Remittance Girl's Blog, page 9

Entanglement: Shaken

[image error]The night with the sisters haunted Joaquin. What sane, heterosexual man doesn’t fantasize about having two beautiful sisters at once? The warm, busy tongues on his cock, the layered landscape of breasts and buttocks, shoulders and thighs. The pleasure of violent and unmeasured thrusts into dense flesh so perfectly built to take them. That first orgasm so desperate to be unleashed that its initial pulse pushed his cum in an arched trail over Sonia’s body and a meter onto the prim, grey hotel room carpet beyond. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d come like that. Those moments he played back to a soundtrack of sighs and moans and guttural profanities choked out in his mother tongue. He retrieved each of those outtakes of pornographic perfection during his morning wanks in the shower. Instead of fading with use, the memories grew more vivid with each revisitation.

But there were other lingering symptoms, like the faint bruising of a week-old fistfight or a stumble through a dark and crowded room. That feeling of being outside, held at a distance despite all the apparent shedding of clothes and baring of skin and desire. In all that night, he couldn’t recall a single moment of real intimacy. Not a kiss or a spasm, not a caress or look to pull him through the wet webbing of flesh and into the warmth of belonging. This bothered him. Not because of its absence but because he felt its lack with such clarity. Whores, he thought with more bitterness than he cared to admit. Just whores. And even as he thought it, he knew he used the word as a shield against their subtle rejection.

He asked about them around the expat bars. Oh yes, various men had said in varying degrees of intoxication, the sisters. Those sisters. But no one knew who they were or where they lived or whether they were even still in town.

* * *

The annual Aussie Ball was an event no diplomat in Saigon could avoid. Unimaginatively themed and offensively over-priced, Joaquin was informed by official memo that every middle and senior official of the consulate was expected to attend.

He pulled on the only formal, black suit he had. Despite recent dry-cleaning, the chemicals didn’t mask the faint smell of mildew. His tight, black oxfords pinched his feet, as if living in the constant humidity had swollen them a size larger. He shaved with as much care as was possible in the soggy, evening heat, gelled his hair into a semblance of Sean Connery neatness and took a taxi down to the New World Hotel.

The ballroom was decked out in flags and dot-matrix posters for a night of James Bond retrospectives. Vodka martinis, shaken not stirred – but mightily watered down – were being borne on large silver trays around the foyer. Joaquin spotted at least five poorly executed Miss Moneypennies, several Miss Goodthighs, and one very convincing Plenty O’Toole.

Predictably, most of the men had come dressed as James Bond. It was just so easy to pull off. He did notice the Russian Consul General had opted to buck the trend, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with SHMERSH printed in large black letters. Joaquin wondered whether the man had managed to emerge from his usual alcoholic haze to appreciate the irony of his costume.

He milled around, murmuring to colleagues, perching and removing bland, official smiles for his corresponding numbers at other consulates, sipping watery cocktails, until Paco arrived late and with wife in tow, bad-tempered and impatient to see the end of the evening. His wife, Maria Cristina, was a rake thin Barcelonan who constantly complained about the pollution, the heat and the lack of hygiene at local restaurants. She’d been an assistant curator at some museum before coming to Saigon and had never forgiven Paco for derailing her career.

By the time Joaquin could extract himself from playing witness to a viciously whispered, escalating marital squabble, the lights in the ballroom had been dimmed and he made his way between the numbered tables to his designated seat. The music was already blaring, and the first unremarkable course was being dished up. It wasn’t until he’d seated himself and had a plate of prawns swimming in something foul-smelling placed before him that he looked up, and across at his table-mates.

There were the two Colombianas, flashing their unnaturally white teeth in his direction through the artificial gloom, with a tall, broad-shouldered man of approximately his own age seated between them. Joaquin experienced a moment of something akin to vertigo. Identically shaped face, same dark eyes,  same high, almost swollen cheekbones. The male who sat between Sonia and Marta was a mascuilinized replica of two women. He had to be their brother.

There was no chance of conversation over the cacophony of James Bond Theme Songs, badly rendered by a succession of self-important expats. But each girl, in her turn, waggled a set of ostentatiously ringed and perfectly manicured fingers at him. Once the hotel staff had cleared the main course, he felt a hand on his shoulder and a seductive growl in his ear.

“We’re going to smoke some weed outside. Come with us.”

