Our mothers told us we smelled naked and ripe, and when they got close enough to hold an ear to our hearts they recreated the burbling with wet sounds, their clammy tongues flicking around their mouths.
“Decay,” we whispered outside their other ears. All those manners and ethics were being pulled loose of us like too many bones, coyotes and vultures burying them deep to savor at a later time.
First the lifeblood drains to the dependent parts of our consciences and that lividity rises up behind our expressions. The muscles of our decency refuse to uncouple. Our honor cools to a temperature of consensus.
Froth and rupture. Our minds pillage themselves. New colors marble through the veins of our principles. Our hair slides out. Our skin slips. The maggots feed on us and squirm away to make their own code.
We’d turned rotten is all. Autolysis and putrefaction. Our morals were breaking themselves down. Blistering. Aided by the outside world that hunted out any point of weakness to feed on. Bloating. All that integrity burglarized by blowflies and filched by gut flora. A vibrant person will rebuild herself. Only the dead break down.
Recipe for Her Absence
Ingredients:
1 Half-Empty Bottle of Perfume
1 Glass of Water
Directions:
When she gets up to leave, think of everything. Try to bribe her, blackmail her, hold objects for ransom. Objects like that almost-empty bottle of perfume she’s had in your medicine cabinet since it was full. When she looks at you like you’re crazy, grip your fearful fingers tighter around the bottle and shove it into your pocket defiantly. Turn around so you don’t have to watch her leave for the last time. When the screen door slams shut and then slams shut a little less and then wobbles, take the perfume from your pocket and figure out how to work the cap. Does it twist? Does it snap? Does it just lift right off? Yes. Spray the perfume into the air in front of your face and sneeze a little and be thankful for that small regularity. Every morning, every evening, when she left the house, she would perform this ritual, and if you were standing nearby you would sneeze, and right now that convulsion feels more comfortable than your skin. Cup your palm a little. Hold the bottle to your nose and breathe in deeply. Feel the tears rise and squeeze them back into yourself. Hold the bottle close to your cupped palm and spray it until a little puddle exists. Lean your face down to your palm and lap it up like a kitten. Grimace. Remember what it was like to lick the Windex off the window that time when you were a child. Lick your hand until the perfume is gone. Shake your hand dry. Flex your tongue out of your mouth. Savor the bitter alcohol and flowers. Think about how everything is different now, how from now on this perfume will be this taste and not her smell. Panic and think about the long list of irreversible things you’ve done. Go to the kitchen and fill a lukewarm glass of water. There is no time to wait for the cold to meander to the tap. Drink the glass down and then spit onto the stacks of dirty dishes you’ve been meaning to do. Already, allow the lazy hindsight to come into focus: how she could plow you down with her comments, how in every picture you could detect dangerous lies, how she’d stack the decks every time you played gin and deny it again and again. The pungent perfume on your tongue reminds you that no matter how sweet you remember her smelling, when you think of the taste of her now, your tongue will remind you of the perfume lingering at the back of your throat.
Despite your best efforts, remember that ridiculous night in Grasse when you drank too much good French wine in the café, and how strong the summer breeze was on the short walk back to the hotel, and how she had that loose dress on that the wind nearly knocked off, and how her ankle turned gently on the cobblestones and how instead of leaning to help her up, you stretched yourself out on the ground beside her and twined yourself into her spilled limbs, and how you lay there breathing in the moist Provence air, clean and fragrant, and how she imagined aloud the wind undressing the flowers in the fields that surrounded the town, and how when you kissed her bare shoulder, you swore you could taste the jasmine on her skin.
Now try and remember the taste of the perfume in your palm.
Both Fruit and Flower
Ciara-Bianca, Ciara-bright, Ciara-blossom turned to fruit.
Every day Ciara-Bianca is cross-pollinated, self-surprised, she stays the same and comes undone.
Ciara-Bianca, at twilight, can feel herself turn waterless, feel her bones bend into beams of ghost and question, can feel the transformation occur, a little backwards shipwreck.
In the dark of night she is the ruins of ancient artwork. In the morning, she is a mystery, even in full light. As the afternoon turns to evening, though, she can feel herself become the ultimate skeleton fiction.
It’s at twilight that the buzzing of the day embeds itself in her, changes her. It’s at twilight when her stamen feels the hunger, and her pistil feels full; the sticky tip of her stigma pulling the full day deep into her. That is when her body begins to make the apple seeds.
Ciara-Bianca, on the stage, under the gas lamp of faithless vision and the panic of crushed myth. She drums closed arguments with faint questions. She cannot shake it out.
The petals of the blossom fall as she plumps, her skin growing thinner, building layer on layer, until that epithelial first coat has knotted itself into a core.
Ciara-Bianca rising round the neck of the dying spring, shining from within like startled death, her vivid veins rushing like nothing when compared to the famous, clean poetry of the fresh curse of fruit.
At the bottom of her are all the furry parts that made her, the part we try to ignore, to pretend it doesn’t mar the smooth red slick of the separation of inside and out.
Ciara-Bianca, filled with people weary of the great half dark, in her hands rests a cold story.
A little overripe, looked over, winked at and passed on, the chiaroscuro of Ciara-Bianca jumps with centipedes. She can only feel love like a loose shadow.
“When I’ve rotted,” Ciara-Bianca tells herself, “when I’m past possibility, I plan on asking what all of this is about. I’ll do it, in the service of shrill facts and likely twins. I’ll give credence to the sunless ideas, beautifully explained under the weight of many men and women. I’ll win my case with that old repellant weapon: betrayal.”
Ciara-Bianca, like church or scorpions, bent and strange, cut with a little bit of snake oil. Ciara-Bianca says, “It’ll all be over in the end.”
Even a roof is under something. Even the coldest day has a cooler shadow, grateful and long. Even the deepest hole can be dug deeper.
In her bed, in the pitch black, Ciara-Bianca can hear everything. The memory of her is thrown away just as it is called into being.
In the dark of the night Ciara-Bianca’s face becomes the moon becomes a chemical fire becomes a belly of dead moisture becomes herself and her.
Which is true? Ciara-Bianca could flower and bear fruit at once, could watch herself without touching a mirror, could read her story without laying eyes on the page.
Configuration
“Holy God,” we say. Lory has crinkled all of the wire hangers into a meaningless Venn diagram on the wall. Lory tries to wink and tit in some sort of meaningful way, but she is covered in flowers and downy hair, and it all feels like too much to be honest. Lory, standing on top of the covers, like some conquest, Lory hears out of one ear and pouts against her shallow chin. “Lory,” we say. “Go ahead, explain it.” But Lory knows the rules. Lory presses the meaning deep inside her and reaches with a blunt thumb between her teeth to dig something out. “Come in,” she says. “Take a look.” And that’s all we do. We whisper, and Lory beams proudly and stirs within herself. We coo a bit and think that we’ll forget this by tomorrow, but a handful of tomorrows come and this image still pops up like floaters in our vision.