Knives & Sea-eyes

-Eyes of my soul, are we agreed? Come to dinner Sunday; let’s relay our weeks and pains and needings.
-Ok sure, whats this medium you talk in, my art deco lover?

A table was set with candles cos candles only light up whats nearest to them so the slum beyond their lampness couldn’t be seen too much. Spark match, flame, and glare gone, gloom, a soot surrender. Entering was a lady; tall and spectrebone and jawed wideeyes. Quite renaissance. She saw little girls kill other little girls’ pretty dreams daily, but she was professional so said not much.
He was sitting, pluming match fingercaught, stemmed glass gripfisted. Acknowledgement was reluctant because sometimes her sea-eyes angered him and he wanted to hit her and sometimes he did but sometimes it was a sexual thing and he didn’t feel too bad about it.

-Hello
-Hello, I brought a knife

Pale feet nursed by coalish shoes came forward and he saw them and he saw a glint in her hands and he smiled a bit.

-Ok (said hoarse)

Sitting too she glowed in orange and heat brewed in her facesides and her heart was booming some with the painful strangeness between them, air of a dream, scene from a film. Knives were new, made it all feel new again made it all shiny, that gleam.

He didn’t tell her he'd tried it, nearly, with a girl who was too young for all this maybe, not by law but really by common sense - you could tell by the feeling of pity you would get if you had seen them together, she was just small and beauty in miniature, so really a bit twee because all mini pretty things are.
But it hadn’t worked that time cos she had scared off and ran, but all the blood that sprang out of her made her weak and her little limbs buckled and that picture was so slow in his head, her fall under arced lunarlight and whenever he thought it; his wolf-run to her and a jeep to a hospital and the tire-tar-screech when he burned rubber when he reversed straight away leaving her floorbound and scarred for a long long time, all slumped, deadish, in front of a gleaming hospital door, all washed in white light and neon and the blood in her hair quite clotted and her fluttereyes...
Well, so what, people go and come, she should have stayed, not run like an animal uncaged cos then he wouldn’t have felt confused and violent.

He thought he might like the tall lady because of her eyes, they changed colour.

Wine was poured. Not expensive wine, red and thick, pretty in candleglare by her mobile eyes and hair a bit long and splitting.

He never ever really wondered if that little thing was ok, but why would he, as men come he wasn’t loving. And sea-eyes knew it and accepted it because her romanticism had been warped years ago by someone jealous.

As the flat was unbedroomed a mattress unsheeted lay like a kicked dog in a corner, in gloom that was good really. From the wine she got more OK inside and she had relief that kind of made her seaeyes melt, and a bit her sense, because maybe if she hadn’t already got barefoot and quietly intriguing, he wouldn’t have roused from his unacknowledgement, but he did. Though really he might have done when he saw the knife shine like a plea for skin when it got caught by light in its place by her dark shoes.

He had led her to bed, the bed smelt sour and perfumey and like a stale person in a nice way, and like blood and cruelty in a sinister way. And she thought how it was weird that probably no girl can ever really not find a mans face foreign with its stubble scratch and smell of water and human.

And he reached to that knife with a heartbang, and she wriggled, and he panicked, cos he couldn’t let her get away! Like those boys you might - they are a certain type of boy definitely - see on holiday in hot places trying to grab lizards that run across walls, and they have sweaty hands and desperation and this weird scary manic look in their eyes that you cant be sure of- whether its fear cos they want the thing so much, or fear cos their power is a bit challenged, and they see all they’ve ever known about strength come crashing like an obese baby balancing on a feather. Or maybe its just the fear of having something so small seem so desperate to escape and wiggling like a maniac and they know they could kill it palmdown and its horrifying.

She had thought it might be exciting cos he was all brooding and not very fiery, so maybe little scratches would breathe something into him that meant he would pay her attention and she wouldn’t feel stupid anymore, or a bit shameful, when she woke up and remembered how she had lounged all blurry and winesmeared provocative, try emulate some pin up all macabre, but he had just ignored and played with skin around his nailchewed fingers. When she thought of these moments her cheekbones always flamed and she had to plunge her head into the crook of her arm and squeeze her eyes and say No No No!

In the end it was OK, cos she realised when she saw his face look like those little boys’ faces that she should just stay still so she did and he took off her skirt but left on the rest, and she thought things that she cant remember now. But she can only actually remember his grunt and ice cuts, and stickiness’s which she couldn’t differentiate or see, cos the candles were only in the distance and they left swelling glandular patterns like paint on the wall that she concentrated on.

He was fumbling cos he was a bit excited, more than normal anyway, but she was unwieldy he thought, and she was kind of passive which he liked a lot, but he didn’t know always how to manipulate her suddenly monstrously long limbs and heavy torso, but he worked it out with his sweaty palms. But then it got worse when they got bloody too. And it was all heightened and she felt like leather inside and he felt like it wasn’t real, like she was an old tired courtesan, which he didn’t like cos then he felt boyish and silly.

When he finished he lay on top of her for a bit letting crimson cream dry between them, not out of closeness or anything like that but more out of tiredness and he was quite hungry and he wanted to pin her down too. She felt a bit sick and had a headache like really hard moths, mothbullets, in her skull from the heat and the wine and the candle patterns that she thought got more grotesque all the time as it got more guttered and waxy, and her tongue was like a heavy dead pig tongue and her skin was like really tight thick plastic sheeting, like what they have in abattoirs.

When she had been younger, messy mass of curls and curves, she was quite innocent and soft. Her parents were divorced and she was brought up in a house of girls, with perfume and trinkets and silk and overemotional screaming. Aftershave was not something she was accustomed to. And she’d often dance through nights with boys she didn’t really know, but it was nice to whirl in a ghostdream and feel like something from a story maybe. And then someone had fallen in love with her, very very in love, and he had scared her thin with proclamations and threats. And when he saw her kiss Jack Scarlett at under a raining sky he killed Jack and she vowed never to let someone love her again.

He got up and passed her her shoes and spat on a towel for her then went to another room and said nothing to her. She wiped herself down a bit, but kind of half heartedly, and she put her shoes on and her skirt, left the knife and she moved into embracing candles and out again to the door and into night time. A cold night time with smells of woodburn and petrol, sirens swallowing darkness with blue flashes, september smell of old warmth and anticipation. Under a moon trapped sky she stumbled then she ran careering like an earthbound bat down the street with no streetlamps and she didn’t look back at his window that had darkened cos he had licked his fingers and pinched out the candles. She ran hard, blooded and frail and alive with blood streaming, both out and in and through.

Her feet stopped when she noticed the dizziness and burning shins. Breath coming like thunder and sea-eyes dancing merry, and she didn’t put her head in the crook of her arm and moan No No No, but she look skyward and said nothing, but silent acknowledgement of her unreturning. Her freedom to not return.

From then on she told little girls not to kill other little girls pretty dreams,
-Because, she said, because pretty dreams are very necessary for avoiding some pains.