Been in my kitchen thinking. Through sunlight in the window and through the growing shadow. Sunlight on the countertop. Planet around the sun.

- For decoration, offers Ariel.

He's got big sad eyes...they wear you out. He's like the cat named New Cat in the poop-box saying, ya, well, you let me in, pally. Flutter, flutter.

- You're dead, I tell him, as if this information might somehow advance our cause.

He shimmers, translucent, the lunar shrapnel of half a lonely memory. I'm a snowman on the moon.

And his sadness has become more exorbitant in recent months. He works the broken shaving razor into his skin as thoughtfully as young breeders plan breathlessly towards the marriage, breathlessly against the marriage, fingers thin and overripe, like gelatine: you can smell the fear and need, the lonely yellow house of it all. He's killing himself, with patience. Like he used to do, when living.

His hair relaxes, drips. His chest drips. He drips. The look on his face is immense. He's a mess.

- O you fucking fag! I say (I mean he is, was), you're getting blood all over the sheets!

It's not like your not warned it's hard. But, Jesus, it's been like walking in on a planet taking its light off, one leg at a time.

One moment they're cheering you out of the cupboard. The next moment they're writing you out of the constitution.

All said, we're fickle.

It's time for it to end. And yet I can't.

- You have to fuck me, he explains, looking.

The stereo's bouncing bubbly, moody, champagneless, rootless synth. Playstation blips, pings, pops, fuzzes, fissures, a nice kind of vacation whitenoise, the kind your cock floats on, soap in the green sea, ass on a beach-side terrace, til early morning and sheet-twists at the ankles. He winces, scrunches his eyes at his next run with the razor. His gaze has grown so tired.

Gashes on his chest, back when he was alive this was a bi-monthly or so activity which he affectionately termed “cutting.” His razor applied like a lipstick much loved. He's made a girlfriend of his pain.

I hate this.

- Honey, I say again, the friggin sheets.

His eyes glint.

- You have to fuck me.

I look at him which is as much to say huh. He's dead after all.

- Because, despite shit, you're really horny, he explains.

Fair enough. He's got me there.

His dick all dirtied in cemetery and a hopelessness I can't quite say.

- Your mouth has done nothing better since.

Left with any time on my hands, my mouth moves pretty much around the probability of a nuclear bomb. That's about where I'm at. We're alone amongst ourselves, fractals, we distrust ourselves, we dislike the others. I sketch him sometimes, when his ghost's not around. They are just doodles. The circlets of his eyes, supple mouth repeating at small and smaller intervals, overlapping and getting complicated. I am obsessed with fractals as I'm obsessed with the Earth's final death. Jaundiced fuzzy edges. How far can one dot stray from the other dots before we really, literally begin to die of it?

I die of it. It's a shitty drug, crack, but easy to come by, and I've sort of been being a dumbass these days. You know, giving in. Sleepwalking through doing dishes as if I'm bound there, then returning to a small rock in the bowl. Sucked the cock of this scared dealer kid while the guy who was buying for us beat off. Behind a van, on some concrete stairs, ears primed for sirens. He couldn't climax, ran off. Which, at the bar, incidentally, he had promised he wouldn't do.

Ariel sits on the edge of a light, so busy.

Our whole kitchen smells of burning plastic now cuz of the last bowl. Like the room gave birth to a new asshole while I sat at the table, thinking.

I have nursed myself with H, special K, booze, but none of it has the effect it once had. I am acutely aware of an overall waning. The What Next! of military strikes, not even gore magazines entertain me as much anymore.

He's shivering, my ghost and friendly sleaze, my hazy boundaries, my Jesus. The cocktail dress, evening gloves of grody mutilation up his skinny, passive torso. That's what he used to do, cut himself totally naked on our bed. Had whole wars going on inside his body. A confused blotch. And kept sending the troops in.

His pecker tastes salty, clammy, smooth against my tractless mouth. He spreads, a lazy swan about to be beheaded. I'm horny in that anxious crack way. Totally inappropriate. My undead boyfriend and all I want to do is fuck him in any way, shade or form. It's not, you know, like prayers.

I fuck the ghosts of lovers not, I don't think, out of any particularly natural inclination--nor disinclination . . . but because I am not sure what else they were good for. Fodder for recruitment? Bunch of toughs jiggling their balls outside neighbourhoods while police keep theirs nominally holstered. I'm a good citizen but I want to taste The Unfathomable Truth. I aspire to be defenceless before its committee.

He pulls the frosty hair over his eyes, fawning over his razor-work like a young mom.

- You fucking twat, he says, smiling small, get some down your throat.

I do, gag. Pull the waistline of my pants and gotch down so he can see the blood rushing to my stubby, blunting pecker. He slides across the topmost of my throat, mucous-silken, lily wet, a mermaid.

His hand moves to touch.

Ariel never got much older than thirteen. That's the way he looks, goose-pimpled from his cuts, his nettled pubic bush, thin build, the bone showing. Sitting much the way of the other kids in class, little do you know.

He runs his hands under my balls, cups my dick, the shivers there, light and foggy. Rubs with only three fingers, little, little strokes. Light as the past, discontinuous as memory, gone and unmoored. I'm sucking, slurping, mouth full of gob.

He moans, his legs startled a bit.

