Endless Envelope

quick piece of wednesday writing

Francesca walked out of the lake holding her shoes. She was a woman who wore water like a morning coat, tight around the waist.

            “Bout time.”

Serks flicked her cigarette into the gravel.

            “Do you have to do that?”

“M’car doesn’t have an ash tray.”

            Serks had a voice like the bed of a loch and whenever she spoke there was the lacuna of something submerged.

            “Not that I could reach it.”

She rattled the handcuff against the door-handle.

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I figured it’d been too long since I wrote a story about someone wanting someone they couldn’t have. So here.

You asked about the bloodstain on the passengers side and I told you the story of my uncle, the drug-dealer, who had rolled down his window to speak with a gangster and had been fed a gun.

“I tried to clean it when I got the car but he’d let it set.”

“He lived?”

“Yeah, drove the car for another five years, they pulled his teeth out of the door.”

You touched the pits in dashboard before sitting down.

“You don’t have to sit there.”

“Huh?”

“I just, nobody really sits there cause of the blood.”

“Do you want me to move?”

“Not if it doesn’t bother you.”

I had never thought of a car ride as intimate but your hands on your bruised knees and your shorts stopping where your thighs began to freckle were changing my mind. 

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Dear Sophia,

I remember us together but it was never true. The ghosts of hands that have been haunting me for months are figments to be exorcised and nothing is left of my pen or my dictionary, which after making love you had flipped through and read me the definition of suffuse.

To flood.

Sophia I am flooded, I am submerged. The shapes of women that swim past me now are darkened with the depth to which I’ve sunk. I have reached the frontier of emptiness and the sea, in it’s mystery and it’s power, has come to rule my moods. I am changeable and cruel, I am in a moment swept away from any touch that might be offered me and I will ruin in time whatever insists.

Sophia I remember you on the water, I remember you in the sand. You were the color of cork, half-buried, and I unscrewed you seeking the message you hid. In my memories there is salt on your breasts, you wear a skirt of seaweed and a shell between you legs. Beneath the shell is a horizon and I make a sunset of myself. 

I am writing to say that I have mourned you.

My salt is spent, it has mixed with your dust, it has filled the pages of my dictionary and lays two inches thick over me. When I move, my shell of mourning cracks.

The sea leaks through. 

But Sophia I have mourned you and if I must never write again except to make an ink of my blood then that will be my choice. If speaking another word would wake you from your peace, then I will be a mute.

I am tired of living in dust, I want to Love again.

-KS

“Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“No.”

“You’re an asshole.”

The room is filled with voices that have no bodies, chattering conversations that float about free of a conscience, they fill the space but nobody is talking. The seats in front of us are still empty; Viggo has his boots up on the headrest. We are sitting in a gallery of heads, a dozen decapitated hairdos peeking over the low-backed theater seats. I imagine them on spikes.

            “What about the blonde?”

Does love at first sight apply if it’s not face to face? Does love enter through the spine? The vulnerable patch at the back of the neck covered in downy-hairs?

            Viggo says love enters through the groin, he brags that his cock is like a tamping rod and it knows wet when it sees it. I say it’s the eyes.

            “Worked well enough for Romeo.”

            “Then we’re all doomed,” he laughs and adjusts his jacket on the back of his seat, “when was the last time someone looked you in the eye?”

            I don’t know.

We’re a people in love with convenience and ourselves; in her purse a woman carries her cell phone and her compact. She checks her messages and knows that her husband loves her, she checks her compact and knows that she is beautiful, convenience and self, her entire world in a handbag. I don’t want to be able to carry my universe on my shoulders and if I must then god forbid it be easy, I would rather be my own Atlas. Meanwhile the Titans are laughing at me, they went digital centuries ago.

I don’t want a virtual love but my world is coordinates and pass-codes. I need a cell-phone number for casual conversation and a domain name to make you smile; the heart has an electronic lock. Love is no longer a risk but a calculated investment.

Modern romance is based in the denial of the soul.

 The houselights go down and Viggo spends the entire show staring at the back of a head. When it ends we wait to leave, the blond girl turns around and he feels nothing, he sighs and picks up his jacket.

The girl beside her smiles at me, our eyes meet, codes are overridden, the lock is broken: Unbidden, love enters the body.

Spring had played us for fools, had stripped us naked only to get hard with frost and in our short-sleeves, in our sandals we were huddled. The beaches were foggy, our town, revived for moments in the false-start of the season, was deserted again and left in blissful silence to it’s natives.

Those of us who had bothered to believe in early summer shrugged our shoulders and returned to our basements to light another joint. Even in cold weather we are stuck in our summer town and we make the best of it. We buy lots of drugs; we storm the beaches and burn last year’s lost and found for warmth. Hawaiian shirts, abandoned beach chairs, children’s pool toys and paperback books all go up in bonfires, we are sending smoke signals to civilization ‘You’ve left us here with your detritus, please don’t come back.’

Meanwhile real-estate values are skyrocketing.

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            You kill me with kindness, your tempered smile sharpened to a point you speared me onto you. I hunted through a street grid, through three thousand apartment buildings and two hundred bars with men that told me I looked like their sisters. Down the street you hail a cab, you kiss your sweetheart goodnight, you feel empty.

—

I think you’re beautiful. You hang yourself on my headboard in a noose of lipstick and laugh at me, a Madonna laughing.

            “You’re crazy.”

I am.

            Your crazy writer who doesn’t talk for days, who has covered herself in words but refuses to speak, who has been writing you novels on napkins. I drink too much coffee and wake up with a headache, I don’t go to sleep, I am throwing my heart to the wolves and you are in my bed laughing at me.

            “What’s so funny?”

“I’m not beautiful.”

            You hide your blush behind your shoulder, a slash of vermillion and I want to paint you.

            “You’re beautiful and talented and I like being here, here more than anywhere else in the world. Is that okay?”

            You don’t believe me and never will and I will write you portraits and you will not yield to my awe but I am telling the truth.

            “I think I can live with that.”

“Blue.”

            “What?”

“My favorite color is blue.”

            He shifted in bed lifting himself onto his elbow.

“Vermillion.”

            “Really?”

“I like that it sounds like a reptile, like a really badass reptile and it’s like, actually pink.”

            She laughed, it sounded like birds flying and he was already in love.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

She shook her head; she was wake up pretty. Her hair was the color of lipstick and her lips were the color of a seashell, beneath her eyes there were still shadows of the tide.

            “Why do you ask that?”

            “Seemed important.”

            “I don’t know, maybe its not.”

She kissed him again. They had been kissing, quietly, blissfully, as if there was nothing else, for hours.

            “Do you have a family?”

            “No.”

            “Just ‘No’, like not at all, not ever?”

            “Maybe not, I’m kind of a mess.”

He touched her face. The sun must have come up because there was light in her hair, he pressed his face into her shoulder like a child, he saw the sunlight through her hair, and everything was colored vermillion. 

I have begun reworking Bird-Dog into a viable novel. I’ve found that the original drafts, having been written over several years, are somewhat incomprehensible when you try to read them together and my pacing needed ridiculous amounts of work if it was ever going to sustain a full novel. That being said I’ve been mining the original and reworking it into something a little more novelesque over the past weeks. This is the beginning of the third chapter which uses most of the material from the beginning of the original drafts.

Bea was from Houston and of the twelve photographs she had taken of me while was sleeping she’d sold two of them and kept the rest. Even long before we met she was tilted toward me, bound on the predetermined route towards our eventual collision; she had been bracing for impact her entire life.

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