murderer

The night had been coming for the past two hours. It had come and slowed itself and twisted itself like it was snarled and shaken—-shake it out, lass. It was dark, then. And it looted. He had told her, earlier, he would go to death. After, he said. Now he laid, his hands together. The night takes things from her body. She is an alien. She wears tight space suits and walks in long dramatic steps and she has antennas and she does experiments to him and makes him want to walk to death. Or ride. His hands are tempted and sweated and the small parts of her back—-those parts are not human. She could not be a human. She does experiments with him and looks at him like the other girls don’t look at him, not like that—-not then.

He begins to think that he has missed the train and he would have to walk or sleep in his uncle’s basement and his uncle is on a mean drinking binge. His uncle is on a mean twelve year drinking binge: kept and urged and strained by the ins and outs of an unjust saddened heart—-he is in the pits of a tempered and tame existence. His uncle once put his hand through a windshield. His uncle was angry and round in the face—-he gets round in the face when he is drunk and impaled into the past deviled women (she stilled, in white). It is then that his uncle will say howler things: it is then, sometimes, that his uncle is a monkey.

‘I have missed the train. I will have to walk.’ He thinks and he is sure that he will not go to his uncle’s basement and she is in her suit now, again in her suit, zipped and patient. She has her chin on her fingers on his chest and she looks at him and it is like she does not breathe. She is an alien, he thinks again and now he is sure of it, even though it is darkened and hollowed and she is unseen in part. ‘I must get to death.’ He thinks again, and taunts the alien.

“You will take me?” He asks her, all of a sudden, but she does not twitch. Aliens do not twitch when they are shocked and taken by surprise. Aliens look back and say things that make the others think that they are alone, here and there.

“Yes.” She says. “I will take you to the train and if we have missed the train, I will walk with you there and I will not stop you.”

“Oh.” He says and decides that now he must go. He is caved and soiled and emptied, then. He is caved and the back and forth of the tantrums return to rid him of the blanket nested pills: he will not burst, yet. He is in shakes and he has held water—she will not see the bleeded and haunted street urchin turned in on itself: bitten, pierced and logged by its own poison.

That is for me.


[s]