Night Nurse

[image error]I loved a man whose wounds gaped so wide no sutures could close them. So deep that poison forever festered in their hollows, distilled in those dark crevasses. Some recent, some very old, and so many that he spent his time counting them, his dreadful possessions. He gathered them together and forged from them bright armor, with fever for its shine, secured with the outrage of his nerves and the sinews of his jaw.

For years, I worked away at the metal carapace. I noted each wound and gave each its due. Named them in my own tongue, and wept over them. I worked to close them, to knit them, to pour cleansing daylight into those festering caves. I was a true and patient nurse.

And then I saw a new wound made – barbaric and infinitely deep, right before my eyes. I saw the sword that cut into the form, saw its bright blood well, its gaping meat split wide. I did not step back horrified. I did what I have always done: staunched as best I could, kept faithful vigil, gave the comfort I could give.

There are a thousand poignant stories of patients who fall in love with their nurses, and of nurses who fall in love with their charges. Don’t believe them, you clever young thing of tender heart. They are lies told to keep the stupid and the tired at their posts.

Take advice from this old and disillusioned thing: once you take up the basin and the sponge, you become the night nurse always and forever. You will not sleep, your feet will make no sound upon the corridor of another’s heart, your ministering hands will always come back empty into your lap. You will only exist when you are required.

And if you, sister, in your turn, are wounded, or when the infection finds in you a new host, no one will sit vigil over you, or wipe your brow. Night nurses die at dawn.

Pick another profession.

Entanglement: Familiar Curves

[image error]For months after Joaquin Ibañez was posted to Saigon as economic attaché, he had no eyes for Western women. The exotic, humid paradise was swarming with motorbikes, ghosts and tiny Asian sylphs. They possessed none of the attributes he’d grown up thinking of as womanly. No hips, no ass, and tits so small he sometimes felt vaguely taboo when he covered one with this mouth. Its alienness was exhilarating.

As much as his education forced him to acknowledge that fucking the natives was both offensively colonial and frowned upon by the consulate, it was, in those first few months, beyond his power to abstain. It took time to grow jaded about the pussy on offer; it took experience to realize that, although not quite as transactional as prostitution, it was never as casual or as free as it first appeared. Saigonese women didn’t view mutual orgasms as fair recompense for their sexual favours; they wanted money, gifts, status and, most especially, relationships.

Not that Joaquin was a heartless bastard; he fully expected to settle down with a nice girl some day. But he was fairly certain those kind of relationships could not be formed without a good conversation about shared interests over breakfast, and that was not on offer. He nursed his hangovers with black coffee and the Vietnamese girls sipped tea and texted in silence. Their lightning fast fingers skittering over the screens of their slick, shiny mobile phones.

He had grown tired of that, and curiously lonely. The last memorable evening he could recall was a boisterous, drunken argument about globalization with an obese, middle-aged Australian woman in a backpacker bar. It was so vibrant, so energizing, he’d considered taking her back to her hotel and fucking her. But between the eight beers and her almost total lack of physical attractiveness, he’d decided that an erection was probably not on the cards.

So, it was with reluctance that Joaquin agreed to accompany his co-worker, Paco, to the grand opening of some pseudo-salsa bar recently established in the basement of the old opera house. They availed themselves of the complimentary tequila shooters offered at the door by Asian mini-babes dressed like porn cowgirls, and made their way inside the cave-like club. The smell of new paint, adhesive and cigarettes only partially masked the underlying stink of damp concrete. They found an empty black leather banquette at the side of the dance floor and snagged two more shooters.

“Damn, I wish I could salsa.” Paco shouted over the music.

“We’re Spaniards. We don’t salsa.”

“I can’t even do a fucking Sevillana.”

“Me neither. Why the hell did you bring me here?”

Paco pointed towards the lit-up dance area. “To feast your eyes on that.”

Almost dead centre on the floor, two identically dressed Latinas were dancing together. Joaquin had no idea what style of dance it was – fairly certain it wasn’t salsa. It mostly involved them humping each other’s thighs.

“Coño,” said Joaquin.

Paco shook his head. “De puta madre,” he muttered.

It wasn’t just that they were smokingly hot, or eerily identical, or that they were rubbing their crotches against each other’s hips in time to the beat; it was the shape of them. God, they had hips – wide, strong hips. And voluptuous, meaty asses that rolled as they moved. Their matching red dresses were tight, sleeveless and cut low to flaunt gloriously generous tits. They danced and their flesh moved with them.

He knew exactly what they’d smell like, what their sweat would taste like, what a handful of that ass would feel like: safe and familiar and true. A jagged pang of homesickness ripped through him.

