Fire on the Other Side

It's been half an hour, and the skinny punk kid is still striking matches and throwing them one by one, lit, under the bathroom door.  The crackling little bursts of flame play counterpoint to the dull thump of his two fists battering the metal, but the door doesn't open and the girls don't emerge.  (One shorter than the other and with bigger breasts, both wearing their dilated pupils ringed with caked-on layers and layers of paint, both sniveling and wiping their nostrils—he can't stand the idea of them coming out looking like that.  But he can't very well just leave her in there, can he?)

They've been swallowed up, maybe they've swallowed each other up for good this time, and he can feel the pressure of her cold fingers teasing a line across the other one's ribcage, can hear their heartbeats race louder with every intake of strung-out breath, can smell the sweat and the saliva, all there within the crevices of his own feverishly hazy brain.  Whether he's cut out for this no longer really seems to be the point, but as he rams himself hard against the door he wonders what is actually getting broken down here: him or it?  Not her, obviously, when any drug pulsating through her body sends her spiraling upward in a spastic frenzy of euphoric kisses.

Either way, he wants in.

***

A mad dash, then pleas and pounding. She never wants their nights to end this way, but she bolts when he starts to smother her with those x-ray eyes.  Like clockwork, like a greyhound chasing a stuffed hare around the track.  Bam!—gone.  It's not so much the high she's after as the satisfaction that comes with knowing how he'll disapprove: the sticky chaos of rapture, pleasure, all tangled up with the thin whine of his lament.  She can't quite shake the sense that if he's going to insist on acting like her father, he might actually deserve to be treated like him.

 
***

The veiny pair of biceps that is dragging him across the threshold and hurtling his skinny body onto the curb isn't listening to him repeat the story of how he retched his heart out onto the floor begging her to open up before he finally yanked the knob from the door and went flying six feet backward into the DJ booth.  Getting the girls out may be damn near impossible now, and he's not welcome any longer—not welcome in their world of black and white and throbbing lights.

So with more internal bleeding than the bruises would have you believe, he wanders past East Broadway through a somber maze of Chinese graffiti and discarded pizza plates.  At noon she'll drag her pasty limbs through the door of their apartment, flop down moaning on the futon he cocooned for her with potted cactuses and purple desert flowers on the day she told him how she missed the West, and stretch her arms out overhead.  She'll arch her back, moaning something about dehydration or how fully last night's music fed her soul.

Of course he'll know what really makes her tick.

.
~

words: Suzanne Marie Hopcroft , NY (homepage)
image: 'Eos' - Dorothee Lang, Germany (blueprint21)

~

another place on fire: New Season of Drought (#8)