path that led back to her brain; they highlighted each and every synapse that had fired, every flicker of muscle, every pulse of blood, every damn-tiny thing that caused her hands to be there, in front of her, alert. And when she moved a finger, just few millimeters or so (or half inch, because she still sometimes thought in Imperial), they would scurry to reorder themselves, to redraw the map.
And so she held in her a sloshing, twisting, forming and reforming tirade of information, of little battle reports; sergeants of her limbs, lieutenants of her organs, privates of her privates, all desperate to report back and inform her of what exactly was going on within her body. So she tried to move as little as possible, to maintain a proper posture and allow her fingers to move only from the knuckles as she typed.
Kevin pondered the two letters that squatted at the bottom of her emails – M. L. – said them out loud, rolled them around in his mouth, put strains on different parts of them, sped up and slowed down their component phonemes until they lost all meaning and turned to mush. When he watched her, sitting at her desk, he could see her throbbing; knew about all her little pulses and squirts of chemicals. He. But mostly he looked at her titties. Everyone said Martha Lucker was a real looker, and laughed at their own joke. A good fucker, a good fuck-her.
As they walked down Brunswick Street, Martha found that Kevin had the most irritating habit of veering a few degrees off centre, of pushing into her personal space by a few fingers or so. Two parallel lines should spin off in tandem towards the vanishing point, creating that phantom known as perspective, the one that pretends that far away doesn’t mean small, when in fact the opposite is true. And so it annoyed her that he insisted on converging.
She, on the other hand, seemed to Kevin to be vibrating at a low frequency, not shaking, exactly, just humming at a tone that was just high enough to collide with the rhythm of the passing cars; the sounds like two infinitely long glass panes meeting at a perpendicular angle, scraping, sliding past each other.
Election posters were everywhere. One flapped loose from its restraints at one corner, creating a whapping sound that made Kevin uncomfortable for some reason he couldn’t fathom. Someone had written CUNT in a speech bubble beside the prospective TD’s head. He didn’t know if this was to indicate that the politician himself was a cunt, or that he thought his constituents were, or if he was just fond of the word. The man did look like a cunt, to be fair, one of those fresh-out-of-students’-union boys, with his tie done up tightly and his hair cut short in an effort to age himself slightly.
They turned a corner, awkwardly, the pavement disjointed and grey beneath their feet, the greyness causing a sense of vertigo, of undifferentiation, which made it hard to tell where the walls began.  They saw something ahead, something that created a dimple, even a dent, in the proceedings of the day, something steel and angry.
The traffic accident was already cleared by the time they reached the pedestrian crossing. There were only faint traces left, reverberations of screeches and shouts hanging in the air. The leftover waves of an action, rippling out, pushing their way through reality until they faded and never were. A black skid mark, a half-handful of shattered red glass; a brake light that hadn’t done its job and so was doomed to be crushed to powder under howling tyres and bored feet until it was ground down to a single molecule of shame.
Martha could see from the slightly askew window blinds - just a few slates angled away from the plane, enough for two probing fingers and a pulsing eye to fit through - that the neighbours had found some diversion in the spectacle that had so recently been cleared. Was anyone injured, she wondered, and replayed the scene in her head. Two cars, or maybe three. Speeding from the near past into the near future. A sound, so unfamiliar as to be disembodied, a crunching, scree-ing sound that dented metal and bone with its forcefulness. When visiting sites of horror, places where things that should never have happened had happened, she found herself thinking things like how much could a fragment of a child’s skull hold? Was blood water-soluble or fatty? Did it stain, or just grasp deceptively tightly to surfaces? What was the breaking point of bone? In torques, precisely?
Kevin wondered if there had been much damage. If the cars were nice, worthy of sorrow over beauty lost, dinged paint, or if they were old bangers driven by old bangers that should at the very least be forced off the road. He wondered who had the insurance policies, and whether it would end up in the Circuit Court. Whiplash, emotional distress. Fear of driving, fear of flying. Summonses and post-its. Perhaps an undercover PI, snapping shots of shopping bags lifted, yoga classes attended, spines or souls certainly not damaged. The PI would have a degree in something intangible, Communications, maybe, and dream of bursting into the world of investigative journalism with a scoop that would fall neatly into their lap. But for now, just for now, they would follow welfare frauds and ambulance-chasers, just until that big break came along.
They kept walking. Often, in the city, they met the big other like this; bumped into it in traffic accidents and streetlamps and arguments, in words that lit up in neon and faded to grey in simple print. Noticed it lurking in nametags and dog shit and shifting alleyways. The other was weaker, then, when they spotted it for what it was, and could take it apart with the inexpert tools of their eyes, see the chunky shapes that pretended to create language; order. But mostly they looked away.