“Screw the free tequila. I want some of that.”

Paco swept his hand towards the two women. “Go get it.”

“There’s enough for both of us,” said Joaquin. Even as he spoke, he was embarrassed by the adolescent fantasies brewing in his brain. Fuck it, he thought.

Paco liberated another shot glass of tequila off a passing tray, downed it and grimaced. “Fuck no. My wife would kill me.”

“More for me, then.” Joaquin edged his way around the table and set off under the glare of the dance floor lights.

* * *

Marta and Sonia, Joaquin found out, weren’t exactly identical twins. The Colombian sisters were born a year apart and, after an increasingly flirtatious three way conversation, lubricated with more tequila shooters than Joaquin could remember, he figured out that Sonia was the one with the mole just above the left corner of her mouth. Marta was the one with the kidney shaped birthmark on her inner thigh.

He noticed it when, after stumbling into a room at the Caravelle, and getting Sonia on all fours, he pushed himself between the burnished globes of her generous ass, watched as she spread Marta’s legs and moan into the dark, matted wetness of her sister’s cunt.

Despite the alcohol, his cock didn’t fail him. They smelled and tasted exactly as he’d fantasized they would. It was a relief to be physical with bodies that didn’t seem like they’d break under his thrusts, sweet to hear obscenities uttered in his mother tongue, with the growl and rasp of women who were hungry for pleasure and nothing else. Glorious to watch the two of them race tongues up the sides of his shaft and stage mock battles over who got to swallow him whole.

Joaquin had had a threesome before, but never with sisters. The incestuousness of it drove his hunger even harder than the pleasure of indulging in familiar flesh, of not being exactly sure which one he was impaling until he kissed lips and felt for Marta’s tell-tale mole.

They did this often, that much he understood. The more he thought about it, the stranger it felt. Or perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, the burned-out alcohol tainting his blood, or their curious familiarity with each other’s bodies. But slowly, he felt edged out, and subtly exiled to the position of a convenient cock. The last time he came, with Marta riding him and her sister sitting on his face, he felt curiously distant to it all. There was a union between them he was not invited into.

He never caught their last name, or why they were in Saigon, and they didn’t stay for breakfast.

Something More Than You

[image error]He made of her a thing. Not anything as superficially offensive as a pornographic thing – far worse. Something without even the solidity of image, without even the slippery worm of words. And yet he did not make her nothing because he would not let her go.

He would not let go of her hair.  Not when her eyes began to stream,  not when her nose began to run, not when she gagged and gagged and was sure she’d bring her lunch up all over his groin. Only when something inside her gave way, and she no longer felt responsible for keeping her lunch down, did he let her go.

He let her go because the room was too close. She could not sleep in his embrace, could not pull enough oxygen from the air he’d breathed. Love pressed on her chest even as her hips arched upwards, tricking his fingers deeper. Until her cunt had eaten his wedding ring and she could taste metal through the bloody membrane of her chewed-up cheeks and swallowed the chalky impossibility of it all.

I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a—I mutilate you.

J. Lacan, “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”

On the Cliff of the Moment

And then I knew,

Like a resigned nod

that prompts the stately closing

of massive doors upon some fictive scene.

And then I knew

that delusions of proximity

are like delusions of grandeur, only

twice as laughable and five times as distant.

And then I knew.

despite saying I was cool with all of it,

I could do without everything but hope,

and that was not on offer.

I understood the measure

you would take from me

and it was not enough.

 

Unmanned – Day Seven of the 10 Days of Flash Challenge

This is Day Seven of Leone Ross’ 10 Days of Flash Challenge, running on her Facebook page. Do go have a look at what’s going on there. Lots of fun. Great for honing your writing skills.

Today’s challenge was a super short 55 word flash piece in response to a photograph. There are five to choose from. Being politically incorrect and having completely run out of the milk of human kindness this morning, I chose this one:

[image error]

“Hold on. Are you…”

“Yes.”

“I asked for a headless horseman. That was my fantasy! Not…”

“All the horsemen were taken. Sorry.”

“So, I get a headless homeless man instead?”

“’Fraid so. Again, DreamMaker Corporation™ apologizes.”

“What the fuck?”

“Just-in-time Inventory Management. It’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

“But… You do have a cock, right?”

Untitled – Day Six of the 10 Days of Flash Challenge

We’re on Day 6 of Leone Ross‘ very helpful 10 Days of Flash Challenge. Write at least six short flashers – one to ten lines each. The stories all have to be about difficult ‘intimates’ in a single character’s life. Write at least six short flashers – one to ten lines each. It can have a basis in reality, but it needs to be exaggerated, fictionalized.

