Pulse-GLOW!
The lust for an older man was implanted, as it happened to go for all cobby, ample-chested young women in the city. Like, it’s not hard, it’s just new. Like, adult puzzles in a children’s toy store.
She’s starting to understand the nocturnal feminine pull for bay windows, pulling a chunk of slick hair off her back and onto her left shoulder, garden pink in wetness. This is her active journal prompt, she is the answer, when did you most feel like yourself?
‘I think I’m having a flatline.’ His head’s sort of shrunken-looking, so it moves an obscure and frankly unpredictable velocity, and she’s not stupid but she sure must be slow because it hit the tiles with a pitch so blunt and high she can see his MRI in splatters before it’s captured and it’s all in a strange instant so she simply sees it. Woof.
His head is bald but for a few coarse black hairs, almost ingrown, nestling their tapers into unfamiliar holes, stiff. He gets his dairy delivered into a white styrofoam cooler on the rear porch, poultry too, chocolate milk in glass pints and blue eggs and special order eggnog out of season. She can taste it when his lips part, in sleep, like warm edam. Many things repulse her. It serves to connect her to warrior ancestors, the ladies of the 50s getting anally raped by their own husbands, the foragers and legless girls dragging their entrails through the Six Ages, Cameron Diaz against Chris Isaak.
Regrettably, the repulsion works to aggravate the tensile hairs guarding her sex, it wicks the moisture from her mantle and unhooks its jaw, like the tin man, she is oiled and heartless and excited by green eunuchs and spoilt witchcraft.
He’s meant to wake twenty-five minutes from now, often shellacked to the sheet in sweet-smelling eucalyptus sweat, cream in the corners of his mouth. She wakes early, cleans herself with a cold hand towel and replaces it folded on the sink for him to rinse his face. Sometimes she’ll see the cotton pills of her panties, of her more internal folds, amongst the reddish hairs of his beard, but more likely she’ll have disappeared before he can begin his routine.
He works in a children’s rock music centre, one with afterschool programming and parental relief courses through working hours, where the clientele can be identified by bulging eyes, ample ears, emaciated figures, feculent fingernails. It’s located in a small theater on the train rail, or, an outdated rail which has tempered to the stones of its nativity, shuddering with the passing of the newer, lighter rail above. A small newsstand converted into concessions, boarding hall to linoleum void. It’s a black-box theater, one not dissimilar from Piven or Greenborough. The conversion of the space was quick. It did not exist, and then it was his.
She took her popcorn tea across the street when he’d drive in the snow, triple-fold her legs and watch the rail soften with commuters. There was a time in which she’d sit with legs splayed, wool leggings damp at the crotch, figuring a firefighter or banker would eventually come and grab her, lift her from the chair by the wet of her pubis, and fuck her against the window with the philharmonically gifted children screaming to Call The Police across the street. These were private desires.
In warmer season, she’d capture upskirt photos of her chafed thighs and email them to the man. He’d never reply, or confirm receipt, which led her to believe the .org address she was accosting belonged not exclusively to him. This was, in turn, a public desire. She’d been arrested twice, once for public indecency and once for something like it. One urination between cars, and one where she came so hard in her own jeans she had to strip them off in the alley behind the bagel shop; she assumed the tunic could function as a short dress, but her pock-marked ass cheeks flaring in the crosswalk’s wind seemed to greatly molest a new mother and her still-blind infant. It could’ve been salacious, it could’ve been so maddening, it could’ve been soaked in desire, all urging, but to the man it was as accident as a dropped baby. Negligent.
Then there was her real flaw, her upper right shoulder pains. They began at nineteen, the time around when she met him. There was a fire on the corner of Bedlam and Lee, four residents died and the speakeasy in the basement melted into itself. It’s like nine eleven all over again, said the Cadillac crooner who lived across the street. It sort of was like nine eleven all over again, except for everything about it, but it sure smelled rotten.
He, the man, was divorced and working at the Brookstone selling touchless thermometer pistols and electronic fans that are worn around the neck like spike collars. In fact, he was wearing one the day after the fire, waiting for the train, sweeping ash and, probably, human remains up his chest and into his nose. She was rubbing herself against a light post like a wormed dog, trying to fix or dislocate her right shoulder, whichever took first. He had a drool about him, she thought, one which only she could see. The train would pull up and out without him the moment she turned away.
Do you think teenagers should be able to drink non-alcoholic beer? She asked him, fare paid. Sure. It’s only got a small percentage of alcohol, he said, like bitters. She didn’t care for moments of consideration. What’s the threshold for percentage, you know, before it’s like, a cigarette for a baby? He hadn’t turned to look at her yet. Well, babies shouldn’t have cigarettes. She realized he was stupid. Kids smoke all the time, you know. Matter of fact. More than adults, too, probably. It’s a horrid habit. Now he looks. Do you smoke with your friends? He looks a lot. Sure, sometimes. When it’s twilight in the park. Lie. He’ll like it. Twilight in the park, huh. He likes it. The swing set’s my favorite place to do it, to smoke a cigarette. Stretching. Yeah? How’s that? Train’s almost due. Fine, just fine! It’s quite the stretch, for my bum shoulder, you know. She’s suddenly sure it would be. How’d you manage to get a bum shoulder so young? She pauses in her gaze away from him, he does not. Which park? He asks. The train coughs so she doesn’t have to. Huh? She says. She looks at him, his stupid neck-fan, the hair of his belly button pressing against the thin cotton shirt, the over-pinkness of his mouth hole. He smiles. Good teeth. Shame. Which park do you like to swing and smoke and stretch your bum shoulder in?