He squeezes his tits. The blood frees. He's cut himself mostly above them, lightly then deep. How great it would be, in this way, to die with the flow of it.

- Ah, he moans, sharper. And as his belly, toes and nipple convulse, my mouth is filled with his viscous, embittered sea of him.

- Kiss me pretty lady, he says, still shaking, raising me up, grinning like it hurts.

Gunshot eyes. Gently accept me out of my life. I stand before him, my pants just down below my dick, the band of my pants tense, licking my lips, breathing.
He's still beating me off, a little.

We have teddy bears on the shelves. Guns and roses albums. Play sheriff's handcuffs. Domestic scenery tragedied and meaningful.

I kiss him and he takes my tongue, tastes his ethereal residue. Urging at my shoulders, homo and present.

- Baby want to play dead too? coos.

He mouths the words like they mean more than they mean. The End, nada. But we're patriots of death. We keep lining up for it.

- Dead, baby?

To which I retort,

- Dead babies, dead babies, dead babies.

We both laugh. There's nothing funnier than dead babies. Now that we're head to head I go full on with him. Ariel has a nervous, dried snail for a tongue, always retreating a little, drives me nutso. My heart's always dying for some reason. A little always.

He moves closer, to touch my face, to think me away out of life with him. I shudder, look, run my fingers through his hair, lock a grip at the back as if I'm forbidding him to go. Go down on his nipples, the sparse patch of hair on his breasts, the blood, the bush.

- Like kissing a friggin tampon, I laugh.

The thing with crack is your high comes down supra fast. My nerves and patience are permanently jangled. I hate everything for stretches. I have to check my head minute by minute. What have I done? Where have I gone? How long will it take to repair? We're so used of trying to lift ourselves towards happiness. But what of these few beautiful moments like when a happy thing falls.

He runs his hand up his own chest, finger-painting blood. Staring at me with buzzing holes for eyes. Composed, pleased.

- I hate it, he says.

- What do you hate?

- I hate It.

- You're such a child, I say, breaking away. I slap him right where he cuts himself, lightly. Watch the splash of pain brace and overtake.

He is, even now, more real than any of them.

His mouth pauses momentarily in fake orgasmic “ow.” Wipes his fingers on his bush and slight belly, leaving lipstick traces. Trails. Like there's a way back.

- You're a prick, he throws back, pulling me into kneeling position.

His lips are inches from my mouth. He's bowed like crows.

- Tell me you hate it, he demands.

He brushes the razor lightly over my shoulder.

- I know you do, he says, then falls silent. Blade flirtatiously grazing above the bone.

My eyes fall shut. I'm grabbing my hard on.

- I hate it, I hear myself say, breathless, pumping.

He lets the razor sink.

- Ow you fucking ass!

He hovers over my body, his eyes just gleaming. His smile aroused and warm. Pushing me down on the floor, climbing on.

Dying or fighting it, it's not a dissimilar impulse.

He winces when I touch his cuts. It's killing me, not even softly. I beat fast for only seconds and cum all over the front of my pants.

He nuzzles to lick the wound he's made. All slutty, happy, kittenish. After a moment, I bring his head back, look into his unembedded eyes where there is only sky and childhood. I never know what's behind that. They kiss, decisively, tasting my blood.

- Mew, says.

Without breaking the kiss, he slides down my pants to my knees, and pulls me up on the bed.

We kiss and nibble, ear-lobes, throat, pure fantasies of sensorium, of being in our bodies, of not wanting to leave. I caress the battlefield of his own, his cuts and wastelands, like casualties, a sopping inner anger. I lick my finger. Inside his ass it is eager and warm.

Inside his ass I search for the heartbeat. His core.

My mouth leaves his and gets to his chin, pausing only to kiss and lick his cuts with a flick of tongue until his shudders become tense overall writhing.

Even the ghost of boys, I don't know what better they were good for.

I smell the scent of him on my finger. Take his cock's head, stroke just around the top. Then I slip down to bury my face in his neck, my nose is in his hair, his brief little shimmer. My lips sucking up his loose skin, thin and slimy, his death clothes, tongue flicking up and down the blood dribbles. He gets hard again fast and I taste the feel little salt bead between my thumb and fingers.

I feel the razor tracing gently down on me again, this time my spine. His hand massages my ass now, just rimming the hole.

I'm feeling weird again. My breathing is heavy, I don't want to say it.

- Ariel, give me one good reason to keeping going because I'm going out of my fucking mind alone here.

On all fours, pants around my ankles. He jabs his cock towards the hole in me, making pretend miffed noises. I know I might die with him this time.

I suck in tight like my black, black hole, and twitch ever so lightly, feeling my ass cheeks being parted ever so slightly, and the world collapsing underneath and in gushing diarrhoeal waves of clean sea.

He pauses only once, saying,

- But we make most excellent decorations.

And we do. The casually acquired bookshelves. The fractured animal noise of me and him as he takes me deeper and deeper away from an Earth upset with itself, haemorrhaging the remainders. If they could remain, with us, naked back above my spread bum-cheeks and knees, the bony strain ramming through my spine and in my mouth and the tingles in my brain going and my scent thickening about the room, then there would be better forms of torture, I think, than this. Dying for a lack of a future. Dying torn from the past. Looking for a kiss. Honey. O honey.

 

© 2004 Ryan Kamstra - Contributor's Bio