This one, I have to admit, was very hard for me.  I’m not sure I was prepared to write this, but it’s here anyway. If you read my writing on this blog, you’ll see tiny fragments of other stories peaking through in this. I’m too close to this to title it.

_______

He loved me then. Even through the milky veil of age, I can see it in that photograph. His skeletal, angular body is hunched over me like a protective cage of bones.  I’m balanced on his knee – chubby and mostly toothless – in a shit-smeared diaper, but he doesn’t care.

_______

He comes in with a bowl of steaming water reeking of Vick’s, and Sheba the bulldog at his heels.

“Come on, he says,” sitting on my bed and laying the basin between us. “We’re going to breathe this in.”

I can hardly inhale. My chest hurts so much, my ears ache. I try to refuse, I have no voice to do it with.  Beneath the pink blanket, over the vapors, he is reading aloud, lost in the words, and I have disappeared: “…down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.”

_______

“I can’t,” I whine.

“You can,” he says.

On the flat, scrubby tabletop of the hill, I’ve bled all over his white tennis shorts.  All around us there are piles of stones, balanced neatly on top of each other. And between each stone, a note.  Littered around us are the balled up sheets I’ve wasted, finding myself without words. He rips another page out of the little spiral-bound notebook and thrusts the blank page at me.

“Write something that matters,” he says.

_______

Sunday breakfast. Around the table, we rustle newspapers and eat toast.

“I’m going to go on the pill,” I say.

He doesn’t look up. “Why? You’re only sixteen.”

“Because I want to have sex with him.”

“You’re a fucking whore.”

Silent until then, my mother stands up, turns, and backhands him so hard, he falls of his chair.

_______

“I didn’t say you couldn’t live here,” he shouts.

I look at my mother, but she’s mute.

“Yeah, right.” I’m opening the door, pulling my coat on.

He gets up and grabs my arm, even through the wool, I know his bony fingers are going to leave marks.

“How the hell did I make such a stupid daughter?”

But now I’m a match head. In that brief moment it has been struck, before it flares, and he knows it. He lets go.  “Never, ever touch me again.”

_______

He’s there, looking older and frail, when I clear customs at the airport. He smiles, wraps an arm around me, and kisses my forehead. “Good lord, you’re fat,” he says.

“Nice to see you, too, Dad.”

The civility only lasted part way through our first dinner.  I blame Oliver Stone. I should have never brought up that movie.

Back at his apartment, I’m crawling into bed in his spare room. It’s full of junk. Empty picture frames and stringless tennis rackets, unwired lamps, broken crockery, and towers of paperback books.

He’s yelling at me through the locked door. “The whole John F. Kennedy thing was a load of crap. It’s all conspiracy theory crap.”

“Sure it was,” I yell back.

I slip on my headphones and press the play button on the Walkman, turning the volume up as high as it will go.  On the tape, Richard Grant continues his narration of “Enduring Love” but I can still hear the yelling. So I dry-swallow an Ambien.

_______

“Hello?”

The line is scratchy. It’s 2014, how can the telephone line still sound so bad?

“Hello, Dad.” It’s all I can think to say. I feel fear and an almost blinding wave of nausea.

“I got your book.”

“You did? Oh, good.”

“Yes, it arrived yesterday.” He’s yelling over the line, like he’s playing the part of a good father to an audience sitting too far away.

I sent it by courier over a month ago. He signed for it two days later. I checked online. “Excellent. I’m glad you got it.”

“They never bombed Malaga, you know. You got that detail wrong.”

“Oh, dear.”

He launches into a detailed account of that particular phase of the Spanish Civil war, but I tune him out.  Instead, I indulge in a long, silent bout of self-castigation for sending him the book.

_______

“Look who the cat coughed up,” says the lover I’ve ignored for too long. But he can see I’m on the verge of tears. “Come in.”

Beyond the windows of his flat, the car tires hiss on the wet afternoon street. “Want some tea?” he asks.

“No.”

“What do you want?”

“Hurt me.” I can’t look him in the eye. I’ve never actually ever asked for it before, but I’m desperate. “Hurt me, and then fuck me.”

“What should I punish you for?”

“For hubris.”

My Man’s Hands and Pilar’s Knees – Day Five of the 10 Days of Flash Challenge

If you’re interested in joining the challenge, take yourself over to Leone Ross’ Facebook Page, “like’ the challenge and go for it!