She’d thought about her skeleton before, of course, because she was a woman and it was kinder to imagine bones crackling together in motels than flesh and fluid spurting and squirting. She thought of it clinically. This connected to this connected to that and big swangin’ jaw and eternal teeth, swamp women and ice age children curled in knapsacks, folded up like pocket birds and rotisserie chickens. Accordion people. She was an accordion person.
She imagined her children, perched on trikes in a suburban courtyard with long plaits and those frilly white socks with ladybug beads sewn in, watching the man shake jars of lightning bugs and toss them on the ground, slam his foot down and skid streaks of cold light across the asphalt. She imagined her children in two hues: looking back at her with anger, wetness, humiliation, and looking up at him with laudation, glee, mazedness. One of them bound to idiocy, who it was couldn’t matter, because it was her vagina that’d pulsed them into the bailey, and it would inevitably fall back on her, the shit-hot anger, the disappointment.
She imagined this well after they married, once her sides grew softer and the endocrinologist swore her labs were in order, that no, there were no metabolic issues, that no, there were no eruptions or lesions or masses, that no, her B vitamins were exactly in order and no, she could not have the depot shots, anyway. She was beginning to annoy herself. The smell of her own breath repulsive, she’d stick her arms out the backdoor with a book and read from behind the window, exhaling out the crack, inhaling slower and slower until she’d have to hold it altogether in order to turn the page. She emailed an author she knew nothing of asking for marital advice. She included her mailing address.
The lust for an older man was implanted, as it happened to go for all cobby, ample-chested young women in the city. Like, it’s not hard, it’s just new. Like, adult puzzles in a children’s toy store. Like, someone’s dad just lost his job and his wife never took his last name but their children aren’t hyphenated and if you search him on the internet, you’d find only a thirteen-year-old LinkedIn photo and a poorly-protected Seeking Arrangement profile with the bio Just looking. Delicious. Men like that had warm, low-hanging fruits of testes and disconnected relationships with the lower generational. It was as gamey as sloppy seconds in her high school class, which body odor and latchkeyedness had stunted her from, so the peer-pull toward GED classes was in turn usurped by her feist and covetousness, and the moon and sand tends to tickle the devil’s daughter, so she witnessed a fire and he witnessed his own stripling, and together they wed in quietude.
He was whimpering, pulsing, pulse-GLOW! Pulse-GLOW! Alright, now, shut up. Finally she will know herself in this small warp of theater. One arm’s pinned outside the bathroom, that’s all she may see, caught in a game of zip-zap-zop. Her skeleton is growing, or her skin is shrinking. She heard it, then she felt it, then she looked, and felt not one thing. How can you feel what no longer exists? This makes less sense, and she’s beginning to work up a warm appetite. She drags what’s left of her foot to the tv stand and props it up, reaches to pinch a sputtering blue tube jutting out where her soft corn used to live, and notices the bullet missed her bunion entirely.
Such an arcade fitted with representations of the stages of Christ’s Passion. Her pregnancy did not stick. Fine. It was a wandering desire. He, Christ, witnessed her slut and slaty eyes under the worm moon, hailing a taxi in a by and large residential area, with a thin plastic bag with teeth on it. The women’s repro health center was co-operated by the children’s dental clinic. She missed the taste of bubblegum fluoride in the corners of her mouth. Her husband was growing pocked skin at the rear of his upper arms, he was always on the bottom so she assumed they were bedsores. He’d tell her they were chicken pox scars from childhood, and she’d say she didn’t care, which she did not, really, as repulsion was no meditation. But she did wonder if her baby had formed its fingernails or eyelashes or whatever came after the heartbeat, if it had been wiped of its grape jelly and tucked against her swollen chest, if it had cooed at her and screamed at him, would it want the vaccination? How was she supposed to ask?
It’s crazy clown time. Bond Arms’ .45 Colt from Walmart, pink holster, good luck today. She inverts her jaw and chews the semi-permanent retainer from the back of her teeth. She hadn’t ever thought so far ahead, not once in her life. Mommy’s gonna tell you no lies. The fish beach isn’t far off, the ferry fountain, a psychic sweep of the room and the bullet in his chest sure looks grippable. His mouth is open and wiped clean as a newborn’s, pink and gaping again, the organic veining, the purple strain, the reek of a half-thought. He’s hungry. He weeps in his slumber. It hurts. She applies his neck-fan and watches the pink go dusty. He’s a cool summer. Her shoulder aches and she drops the pistol in his lap. Urinates hovering over the toilet, wipes front to back, rinses her fingers. The hurt’s got her foot clubbed, infection in roped talons, she heaves her lower half over his carcass and onto the bay bench. She’d like for this to be her recall. An exercise in style, all-wheel, a hymn to share. There she exists in a pastoral, Christina in her world, Baywatch, well-tempered, she is in this instant without string or strain. It sounds just fine, listening to the world move when she cannot see it enough to make sense. Her alley routes unoccupied. She watches through slats to ensure the babies are still babies and cigars are available to any infant with a mouth large enough to fit.