The Devastating Blue

pale eyes of a murdered boy

Long shadow of naked woman becoming man with green skin.

The velvet surrounds us, keeps us.

Two bodies in the dark. The only light seeps from snowy television and cracked bathroom door. Fever pitch of dreams and mirrors. I separate from her in the liminal and drift below ground to hunt blind silverfish, bony creatures that are more frog than fish but taste of spider.

Other travelers pass in the dark and I offer to trade my silverfish if they can answer a riddle.

What is the shadow with green skin that is not man, not woman.

The mind wanders, as it will.

At one point there was a digital clock in this room.

It gave off fine green numbers that floated in the dark like fireflies until the clock met with sudden misfortune.

Jude took it apart in a cocaine fury several hours or days ago and now there are bits and pieces of clock everywhere on the floor like plastic bread crumbs scattered for terrible birds.

Because it was humming, she said. Humming.

My internal clock says this is morning and backs it up with the big morning dick that comes out of nowhere, aimless and discontent. The hard unbowed dick that never heard a bad idea.

The dick that wants a piece of chocolate cake and won’t be fucked with.

Jude is asleep however. Or pretending to be.

I grope through tangle of sheets to find a tube of lubricant originally designed for the slippery purpose of getting astronauts in and out of their spacesuits.

To my mind space travel is an accurate but gruesome metaphor for fucking.

There is no air pressure in space, no gravity.

For one breathless moment you’re a feather in the void, the ghost on holiday.

Dead weight of soul and ego cast adrift you are nothing but blood.

Then you achieve orgasm.

Then notice the tiny hole in your spacesuit now your guts are spilling out of your ears like pudding.

Curious George. It all goes back to the man in the yellow hat.

Jude pushes two fingers into my mouth and tells me to shut up.

Her fingers taste of salt.

Nibble and suck at them and the bed heaves.

Jude is on her knees, breathing like a fighter.

Her shadow bends as if to kiss me, to drink from my lips. Her hands find my throat. I tell myself not to fight and abruptly she does kiss me long and deep and the taste of her mouth is like chewing rose petals sweet with mint and poison.

I want to kiss her again but she dodges away and now her cool hand slithers over my ribs across my belly and down. I try not to think of monkeys and in another breath I’m inside her.

Arms and legs thrashing. The hammer of blood and so on.

It’s okay, she says. I’m right here.

But I can’t see you.

Violence and whispered apologies. Detachment of self. The mind’s eye wanders adrift, as if searching for something never seen, something that hides in the dark under bone.

What’s wrong with my eyes.

Hush baby. Nothing is wrong with your eyes.

How long?

How long what?

How long have we been crashing around in the dark.

Two days, she says. Maybe three.

Jude and I have returned effortlessly to form.

The skin between us is destroyed, unrecognized.

Dead and dying tissue that tastes of the other. Visible wounds and still forming scars that move from one to the other and back.

There’s a nasty gash down my right shoulder in the shape of California gouged by Jude with the tip of a corkscrew.

The wound is worse than she intended.

Oozing and slow to heal and soon it will be impossible to lift my arm. And perhaps it was not Jude who made the cut. Perhaps was inflicted on self. I remember how awkward, how unlike the cut of a knife. The flesh unyielding, slow to give. And it happened not long ago because an echo of the pain lingers in my arm now even though the skin appears to be smooth and good as new, the wound is gone without trace but this is not possible and I fear for Jude, I worry for the body that moves with me now as if through water.

I have mistaken her breathing for my own and it seems that she pushes me along even as I push at her and I have the idea neither of us can swim and if one us fails to push then both will drown. I am aware too that I should stop thinking, that conscious thought will surely fuck things up between us but I am worried about her shoulder, I want to examine her lovely wings for a wound in the shape of California and already I’m losing her and now she swims ahead and it appears that if anyone is going to drown it will be me.

Arms and legs thrashing. The hammer of blood.

I’m coming, says Jude.

And holds her breath. Orgasm is brief, shuddering nonviolent.

What color?

You remembered.

How could I forget.

Jude comes in colors. Trembling blond orgasms that piss her off. Rare pink orgasms that never end. Dark red orgasms that fill her with guilt and perfect orgasms black as fresh turned earth. The ghost grey orgasms may or may not cause her to weep. Orgasms the color of bruised skin, orgasms that fade from purple to yellow and remain visible for days.

What color, I say.

Devastating blue.

Hmm which blue is that.

The pale eyes of a murdered boy.

Nice.

Jude shrugs. Your eyes are brown.

/fade

*from Hell’s Half Acre, originally published in Nerve.

*lost in translation was a side rant about the man in the yellow hat surely being a pedophile.