they laughed, they took a bite out of his shoulder, chewed on it, thought it over. they spat it back in his face. not enough, they said, you’re worthless, you’re spittle after a meal. you’re our urine after we take a shit. you’re the cum we forget to wipe off that dries down the length of our thighs.

they took turns, they tickled him until he bled, until snot came out of his nose in thick drabs of bloody mucus. he cries, they said, look, he cries like a monkey without his banana. they ran a nail along his scrotum, a testicle bled out. just like a monkey, they said and with a thin pinky fished out the other one. they skinned his penis to dab their mouths.

and when they began to separate the ribs off his spine, plucking them as they went along, as if they were listening for a tune, he was relieved that the choice had been his, that whatever laid ahead the second after they reached over and pierced his sternum, was his and his alone.

bile and suicide, she said, i feel like bile and suicide.

driven to a point where it becomes blind hate, blind desire, blind rage. looking for blinding time, to be struck across the eyes, blinded, to be what she sees, to be what you see when she looks at me. how marvelous, how beautiful, how utterly disgusting.

i am the broken window that shatters each view, provides no warmth, keeps nothing out, cuts anything that tries to leave.

and there another scar she has traced, another scorched eyelid. i can erase everything but i am too greedy, too hungry, too nostalgic. i want circuits for memory to never forget her taste, her breast, her laughter. i can fuck your mind as much as you want me to but in the end, i need to remember when you go away and leave me with nothing. i need to remember who i was and who you made me be.

she looked at me as though i was the owner of wounded animals

he said to me, can you survive this? you must be sure.

and i laughed and thought him a fool. sure, of course i can or i wouldn’t be here.

he leaned back, almost shocked, somewhat disappointed. too soon, he muttered, too soon. you really have no idea what is being risked here.

come on, i was annoyed, what the fuck do you care? what is there to think about? i’m here, right? obviously i don’t give a fuck one way or the other.

ah, he leaned forward, wild eyed, finger pointing, that’s exactly the point, if you are risking nothing then there’s no point.

i know, growling now, exactly what i am risking and i don’t give a shit one way or the other. i am done here. this city holds nothing further for me. i’ve bled them all dry and they’re hunting. do you understand? they’re fucking hunting and i’m done if i don’t do this. i spat to my left. can i survive this? can i survive this? i locked eyes with him. either i survive this or i don’t survive at all.

fine, fine. he leaned back again, nodding off, slow chin movements, this we can work with. that is a place where we can begin.

oh fuck, where do we go with this?

he walks into a bar and he’s already quite drunk but she doesn’t know it yet. he’s on the tail end of it so it can go either way. she tosses a beer coaster in front of him and asks what he likes. he says he likes the ambiance. he says he’d like a couples of millions. she more or less thinks that he’s an asshole. he orders his drink, she brings it to him, he tries to chat her up, what do you do?
you’re looking at it, she replies. no, c’mon, i mean for real, in your real life, he insists. doesn’t get any more real than this, she says and serves up another draft to another asshole who more or less is the same like every other asshole that comes here.
little does she know however that he’s seen her eyes and he’s trapped into thinking about how to trap those eyes again in his vision. there’s something about them other than their color, something about the edge of her voice, something hiding, something being hidden. she has sparkling eyes sure, who doesn’t when you’re half in the bag, but something about the smile that said, i can no longer be hurt, i’ve been wounded enough and i will not hurt you.
but he decides to say nothing because he knows she’ll talk to him first. it’s the nature of bars and their keepers, eventually they’ll have to check up on you and unless you’re sputtering mad or falling over, they’ll chat for the briefest of minutes to get the next drink out. the trick is to get enough of it down to get her to come his way often enough without getting completely smashed in the process.
what he doesn’t know is that although she thinks of every asshole who stumbles in here at 2 in the morning as an asshole, she sees something wild and dangerous in him although to be honest he appears completely harmless. she thinks, yeah, ok, maybe a little tongue here, let him feel me up a bit, it’s been a while, i’m bored, it goes on. but there’s something there that she recognizes and immediately dismisses but looks over again at his glass, waiting for it to be just this shy of empty.
so when she does finally mosey on over to him to set up another round, he asks for shots as well and insists she has one with him. and another and another. before you know it, the handfull of assholes in a bar at 3am are all doing shots. the buy-backs are at an even keel, so he doesn’t mind. especially if she keeps smiling like that, like right now, even when she notices he’s looking and she immediately stashes it away like nothing happened.
despite all this there’s something to be said for what comes later. the courtship, so quick and feral, seemed impossibly slow for the both of them. every random bit out of her mouth seemed to have fallen out of his. there was something kinky and wild but willing about the way they went at each other. they had similar horror stories about families and they liked movies that were both serious and intellectual, but also gory and smut ridden. they had a taste for dirt because neither one of them thought themselves entirely clean.
and when she laughed it sounded like it was long in coming, breaking a surface that was far too peaceful for too long.
it had been one morning fairly well into it that while talking about something at work, he grabbed a swig of vodka off his mini bar in his mini apartment in the big ridiculous city well before noon, only an hour or two after they had woken up. she thought it completely off kilter and his response was, honey, you don’t know how this for me is the most natural thing to do.
it was not as if she did not have problems of her own, like being vulnerable but she had no problem being naked. instead she spoke quickly and in abrupt half sentences that when he tried to catch them she feinted and said she said nothing at all. she knew could tell him anything but each thing was one thing more he had on her and she felt she had no handle on him whatsoever.
she thought she could keep it frivolous, he knew he was a disaster for her.
and to say at this point there’s an end to this story is as pointless as determining whether or not she will leave him or he will betray her. around and around it goes, people careening off each other, splintering bits, hurling themselves to make something new. it happens all the time, we bleed all over, until we’re stains on someone else’s mirror. until we’re something they are trying to get rid of constantly until we’re gone, until they see nothing at all.
but she asks him, what if the reflection is the stain?