Shining

    He spreads the handkerchief on the ground. It appears luminous in the gloom. Stilled, our hands like this on our hearts. When you start laughing it gets echoed and muffled impossibly. The same time. "Shut the fuck up" I'm licking the walls, I thought - the haul glints on the white handkerchief. I'm shut. My heart, over expands.
 "She wasn't dead tho?"
 "Shut the fuck up"
In the dark it's hard to know if it's this mouth, or that.
   
    The upstairs room: the girl jumps rhythmically, bites at the bread. We watch her from the rug, a fire in the grate. The bread has a sweet resistance. Hollow lifts the skirts and his legs shine. The girl stops jumping, but the mattress takes a while to catch on. She pulls the bread thoughtfully, her sorry teeth. Our eyes together in the same place, cos he glows so, there by the fire.

белизна

This white flesh:"You speak perfect English" Not I. I can't speak at all. This flesh is - I'm rubbing his hands between mine. He laughs. Her voice " You should wear your gloves, mały , have you lost them?" "No - I" Between my thighs, his hands. He says its colder. My legs, colder than his hand. I shiver. Not on the outside. In here it's warm. Join me? I don't know where it is, or anything. I say: "I don't know anything" We laugh, we look at our hands. I am walking down the street - a long street - the town I lived in then. Somebody calls to me from an open window. I wave. The person wants me to come inside. I shake my head "I can't - I have to ..." I point vaguely down the street. There are two sheets of acid tight against my stomach. Probably I have to take them somewhere. It's not relevant. When I'm licking his stomach. It doesn't taste of anything much. He puts a hand on my head, warmer now. The motion is - off - I don't know - like beating time with a finger. Following some rhythm that isn't there. It's irritating, a polka - their voices somewhere. Nothing much. Bread, maybe - sourdough.
 M: No, it's forbidden to smoke here.
I'm bored.
M: (whispered) Calm down. If I do it properly he'll panic and leave.
I should make him another initial, right? Having the same one is just confusing. When I ask him if he wants some coke - not him - the one face down on the bed - he raises his head and looks at me so blankly. His eyes are too pale, a dog for pulling sledges might have them. The expression is as if you offered one of your pack a blanket by the fire.
D: What the fuck are you doing? I sleep out here on the warm snow. 
Puts the - maybe it's some kind of plate? I don't know - into his line of vision and he unclouds. "I don't (briefly confused again) No (smiles) Thank you!"
The Siberian man is standing some distance from his pack of dogs. He throws them meat from this distance. He throws them meat, from a distance there in the dark. The snow is a warm cushion beneath them - if there's no snow, or the snow is too iced over, then the dogs will die. If the man stands too close with the meat, then he will die. When the dogs are fed, we break into the hospital shed and drink all the surgical alcohol we can find. I mean, they do - it's not like I'm there.
 M: Do we need to take any more?
Other M: (nods)
I feel weird with a plate of cocaine in my hand. Looking out over the water.

Barn

     Some spiders skitter here by my leg. One across my ankle. I think it's a green spider, green with a crimson bloated abdomen. In the kitchen, when we arrived and I could sit there at the table slow motion trickling Calvados down my throat - then it's sister or aunt - mother?  I don't know, spiders are always female. Whatever close or distant relation, it's there on the rim of my glass and I make some involuntary action and it's gone and usually I'd be something else but now I'm whatever and all disinterest. I crush it later, a sad accident under bare feet on the stone floor.

Here I throw up a perfect arc all rotten apple and sunlight. Sort of in the bucket, sort of not.

 If I sleep, the vengeful spiders might seal my mouth with cobwebs. When I vomit again there will be no escape route. The liquid will seep down into my lungs and I'll drown in it. Right here in the hay. This is so pointless and unlikely it makes me smile, turns into stupid spasms and the hay dust sticks to the sweat. I don't care about the spiders for a while.

When you say my name it's dark.

