Zac Hill

Something Like Five to Seven Years On Average Give or Take, Depending of Course Upon Diet, Weight, Income, Regular Exercise, Quality of Life, Whether One is a Smoker, and Other Stuff, and Assuming She Isn’t Like That Much Older Than You Are to Begin With, Anyway, 

or

Roar

What comes at night is neither dream nor sleep.  Is rather the slow motion of a pushed cart, direct and inevitable.  We have talked before about the busted headlight or the broke door.  The clear crystal sherbet dish that fell onto the tile.  The stain on the fan.  Maybe the day’s events if the day has seen fit to provide events.  Once a girl came to her office in clown shoes.  Said nothing about it, just sat down.  Or the time I was on the train with the design school students and the Kenyan kid with the bald spot towards almost his like neck said guys I know this is horrible and everything but you know afflictions, like pathologies right, well have you thought about what happens when you blend them, you know a mute with Tourette’s, and the other kid sitting down in the section labeled Orang Kurang Upaya says Or what about a cripple sleepwalking?  Maybe too a television show, a cigarette.  The ritual of undress.  The cracked and creaking windows.  The dimmed lights.  The hard air.

I rise but don’t wake in the cold and the dark.  Best I can say is impelled.  We are curled like quotation marks.  First always I ease my lips to her shoulder and just leave them there.  Never kiss.  Then my index down her arm, the exact centre, trace the gentle protrusions of humerus radius and ulma until their terminus at her palm.  Soft as milk.  With pressure from my elbow I alight from her side.  Her body dips clockwise.  My left arm now a ribcage canopy.  Then slowly a prowl up her solar plexus, beating heart, the rise and fall of chest.  Fresh ice cream scoop of neck.  Tender geometries.  And always, here, always, like its own rich sentience my right arm spiders up her side, heaves the cliff of her hips, roils and trundles its own animal up her ribs and chest and neck until it plasters over her face and spreads.  Always the spread of fingers on her face.  Then the clutch, the tightened grip, Jesus God Jesus I would wish it gentle but always a grip like someone taken, granite pressure until those lips those pearl lips and ridge cheeks bend harlequin demented symmetries in the cold black dying night.  Her face congealed like the plaster of a mask.  By the kill of my hand.  And I say to her there in this whisper, this hiss, say to her tense on the framed bed in the dread and desolate silence, I beg her to tell me, I beg to know—Why me, the man you’d watch him die?  Why me the man you’d bury?

Best I can tell she never stirs.