A PARASITE
Lindsay’s body is hanging against the stove, her face broken like a pale red egg along the wall. Across from her on the floor, arranged between her boots and compact, my hands are pressed together in a jagged flower, framed in our blood. Our house is on fire. The kitchen is filling with smoke, coiling around the legs of our furniture and into our gaping mouths. Lindsay is still in her clothes, but my body is stripped naked, blasted and exposed by long cuts reaching from under my chin towards my intestines. Our flesh, still moist and pearlescent under our sweat, tightens as the heat pulls our identities away into the black anonymous air around us.
. . . . . . .
You’re standing above me, watching my body shake as it dies. Your fingers are still squeezing around the empty space where the knife used to be. It’s lost somewhere in my ribs now, but you’ve given up on finding it. Instead your attention is focused on the black smudge that used to be my mouth. As you shift your weight around the linoleum, you can hear the last of my organs creaking inside my torso before they spill limp between your feet.
. . . . . . .
You’re already erect when I climb on top of you. Your eyes are bandaged shut, so you must be aroused by the friction of my jeans or the slow sound of my footsteps towards you from the hallway. The harsh aroma of excitement is pulling your body open to expose you, dissolving the outermost layers of your identity like a corrosive chemical, tugging on the threads of your blood. You’re my property now. I rest my hands on your biceps and press my weight forward, driving into your armpits with my thumbs. You’re squirming. It’s cute. I like how much I can hurt you before you finally beg me to stop. I tug your mouth open to inspect your tongue, stretching it between my palms to make sure it’s ready to be used. Then I purse my lips and dangle my face over yours, our bodies joined at the neck by my oily black hair. A heavy thread of spit draws out of my throat and lands somewhere else behind your teeth. I love you, you disgust me. I push your jaw closed and watch you swallow, tracing myself as I flow down your throat and into your stomach, spiraling into oblivion.
. . . . . . .
I’m useless and small. I’m a lonely child. I’m stranded in myself, waiting to be pulled out and reanimated by your touch. I want you to kill me but I’m a corpse already. I should be destroyed. I point to the places in my torso where I imagine my organs are, dragging my fingers along the lines I want you to scratch into me. My body is thin and hard, but my flesh is still soft, ugly. When you touch me, when you test my skin, I can feel my blood rushing to meet your fingers. The blood collects in radiant pools, leaving my veins as empty as the rest of me. Please. I need you more than I need myself. Take what’s yours.
. . . . . . .
My knife in your stomach is like an antenna. If I pull it in the right direction, if I’m forceful and concentrate, I can make your tendons contract and your muscles shake, as though there were some inhuman signal you’re only now capable of picking up. I know you’re still alive by the difficult, uneven breaths bubbling from your nose, but it doesn’t really matter. You’re only a prop now. I wish that you could see yourself, totally vacant and flyblown. You’d be so ashamed, totally exposed, disgusting, cold. I give the knife one more hard lateral pull and watch your chest, divoted and wet, struggle to inflate under the pressure of my palms. You’re so ugly. I’m enthralled. I imagine us here for eternity, drifting liminally around death. I press my ear against the last dry spot and lay there until I’m sure I’m only hearing echoes of myself from within you.
. . . . . . .
My cock is slick with blood and salia. I can feel you reaching for it through my skin. My body is numb. I’m disappearing. Your pleasure and the pilot light are the last things that I taste.
. . . . . . .
The matches and poison are in a silk box above the refrigerator, the kind you might use to hold a parting gift from a secret friend. The top is black with dust, the embroidered surface pulled dark by a cobweb suspended between the wall and coffee cans. Hidden in midmorning shadows, the box seems impossibly small, but the knowing tilts of our heads each time it crosses our vision reveal its incredible weight. Our house was built around the box. It drags us and dictates our movement. It has become us.
The floor of the kitchen is spit down the middle by a winding, crooked fissure, a spot where the limestone underneath the foundation has dissolved under our burden. We used to lay down there beside ourselves and dream out loud, hands held together to join the two halves of the room, shining in the effluent reflection of the plastic floor. I slept underneath you and whispered your name into your breast. You kissed my body and measured your hands with my lips. Trapped underneath your legs, I praise your soul and imagine it tearing me apart.
. . . . . . .
Cat piss in urine light, wrenching black and fourth in your bones and breaking. Bloody toilet shotgun shack, howl rose year hearts is a rose blooding sideways on the oven mirror, the cleanest wall in the fucking world. Stab, thrust, fingerfuck. Still that cock spurts yellow pollen boiling over onto itself. Oh rose thou art sick she seams.
. . . . . . .
Our bodies are ashes on the clef, limbs curling out in delicate gray fractal shapes, two mounds in one piece on a dead frame where the walls have fallen in with the ceiling. Our bodies shimmer like suspended mercury in the dead heat and winter air, hidden in reflected light. Everything we own is black and dust. One day, the wind will blow and our lives will scatter out into space, a thousand dreams in little pieces, each particle indistinguishable from the rest.
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2019