TWO MEN, and one other

Actually, it wasn’t he who presented me with a piece of my past repurposed, so I am beginning with somewhat of an untruth, but really, it was from him, through someone else, that I received that ambiguous gift.

You see, I'd forgotten what a mango tastes like.

You see, I grew up with that shit.

Nusrat is kirtan to me. Scuff or wax on the wood floor on Sunday mornings, the living room a cavern—you were nowhere, friend, there was so much life before you, I deny you your place—a cavern resounding sombre warmth. I swear, if I’d been paying attention, I would have been able to see my parents’ limbs softening in silent supplication.

Of course, la culpa no es suya, he couldn’t have known, he just learnt charm in school and cavalierness at summer camp. I learnt deference—where? I learnt appetite, so I extended my palm and took what was given me because I believed—still do—that nothing is valueless. I drank chai lattes, too.

He was so proud of his ability to go deep. He didn't know I was just shallow.

That pride is profound: it believes it has touched the heart of darkness. That pride is Conrad and Flaubert and the ilk: self-styled travellers, translators, truth-seekers, bringing back tales from the wild. Chasing echoes, they thought—you too—they could see the other side. But what they saw was an old postcard.

You can’t get inside a postcard.

*

It’s quite a thrill to be an idyll, to look at someone and watch him see in you a romantic apparition. But the thrill slumps quickly into condescension, and soon, you find yourself chivvying some poor boy to go have some of your own life experiences.

You are the murderer of your own mystique.

Really, you were on the point of swooning when he was talking that early summer evening. All necessary textures were present: flagstone, cotton, bluster, rasp, encroaching summer, nostalgia. Finally, that old vengeful dismissal—'be more, you paltry fuck, then I’ll think about giving a shit'—materialising before your eyes.

But the thing is, you’d overshot him, this sweet person with so much of your shiftiness and soft spots. And now you felt you were looking backward, or waiting, or remembering, or reliving a dream. Something long-anticipated is not always fulfilling.

Being discovered, it turns out, is no fun for you.

TWO WOMEN

I.

"This isn't a short story," I said. I set the carton of eggs onto the tiled counter and turned to face her. A grin slowly worked its way across my face, "You can't expect every shadow and passing car and cranky store clerk to have some meaning. Sometimes working at Safeway just sucks and so the cashiers take it out on the people they're helping."

She righted imaginary glasses, raised her chin and said, somewhat more slowly than she normally spoke: "That doesn't take away from the fact that this experience was a bad omen."

I walked over to her, took the bag she was carrying out of her arms, set it on the counter beside the eggs, and wrapped my arms around her such that my fingertips reached my own shoulders. "Was it an omen that spake of grave fortune? Of death by squeezing, perhaps?"

She headbutted me in the neck. "Your deliverance of death is weaker than my bullheadedness."


II.

Her face is a pentagon, the point of which is the valley of her chin. Straight lines mark the corners of her mouth, but gentle slopes make her nose appear as though it were warmed, softened, and placed just so between her wide-set eyes. Her skin is pale, but healthy, with freckles creating indecipherable patterns across her cheeks and over the bridge of her nose. Against pure whiteness, the iris of her eyes is a raw, stolid brown: the color of a refreshing meal and a firm hug after a long day of work. And framing the smooth features and structure is a neatly collaborative network of flowing brown hair.

She towered over me, the full weight of herself held in her hips on my hips.


III.

A fly ran itself into the window with little, fleshy tck tck tck sounds. The pillow was stiff, wedged between my arm and my head on the bed. Idly, I touched my penis while she took a piss. The sound of a woman pissing always fascinated me. Blindfolded and far from home, I could pick the sound of my woman pissing out from a lineup of a hundred pissing women. Problem is, this lady isn't my woman. My woman would walk back into the all-too-brightly lit hotel room wearing a long t-shirt and a wide smile. This lady walked back into the room with an unlit cigarette in her mouth and jeans on. Earlier, her breasts had seemed too rigid to be real, but seeing them now, with their polite downward slope, I started to wonder what was the case: did she get implants at such a young age that the added weight has caused a premature surrender to gravity, or are her tits real, but filled with the same grit that got her in bed with me?

"What's a nice lookin' girl like you doing here?" I'd asked.
"You don't look like the kind of guy who's into nice lookin' girls," she'd replied.

And she was right. Which is why I shorted her twenty bucks. Which is why she's got her clothes on but isn't leaving. She's staring at me, watching the fly run into the window.

Buried

My friend, I have buried myself. I speak to you from beneath soil. I have buried myself so I can be like earth, so I can decompose, and then, perhaps, recompose. I have dug deep, gone under, burrowed fiercely, and perhaps it is because I want to surrender as much as possible to the earth before I can presume to leap into the air.