*
Kevin was kind; he held the restaurant door open for her, but didn’t raise his arm quite high enough, so she was forced to duck her head just a little to fit in between his forearm and his armpit. He smelled fresh, of something that, when bottled, would surely be called Memphis Musk, or A Touch of Wild, or Artic Blast. That was a relief, because despite his best efforts, and to his eternal embarrassment, Kevin was prone to spots of perspiration that would begin in the exact crease where his arms met his torso, and spread, in a narrow oblong shape that would shriek to all around him that he was unfit, unclean, unworthy of respect.
They both ordered the carbonara, in a jumble of words that came out too simultaneously to avoid a mutual trailing off and an awkward laugh. The waitress looked at them in a oh-aren’t-you-cute way and Martha wanted to snap the supposed knowledge from her face, throw it to the ground and scrub it with her feel until it tore in the centre, ripping like a wet newspaper.
There was graffiti art on the restaurant wall. Kevin quite liked it. It was something modern, all lines and slashes of colours. He imagined the artist carving each block of colour separately, sanding them down, softening edges, putting them together in a jigsaw, before running the whole thing through an industrial press to smother the third dimension and give it that real rough-to-the-touch texture. The thought formed with a throb-throbbing; pushing itself forward, bloating, distorting his skull until it seemed he had a knobbly, pulsing tumour protruding from his left temple.
Martha looked at the table instead, at the red and white checked pattern that squeaked under her fingers. She could feel her fingernails growing and pressed down on each one to make sure they stayed attached at the nail beds; watched as they bowed under the pressure and turned from pink to yellow and back to pink again. Martha was repulsed by the smattering of freckles on his back that she had seen when he had risen to put on his boxers. She knew they were there, hidden under his crisp shirt, a score of tiny brown flaws that sickened her with their intimacy. She wondered what part of her was so softly sadistic to have allowed him inside her skin.
Kevin had been eager to see hers; to peel away her layers, but now he wished he could put them back on, wrap her up again, pat her on the head and send her on her way, out of his sphere of attention forever. He wished to return to work, to set aside this encounter as a done deed, to release the nervous energy he had swallowed that morning in one great belch. He played tic-tac-toe in his head instead, winning the first game and losing the next.
*
When their food came, their bodies gaped and sucked like a door-thick sheet of limestone drinking water after a drought. Afterwards, the clock above the semi-frosted mirror stated that it was time to return to work, to end this mildly excruciating meeting of skins. It worried Martha, sometimes, that all the clocks would realize at the same time, at the very same time, that their pointing fingers and digital dashes meant nothing, that they didn’t really record, or measure, just frame events in a manner that let them be broken down and swallowed. Would you move through time in miles per hour? Or should it be hours per mile? If the order reflected importance, then surely the latter. Seconds per seconds, maybe. Time felt versus time passed. If the ratio moved from 1:1, something was very wrong.
Kevin offered to pay.
When he had come, she had felt the wetness drip down her thighs at first, but then she had gone blank; tuned herself into an ancient channel that was not broadcasting and would likely never broadcast again, its audience dead and in their graves. It was only an hour or so later, when he had slept (or pretended to sleep), that she had felt a crawling on her thighs, and up between her legs. She had waddled to the bathroom in a half squat, praying to gravity that the scrubbing, and scrubbing, would be enough to erase him from her, to reestablish the barrier between her and him. She felt permeable, like she could push herself through anything – not pushing too hard, not enough to warp and mangle, just a kind of relaxed clench, enough to convince the rest of the atoms and particles that she wasn’t really there, just passing through, no trouble to anyone.
But then it all collapsed into one and she couldn’t tell where her movements or thoughts were coming from, and she felt untethered, unsure whether she was differentiated from her surroundings or part of them, or if it was important in the first place.
Her nighttime mind, the one that leaps to life after dark and causes all sorts of mischief, wondered what the rules were, and when they would eventually expire. If the cogs and pistons of her body were already tired, worn through like a door saddle that sags in the middle from a lifetime of gentle exertion, from jumping off fractal cliffs into fractal troughs, riding their hooks and twists and caves. It would all break down, eventually, when the energy ran out.
She had fallen asleep in the shower, something she had thought impossible, lulled into rest by the haze; the her breath red-tinged from the traces of four-and-a-half glasses of wine, their remains bonding triumphantly to the moistness in the air before drifting up and over the shower rail.
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