Silly Kissers

Outside are the colours of the city, doubled and tripled. Water pours freely from the face of the road into long running rivulets of gutter-light while they stand in the kitchen.

They’ve been standing there for almost three hours, trying to speak, both of them too nervous to notice that the other is nervous too. Everything they say trembles in the quiet and then lands awkwardly in front of them, familiar, yet strange. The boy sweats when he wonders what to say next and the girl watches the drops gather at his sideburns. It is unlike anything either of them had anticipated.

The girl tells the boy about a romantic comedy she likes, called 50 First Dates. In the film, Drew Barrymore suffers a horrific head injury and is unable to form new memories. Every morning when she wakes up she forgets that Adam Sandler is in love with her. The boy thinks this could really happen to a person, but the girl is not so sure. They talk about it for a long time, clinging to it, each responding to the other only after the silence swells to a point where shifting won’t keep it off anymore.

In the pauses they can hear the television in the next room, and through the glass partition comes a murmuring cheer from a crowd of quiz-masters. Every single one of them has been kissed by someone, the boy thinks. He leans in towards the girl and then veers his head down and away.

They had spent the night walking around the neighbourhood with large black circular stickers that the girl found in a magazine. They both took their digital cameras with them, so that they could take photographs of the large black circular stickers after they had placed them over corporate logos. There were only the three stickers but they made them last, lingering for a very long time outside the coffee shop until no one was walking up the street. Then the boy turned and meticulously rubbed the large black circular sticker onto the glass, blotting out the mermaid with his thumbnail and fingernail, making absolutely sure that there were no creases.

After they take their photographs they look up at the sky for several moments, half-expecting a celestial phenomenon, and as they look it feels like it’s about to happen. An odd crackling noise fills the air.

It’s easier walking back to the house, closely but not very, carefully in pace with one another as they move down the hallway of sycamores. The boy is waiting for the right moment. When it comes they’ll both know - they’ll both feel it.

But the two of them have been standing too long in the kitchen, waiting for it. There is nothing left to say, they are tired and hungry, and the boy keeps rubbing his hands on his pants and looking over his shoulder at the door.

The girl is thinking about the way it would look from the other side of the window. How it wouldn’t look quite right, the way he keeps moving towards her and then shifting his weight back onto the other foot at the last moment, the way the sweat falls from his sideburns when he rubs his hands on his pants and thinks of a new question.

She thinks about how uncinematic they look. How red her face must be. She closes her eyes and wills her pores shut, and then she straightens her back and lifts her chin slightly and opens her eyes perfectly, to compensate. He moves forward again, but then shifts his weight back onto the other foot again.

He pauses another moment before reaching for the doorknob.

‘I guess I had better -’ he starts, breaking off mid-sentence.

His left hand rests on the doorknob as he stares, paralyzed, at the girl, who is doing her perfect best to stand perfectly still and hold her eyes perfectly open, not blinking or in any way acknowledging the increasing dryness of her eyes and this sudden urge to put both of her palms into the sockets and just keep them there until he’s gone.

The pause extends and extends for maybe eleven or twelve seconds, and then the boy opens the door to go. As he steps onto the threshold he freezes, a sudden anxiety overwhelming him, and without thinking he turns and lunges in to kiss the girl and there is a violent cracking sound as his forehead meets hers.

The girl keeps her eyes perfectly open as the blood comes down into the left one, and then she leans forward and kisses the boy, smiling, and he turns away in horror and stumbles out into the dark. She is still smiling as the boy breaks into a run and promises himself that he’ll be able to forget, that he’ll kiss the next girl so quickly and confidently and meticulously that his memory will be blotted out forever.