Today’s challenge was two short flash pieces of 250 words each, on body parts. One above the waist, and one below it.

1. My Man’s Hands

“If you want to love me, baby, you’re gonna need his hands,” I said to the fine young man at the truck stop on Route 35, just south of Hillsboro.

He laughed and kissed me, whispered all the nasty things he wanted to do to me. So I took him on home.

“My man’s palms were so wide. I could plant my face in one, inhale the toil on his skin and run my tongue down his deep, gritty creases. With lines like that, I thought for sure he’d live forever. The backs were torn up from work. All those tendons and veins covered in dark brown skin. Wetback brown, he called it, and I’d say: come here, lover. I’ll make it better.”

“Big, long fingers, calloused and scarred. Sweet enough for sucking and rough enough for fucking. Smart enough to make me dance against the sheets.  He could read my soul with just the tips,” I said, skittering mine over the boy’s pretty face.

He moaned.

“Jesus, I’m so lonesome for those fingers,” I said. I opened the cupboard, stood on tiptoes to reach the big glass jar, and brought it down. The boy at my kitchen table, knees tied to the legs and arms pinned to the bleached pine surface, fisted his hands and whimpered against the gag.

“So, if you wanna be my man, darlin’, you have to wear his hands.”

I settled the jar on the table and turned to look for a good sharp knife.

2. Pilar’s Knees

When Pilar was young, her knees were happy. Sunbrowned and solid below her firm, thick thighs and her blue summer skirt, knees that said hello as she strolled past the boys on the benches along the Paseo.

They got dry when she helped her father in the garden, but the soil made them smile. The little things in the red clay tickled them. Green things grew around them, sap stained them, but it all washed off.

Devout knees that did penance every Thursday. They made their way from the door of the Nuestra Senora Del Carmen up to the altar. She’d counted the distance in Hail Marys – eighteen of them. Pilar wanted so much to be good.

When Pilar married, she did her duty. She scrubbed floors and lay compliant in her husband’s bed. Carlos was a good man, if a little cold. A hard worker until a container crushed him at the docks.  Just three days later, Pilar gave birth to her little girl. She’d fixed her red-rimmed eyes on her swollen knees and pushed her beautiful Elena out.

After that, Pilar prayed in vain. The wooden kneeler bit into her bones, reminding her that life was suffering.  Pilar’s knees got sad. One day, in the mirror, she noticed they were frowning. Being good hadn’t helped at all.

So she found herself a man who’d tug up her black skirt, push her legs up around her ears, and fuck her until toes curled and her knees smiled again.

Luck and the Truck – Day Four of the 10 Days of Flash Challenge

I’m participating in Leone Ross’ wonderful 10 days of Flash challenge on Facebook. She sets a new, quite difficult challenge each day.

Today’s challenge was to take a single event, but vary the setting, the characters, the POV and the tone five ways. Unfortunately, my inability to follow instructions properly is at play, and I wrote six.

Luck & the Truck

1. 

The taxi’s air-conditioning gasps out a tepid breeze and the stink of fertile rot.  The world outside the car, on Monivong Boulevard, is under water.  Rain has turned the daylight green and murky and brought the traffic to a standstill.  A woman in the back seat watches through the downpour as a group of drenched and bare-chested boys pull an old man out of the cab of a tumbledown truck.  He flails and shouts but the rain hammering the roof of the taxi and the protests of the air conditioner drown out his cries.  The young men pull him to the rubbish strewn sidewalk and begin to beat him with thick wooden sticks until he collapses to his knees, then onto his side, and curls up under the blows. The water rivering down the windscreen makes a surreal soup of the brutality. Green and grey watercoloured violence. The woman in the taxi has never seen this kind of violence before, but she is sure, when the old man has stopped moving, stopped trying to crawl away, and given up trying to cover his head with his arms, that he’s dead.

2.

Four orders of noodle soup and three iced green teas.  The thin plastic wrap covering her food tray flaps open in the wind that blows up with the downpour.  Once she’s done with this last delivery, she can go home, curl back up on the pile of soft purple fabric, and go back to her dream of being a beautiful princess in a Korean soap opera. Halfway across the road, Socheata stops and fumbles to re-cover the food, trying to keep the rain out of the bowls of soup. Princesses, she thinks, don’t have to do this sort of stuff.

3.

