hemlockandbelladonna
"So when were you going to tell me?" she said, lighting a cigarette--where had she gotten that cigarette?--Jesus, it was like the girl was a magician in disguise whose only trick was to produce infinite packs of Marlboro Lights.
She walked in circles around him, her fingertips resting sweatily on his shoulder. He bit his lip furiously and willed himself to stare at the page in front of him, his cheeks indignant, his eyes hard, and she didn't say anything but kept her hand on him.
"Please don't do that again," she said quietly, her hands folded in her lap. She didn't look scared. Her eyes wore that same mournful, contemplative, tired--laughing?--look they always did.
I need some air, he said to the waitress, and she nodded and jotted something down on her notepad and whisked off. Orange slices, tomato pickles, brittle teeth, and--ah, thank you--a jar of air, and he took it gratefully and smiled, palms caressing his face.
She bit into the peel, its strange zest spilling and popping all over her tongue with its rough ridges--the orange peel's or her tongues? yes--and she sucked her little earth dry and grinned a tangerine grin with bright blue eyes and sunburn hair and swallowed.
So we walked around the quilted marble of the den and sank our teeth into its many corners, and Tom held out his hand and brushed against the jewel-dust air that clung like lint to every edge, and I looked at my own hands as they turned slowly into blue, blue, blue sky.
"Get her on the table," he said in an odd voice, his hands turning over like clockwork claws, clumsy and raw-cut, and she loaded the girl's soft body onto the dining room table. He stood over her hesitantly, his hair falling over his eyes.
"Go away."
She didn't move. It was nighttime, and the sun was watching but not moving to intercept yet, and the moon was bleary and unobservant and wanted to go home and maybe take a nap, or maybe it wanted to cry, but only a little bit and only because it was so tired.
"What?"
"Fifty-three tires," the bank man on the other line repeated. "They were charged to your account last Friday."
"What?" said she again, quite stupidly; perhaps she had forgotten what a tire was. Maybe she was British, and she spelled--spelt--it tyre.
She leaned over, bracing her arms against the desk, and frowned at the topmost paper through the flocks of dark, off-black hair that fell into her eyes. The news had come in that morning. News was always coming in, but this was different.
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