I know this one. The older guy. Your brothers best friend. The husband you babysit for. The business suit guy on the train. He makes you feel invisible even when you stop wearing so much fucking white.
He's the starving artist in this dimension; He, living in my house with the skin of a boy and the voice of a man, and he is covered in lesions from moaning with his dick in his hands. The sound punches his boy skin, like a young alien birthing from his ribcage. The head breeches and he calls himself an astronaut, because he's not ready to be a father.
He wears white socks up to his ankles in the manner of a stoner without a job. Tall glasses of milk, and each step he is spilling over and I have to tie my hair in knots around the pipes under the bathroom sink to stop myself from lapping it up from the floor like a little kitten. I'm more of a rat now, with my nails uncut and yellow, hair caught in old soap, heady urine stained in spider arms down the white seat. The fat roaches swarm like music box ballerinas.
Like God, I hear his voice splitting mountains, and like God, I've never seen his face, because like Eve, my eyes are infected with paradise, and fruit flies. I see the back of his head poking around the refrigerator under a spotlight, the brown moths burrowing in his hair. I think he is made of silk inside, and they want to eat his mind alive.
I know this one. I watched it in fifth grade on a TV too small for thirty girls in one room. The lady on the screen our surrogate mother, sitting us down about hormones lodged in our pink tissue like emeralds in a quarry. Her hair was long and brown.
Eve's apple core stuck in our throats as we watched Hitchcock with his veiny sausage fingers choking around our necks. We watched our deaths dribble thick down the screen, and it was a horror film I wasn't meant to see, it was a creature feature at 10 years old and coiled vampire bat snouts in folds of skin we hadn't even touched before. I wanted to reach in side and touch the red horned ram beyond the static aether, the upside down pentacle beneath the still flesh sea of my belly.
Her lips are pink as the ruby buds of plump eggs she says are inside us, and says Mother Nature is an artist, and she planted girls to grow, girls to bloom. But Mother Nature is drunk on gasoline, and there is a difference between blooming and exploding, and I learned that living 6 years with my ovaries between my molars to keep their grenade triggers on lock. And they don't shimmer like gems, they just glisten with blood.
I clean up the pieces of tobacco and licorice falling like tears, growing in raised mushroom fairy circles around his feet. I hide in my room with the door always ajar cause I want to hear him creak the floor of the kitchen and turn on the light with his soft spinal surgeon fingers. It pours over his face like angel saliva. I'm too shy to look in his eyes.
He's got a brother who takes boxing lessons from ghosts where the uniform is a white sheet, and a mother living in a rabbits den braiding dandelions into her hair. His father is somewhere lost in the war, and he wants to cry about it but he just uproots my moms lavender plants, and curses at the sky, and straps Kevlar around his heart. And sure I've never been in love, but don't think love is a bullet to the heart, I think it's surviving a bullet to the heart and letting your capillaries grow around the metal like morning glory vines. I think he is afraid to live for it, for something not himself. I think he's so rough inside from looking for someone soft enough to be a tulip for him.
I try to be. I wear white, I open the buttons where the skin is dewy enough to make him want to touch, I wander in the garden in bare feet.
Summer creeps into my room through the screen door carrying the smell of pollen, and copper sound of crickets, and humidity sticky between my fingers like after he sticks two inside you, and the hallucinations of fireflies that are really just distant searchlights because this is Los Angeles and there is no light here but the neon gushing of pulsing hearts. The summer sticky, unwanted but warm. Doesn't love you, just likes that you're warm. Like a sad dog slipping under the sheets. Like a sad boy with his heart in pieces, sticking out of his skin like the teeth of a graveyard. He cocoons his bat wings around me.
I wish it was him. I wish it was him.
The dog from the house next door burrows holes under the fence, and she is always shaking because her heart is so small, my mother refuses to waste heat on the cold of June gloom. She rattles in, her nails clack and our dog Vick puts her whole head in his mouth. She's in heat, and she's red and swollen and he smells it on her. Vick climbs her even though her heart can't take him.
At the grocery store we buy fruit and eggs for sponge cake, and mom tells me the man with boy skin saw Vick fucking the small dog. She laughs, toying with the ruby skin of a grapefruit, and my stomach goes as bitter as that grapefruit tastes, my cheeks royal flush with garnet gems from that quarry. The dark one, far below my heart, full of dead mining men. The one so far below heaven.
The little dogs red grapefruit sex smell wafts from some wet corner, from something rancid behind the stacks of canned goods, making me sick with the citric acid boiling in witches brew, devils cauldron (eye of girl, tail of empty slut, lizards leg, wing of bat). It cooks in me until I boil, and the horned ram bleats and bleeds under my belly button. The devil breeds me for motherhood, and so I raise hell.
This linoleum and fluorescent light is white with lies, and in death I will lie beneath both.
I wake up at 6 am to the sound of his war cries, everything still cold, my eyes bruising at the touch of light. I tread baby skin while he stomps in the kitchen yelling on the phone, and when my legs squeeze together I pretend I'm just cold, I pretend I can't take the centipede of his voice crawling up under my white dress. Swearing rust and spitting blood into soil of coffee grounds in the compost bowl. His blood grows strange plants, growing the dead from their graves, their arms rotting flesh flowers from the earth.
They birth from folds of my bed sheets split open gushing blood. I go willingly, and they don't even take me anywhere.
I feel two sticky fingers milking me for my orgasm, I feel the flesh flowers palming me with sticky red pollen, sinking nails into my wrists, bringing the taste of cum and blood to their lips and chewing off their fingers whole.
They make me deep throat something else. Maybe it's another hand, maybe it's a stomach pump for all the milk and fermented grapefruit I'm drunk on. Maybe it's a gun. Maybe it's the boy skin man taking his throne in hell amongst the ruby demon children he bore with the neon blood of his mouth, with his boy parts stretching my lips into a grin.
I ask him to call me an angel, but my mouth is stuffed full, and he misunderstands, and he slaps my face and he calls me a whore.
It's summer now after all, the air is on fire now after all. And everybody's jumping in the sea, everybody's swallowing too much crystal chlorine. Everybody wants to drown in summer. How else do you escape the heat?
The little dog leaves dirt paw marks on my bed. I leave blood stains from between my legs. She gets her uterus removed. I get my birth control prescription on Thursday after school.