The mangoes are bad this year. The rains have come too soon. They’re watery and not sweet.  The plump woman at the roadside fruit stall gnaws on a hangnail, looks down at the produce in front of her, and reorders the neat pyramid of oblong fruits, perching the rosiest ones on the top.  When the rain starts, she sighs, sits back and cools herself with her ragged paper hand fan. There’ll be no customers until this is over.  The fruit seller’s stomach grumbles. Bicycle riders take shelter under the eaves of crumbling nearby buildings. Passing cars plow through puddles, throwing up sprays of gutter water.  The screech and slew of rubber on wet road make her look up just in time to watch her lunch and the delivery girl disappear under the grill of a truck.

4. 

Mrs. Seng curses softly as the needle in her machine jams and snaps on the zipper she’s trying to sew into a skirt.  Next door, at the noodle shop, Mrs. Keo calls over, but Socheata has fallen asleep in the noonday heat on a pile of fabric on the floor.

“Wake up, flower,” Mrs. Seng calls to her daughter.  “It’s almost lunch time.”

The girl stirs and blinks up at her mother.  “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“School costs money, love. Go on. If you hurry, you can be finished in an hour. Then we’ll have some tea and pork buns.”

4. (Again, because I can’t count to five, apparently)

Mr. Lim had painted sutras in silver on the roof of the cab. He had hung a soapstone Buddha off the rear view mirror.  He even taken to buying a fresh jasmine string every morning, and twining it around the Buddha pendant, but nothing really helped. Sometimes the truck started, and sometimes it didn’t. That was the way of things. Like his hip that felt fine some days and locked up on others.  They were both old.  He’d pulled the metal Peugeot emblem off the grill, and forced himself to forget all the French he knew.  The trick had worked. They’d both survived the dark times. So, if he walked with a limp on occasion, and the old truck whimpered and refused to turn over from time to time, it was only to be expected.

But this morning Mr. Lim felt no pain and the truck started on the first try. They were headed out of Phnom Penh, to a depot on the outside of town, to pick up a load of durian when the rain began.  He swore and flicked the switch to turn on the windshield wipers, but nothing happened. He tried again, back and forth, not fast, but coaxingly.

“Come on, you old bitch. Stop being so cranky.” But the truck was feeling stubborn.

The dark little figure ahead of him was there as he looked up. Mr. Lim stomped on the brake so hard he was sure his foot would plunge through the floorboard. He felt the tires grab, then slide, then grab again. But it was too late.

5.

Keo leans forward on the cafe’s green plastic stool and plunges the long-handled spoon into his iced coffee repeatedly.  The heat is making his bad temper worse.  Four days and no work. His friends, Saron and Toto are in the same boat. This morning, like every other morning, they turned up at the labour exchange too late. Boys who’d got there sooner had snapped up the day’s construction work. They sip coffees, share cigarettes and bitch about their bad luck as the heat swells and the sweat trickles down their bare, brown backs.

He’s ashamed he can’t bring home some money to his mother. Even his little sister, Socheata, earns something.  And, as if to compound his shame, he spots her, hurrying down the other side of Monivong Boulevard, with a tray of food perched on her shoulder.  Brownnosing little bitch, he thinks.  So good at school, his mother’s little pet. As if it’s going to make any difference. She’ll probably grow up to be a whore.

He follows her lithe little figure as the rain begins, watching it soak her long, black hair as she steps into the road.

A Good Man is Dead.

A good man is dead. And it feels like there should be some mechanism by which I can scream that at the sky loud enough to tear the universe apart. A good man is dead and everything should stop now. No jokes should be told, no flowers should bloom, no wine drunk except in the pursuit of some respite from the aching sore of its unfairness.

A good man is dead and the world should shut the fuck up and be mute for a while. Colours should bleach to bone. Gulls should drop out of the sky, stopped in flight.

A good man is dead and, for long minutes, I have forgotten how to breathe. I’ve forgotten how to cry; the misery that should rise is trapped somewhere in my skull, it’s taken a wrong turn and can’t find its way to my tear ducts. I’ve resorted to typing nonsense on a screen for fear that if I stop, I will break apart in the stagnant clutch of the moment.

A good man is dead and I am not. A man with beautiful children and a beautiful wife and a life worth living five times over. While I am older, smoke thirty cigarettes a day and think walking is exercise. He loved life and I do not. He lived in his skin and I ignore it. He was kind and smart and the loyalest of friends. How is it that his goodness did not buy him a quiet death in old age? When I have squandered mine?

It happens every day; this obcene imbalance. A good man is dead.