 I'd forgotten you were there, or you weren't there at all. It's hard to describe the sound of my name in your mouth. like a croak, but not dry - there's some wet underlying mushiness there too. I think bubbles. You say my name repeatedly at two or three minute intervals for some indeterminate time.

 I'd wave, but it seems insensitive, with the nails and the splintered bones and all. I try saying your name too, it's scratchy through the cobwebs, plus I don't really know what it is. When I come, it's like a million million baby spiders. They skitter away somewhere, to build webs over your wounds, or something.

Holiday

    "Olivier, I really, really like you"
I wanted to say this. He wanted to stuff a lot of the shower curtain into my mouth. He wanted to do this without detaching it from the plastic tracking thing that held it in place. He said:
    "Don't bite it"
 He was feeding it in sort of carefully so that it didn't snag on my teeth, or something. "Stuff" was totally the wrong word. I was trying to say something nice, but he glowered anyway. The act of trying to speak, in itself, sabotaged the intricate business of making me eat the shower curtain, whilst keeping it relatively pristine and in position. It didn't matter what it was I was trying to say.

Flies

Here is something: Finger-cold, shut out from the fire, we dream the heat. We walk between the close trees and small girls and boys are there, like flies. In the summer the flies speak to me; the flies on the floor of the forest, the flies on the fish, in the rot at the edge of the shore. They speak to me, but not to the other. They say - something? I don't know what they say, I'm too heat lazy to listen, so I ask:

"What do the flies say?"

But they shake their head, like this, and look away. Tears glisten in the corner of their eyes and I put my tongue to them and it's the sea.

"I'm hungry" we say and we are lying on the ground beneath the trees. The children are still there, so are the flies.

"I'm so hungry I could eat  ... "

This is the game for when we should be eating, not playing.

"I'm so hungry I could eat - your shoes"

"I don't have shoes"

"My own shoes then?"

Our feet are naked and together. We are laughing. One of us is this, one of us is that. It all depends on something else.

"I'm so hungry I could eat flies"

Once I put a small black fly in my mouth. I held it there and the buzz was spice, but I couldn't swallow it. I spit it in my palm and it flicks feebly for a while in the drool there, sad, sodden wings, gives up and I let it drip to the ground. One hen saunters by all indifference then turns dips quick and eats it, unsentimental, unmoved. My face is very wet and stupid.

When it's hot and damp, here in the trees, the flies move with us. We take steps in unison and the flies hum a chorus; we stop and they still their noise instantly. However subtle and sly we can be, the flies can be more so. As we doze in the grass here I dream of an immense body made up of these glittering flies.

Through this and out further in the grass a train is coming. We rush to it and press our face to the earth. There is some other mirror-train beneath us and we smile into the buzz of the dirt although we have been told many times not to put our head so close to the tracks as it is asking for trouble. I don't know who told us this.

When both trains stop vibrating we scoop up some of the smaller children, we take them somewhere else.

Real Food

   
    He plays dice alone for three hours and eleven minutes through the afternoon. Later, they eat Lemon Soup. "Lemon soup isn't a real food" He mumbles this, stirring the watery stuff in the bowl, little flecks of green and black. They don't eat bread with it, because bread is a conspiracy.  

     At that time he would forget, often. Then, in remembering, everything would be fresh skinned and raw. A new, quivering growth fixed in some stupid cycle of bewilderment that stuck tangible and hard there in the throat. He spent plenty of nights trying to dislodge it, pushed one, then two, then three - but probably not four, fingers into his throat. If he rested his cheek on the wooden seat and trailed a hand in the water then it was a fragment of a broken ship in some becalmed and filthy sea. If he got noticed, then at least the rhythm changed, or something. He tried to make these exaggerated retching noises and fake coughed hard enough to bleed a little. Wait for the deck to creak and she'd be in the doorway, sort of awake, scratching. Then he'd stand up and follow her downstairs into the kitchen where she'd boil milk or roll a joint depending on how old she thought he might be that night.