Lipstick Coffin Nail

Lipstick Coffin Nail

By

Matt McGuire

You crashed through my back door about 3 in the morning, loaded on Bols and white with a score to settle. You pushed me aside on your way down the shifting hallway in favor of the toilet where you vomited and then fell on me like a three-day disaster.

Yes, we fucked for about an hour with you demanding to be on top, calling your ex-husband’s name like a banshee and driving your opium encrusted French nails into my chest with the force of a devil. We fucked, you came, left me unfinished, and then you rolled off me onto the pillow and slept to dream.

You awakened about 5 am and lit a cigarette with the lone candle resting on the nightstand, dropped your cherry onto my well-worn satin sheets and burned a hole all the way to the box springs. You mumbled an insincere “Quite sorry, dear” and then passed out again until 3 in the afternoon.

I came home from work to find you making Bloody Marys in the bathroom with the shower running exclusively hot water and steaming up the entire house. You had five cigarettes smoking in the white porcelain ashtray that I bought in Dubai, and you had written “Marko is a fucker” in bright red lipstick letters on the bathroom mirror. When I questioned your behavior, you slapped my face and pushed me into the bedroom for another screaming session with you on top and me unsatisfied.

Round midnight you demanded that I read you a story, so I selected a book at random from a pile in the halfdark corner where your scarlet nightie was draped across a Greek volume of the New Testament; a half-empty bottle of English gin astride it with a newly-cut red rose peeking out of the neck. I scolded you briefly for loitering once again in my ill-tended flower garden, and then proceeded to recount the first few lines of Dorian Gray. By the time the “bourdon note of a distant organ” had reached your thrice pierced earlobes, you were fast asleep and I rose to put another log on the dwindling fire and pour myself a stiff one.

You left in the night without a sound, never to return. God help me, but I do miss you.