MINIATURES

Night Groom

In the garden, curled within a hedge of silver tipped leaves, she whispered to the dirt, I do, I do, while the moon’s light withered and the fountain croaked dry. Hard to say why she chose the dirt when for months, all the elements of the earth had been courting her: the wind lashed against her window until glass shattered on her floor, bled her feet, burnished her steps with silver and red. Water from the nearby well turned itself to a sludge of black tar that sheathed the hairs of her larynx and choked her tender songs. Even the birds succumbed to madness, rabid for her love. At night, they pitched themselves through her window, scraping their feet on the remaining shards of glass. A furious, lovelorn drove, they swarmed her sleeping body, competing for access to her mouth. The lucky ones perched upon her lip and slowly, with focused ease, the way a butcher sharpens his knife on whetstone, they sawed their wings off against the serrated edges of her teeth. She was a mouth-breather and they loved that. They left their bloodied feathers as gifts beneath her tongue.

Her mother had warned her about empty romantic gestures—but these courtships weren’t empty, they were organic and raw. They were traces of dusk, swollen with beyond. Pricks of the sky’s iron sword. 

The birds made her salivate, the wind made her ache. The tar made her retch and writhe. The dirt offered nothing, but perhaps she liked that. It presented one final, unknowable frontier.

Vessel

Snow fell upon the market, a veil of ash that made the locals appear translucent and unreal. Piercing the gallows, a woman’s voice cried. Come and try the infinite sac! You can put anything inside! 

For months, the soldier had fantasized about such a promise. Out in the fields, beneath the withering sun, there was no such thing as ‘inside.’His skin had welts from the constant exposure, an intricate topography of red. His constant bleeding attracted droves of mosquitos whose electric whines carved passages of madness into his brain. As the soldier trudged past bloated corpses, their faces sunken into the shifting wet fields, his blood surged with envy at how cold the mud must feel to them. He imagined it spilling into their open mouths, its darkness suffocating their screams; or pushing beneath their eyelids, severing consciousness from sight. Through their bodies, the earth folded in on itself. It swallowed and forgave. Whereas light, the soldier thought, is aberrant and grotesque. All that is illumined begs to be contained.

And so, when the woman’s voice called out again—you can put anything inside!—the soldier followed it to a ramshackle booth from which two wrinkled hands jutted out. They held a small, embroidered sac, narrow and long, its mouth dark as the entrance to the barrel of his gun. It shook as if struggling to contain a fugitive snatch of wind. It shook as if furious to learn that it had been feasting upon itself. Try it, the voice said, a mere whisper now. Try it, the mosquitos in his brain seethed.

Fluid Code

I sleep with a radio beneath my head. His voice enters my dreams, caresses my breasts, guides me down a crimson tiled hall. I’m going to leave her, he says. She doesn’t see me like you do. He isn’t talking to me, but in my dreams he is.

On either side of the hallway, there are, obviously, doors. I’m going to throw her out the window. That’ll be the last of her. Behind the doors, my neighbours press their nosy ears. They are jealous of me, this much I know. They’ve never had a man who would kill for their love. So I keep walking, with my head held high, despite the metallic pitch of their sighs. This hallway is long, but our love stretches farther still. We’re doing what we must, this voice and I.

I’ll hammer nails into a baseball bat. I’ll swing underhand, one long slash between her legs. I believe him because I would die without his love. I’ll tie her body to the telephone wires, her ruined breasts swaying like deflated balloons. Yes, I say. Go on, my love. Her teeth will char and fall to the earth. We’ll collect her canines like precious seashells.

Whenever I get tired, his voice reminds me not to stop.  Just hold on a little longer, baby. We’ll be together, I swear. But the floor is sinking. Just hold on. There are great chasms between the tiles that I can hardly leap across. My legs have grown heavy with static. They’ve atrophied, grey with rot, they’ve stopped receiving blood. There is plaster and gristle tangled in my hair. I don’t want to exist in a world where time drapes over us like gauze but know that I must, in order to get to you. We’ll be together soon, my dear.

Then the other woman’s voice comes on.