tkuryliw
The harder I scrub, the more you spread. You sink in my pores, unfurl and wrap around my fingers and wrists as I vigorously shake and scrap and tear at my skin in futile attempts to stop the suffocating stick of you from embedding itself in my skin, my tissue, my bones. My fragile arteries betray me and bring your poison to the pulsating meaty organ that resides in my chest- unprotected and waiting. And I watch myself destruct, inside out. I let myself be obliterated into a pile of rotting flesh and burning possibilities. I let you fill me and ruin me. You didn't force yourself in. I let you.
I roll the puckered, wilted lemon between my hand and let the bitter juice trickle down my fingers. It runs down my wrists, wrapping around my arms in tangled, viscous vines.
It's hot. So hot. The humid day bears down on my chest, the air thick with smog the colour of leftover cereal milk. There is no sounds, there is no movement. Even the grass is too hot to do anything but bow down to the sardonic sun, and slowly yellow and rot.
The slam of the bedroom door upstairs startles me from my stupor, and I remember that I'm suppose to be making lemonade. I notice the citric puddle that has begun to accumulate around my bare feet, and quickly drop to my knees to begin cleaning the mess I have made. God, I am disgusting. Smack! I flinch at the sickening sound as my already bruised knees collide against the marble floor in my haste. God, I am disgusting. Scathing shivers ricochets through my knee caps down to my ankles, but I scrub anyhow. Sweat trickles down my forehead in sticky beads, and the fly-aways from my braid cling to my face is silky, blonde clumps as I scrub and scrub and scrub. God, I am disgusting. Scrub, scrub, scrub harder, wash it all away.
It's hot, so hot. I need to make lemonade.
I can hear the steps coming down the hallways steps- soft at first, but louder, almost deafening, as they approach the landing. God, I am disgusting.
"God, you are disgusting."
I know, I know.
I am a bag of potato chips: consistent disappointment.
You’ll find that I’m only half as much as what you bargained for,
payment not equal to this palatable illusion.
Gradual realization-
I am terrible for you.
I was a bad decision.
You didn’t actually want me,
but you thought you did.
No more.
Nothing in exchange but a brief, false sense of satisfaction
and the bitter after-taste of a flavour you thought you liked,
thought you needed.
You never learn.
I am what you crave:
a trick,
a burning hunger for a late night snack of salty regret.
What
a
waste.
Forgive my inconstant mind as it rolls and runs and tumbles away with the idea of the thing that my heart holds on to so tightly. Wait for my shallow conscious to feel guilt and you'll never be satisfied by the remorse I can't feel. It's a precarious thing, to wait for a time where the I isn't separated from the U by the other eleven letters of the alphabet that fill the space between them, but I suppose that is a another cheesy Valentine's card, sitting on a dusty store shelf, over-used and forgotten. It's been a long time coming, and a reality I refuse to accept. But I guess I should get used to the idea: it's not you.
It's always better when we're together.
"This place is dead. Dead and awful. And you are too. A fake. An illusion."
So take you're suede shoe, and try to leave. I hope you don't find the other, that way, perhaps, you don't get very far. Perhaps, you'll turn back in the candy-colored rain, with your sodden left foot, and see me: leaning against the crooked porch door, slanting a smile, in my red dancing dress, waiting. And you'll think, "She ain't never look more alive than right now, right there." You'll take that to you grave. Now who's dead?
I'm dead but not gone.
They found the bullet lodged in her forehead, dead centre. The coroner said if it had been a millimetre higher, the bullet may have only skimmed the frontal lobe, and she may have lived, with only some minor nerve damage. But the marksman was at such close range, it was clear he hadn't intended for her to survive.
He had to have looked her directly in the eyes when he squeezed the trigger to end her life. And he had taped her eye lids back, so she had to look into his as he shot her dead.
He was calling me, over and over again. Five times. Six. Eleven. Twelve. The screen would light up, and the cell phone would rotate with each vibration before the call went to voicemail. Before the screen even had the chance to fade to black, the buzzing would resume and the screen would glow once more, as he tried again and again and again to reach me.
I could have picked up. But I simply watched, and I waited for him to give up. Twenty-five. Thirty-six. Forty-one. Each attempted call I counted, calculating if every redial measured up how much he loved me, or simply a habitual reflex for his thumb to click the several buttons that made up my phone number. Between every call, I counted the number of seconds before the next one. Three seconds. Then four. After a while, it became a whole minute, and then four minutes and twenty-six seconds. Every second longer I felt his hesitation, every second longer I felt his doubt. Each second longer was his indifference.
I was going to pick up on the sixty-seventh ring. I was going to forgive him. I was going to apologize.
I think he knew this, which is why he stopped calling at sixty-six.
You had a tendency to erase everything if you decided you didn't like it. Once, after writing nearly thirty seven pages of a story that had come to you on a whim, you stood up and threw your laptop out the apartment window, and watched it plummet sixteen stories to the pavement. The whole thing was smashed to bits; the hard drive, and the story. Some of your other outbursts were less dramatic- you simply pressed the backspace key, or burned the papers, or erased the sentences that your pencil had so carefully carved out. They were also a rarity. The occurrences were so few, I could easily count them on my hand.
It had never bothered me, to watch you destroy whole manuscripts, entire notebooks, and over priced laptops. You were a writer, you didn't look back, right? No looking back.
Unfortunately, you liked to erase whole people- not just characters, and plot lines- too. You treated them as particles of graphite, left over residue from your pencil. You would brush them off, blow them off, and finally, erase their canvas until it was white, and empty again. And you never looked back.
Please, look back, at me.
He walk along the hallowed rows of the tombstones, hardly hesitating to take the time and read the names of the dead, only softly brushing his fingertips along each mounted grave. Some were so old that they seemed nothing more than moss covered rocks. Others were still fresh and new; soft marble or hard granite with an expensive lustre.
"I used to think God had a plan for us," he said, as he crouched down to run his palm over the upturned earth at one of the graves, "I used to think, that we would 'rise again', as his son did." He stood again, and surveyed he ruins, and what was left of the community cemetery.
"I never thought... that this is what He had in mind..." he half sobbed. He hung his head, and I watch him become enveloped in his own defeat.
All the graves were empty. We knew this, and not because we had cleared the graves of the bodies ourselves.
No.
We knew because we watched the skeletal, maggot infested bodies, climb out of the earth themselves.
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