(flicker)
a/n: lyrics courtesy of the god-like Lou Reed.
r&r, bitzches.
3
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…The perfume burned his eyes
Holding tightly to her thighs
And something flickered for a minute
And then it vanished and was gone…
He reminded her of broken department store mannequins and plastic ken dolls, the way he lay sprawled out over the bare mattress. Just a pile of bones and flesh rotting away in the moonlight, his lanky bare legs twisted in sheets and sweat, closed up in some cheap room that had seen better days and prettier things...the man slept like death.
She could never tell what he was thinking, dreaming. Especially on nights like these when the softness of the dark made everyone feel too much at ease. He moved languidly through the darkened streets in some forgotten daze… they made love clumsily and touched like children… and he dreamed hard.
The grey-green waves threw themselves upon rotted docks. Don't get too close to it, they warned. Thick oily liquid carrying trash and waste and god knows what else spilling up on rocky beaches. You weren't supposed to swim in it, though on some days it looked alright.
But to her, to her the sea was air. Her life-source. He used to think she was some kind of mermaid-creature who had given up her tail in exchange for legs. She moved like water, elongated fingers that traced his face and cupped his half-moon cheeks in hands that always smelled like water… soft, with the ability to wash away tears.
She said one day they'd go to Ganymede, where the water was clean and beautiful in most parts. They took care of their sea; you can fish in it, eat whatever comes out of it without worry. You can stand on the beach where the waves lap up on shore, and be unable to discern the water from the sky- not because of the yellowing smog- but because both were such an endless, unearthly, blue. She said one day, we'll go to Ganymede. We'll leave this garbage bag city. This sinking city.
To her the sea was air.
She'd take him down to the sea on days when the sun peeked through the cloud forms enough so that it was warm and bright and green things seemed to glow. Sometimes she'd cry. She told him about holes in the sky that made the sun dangerous, but the sea could never kill you like that. They'd stand on the beach where the rocks cut into their bare feet but they never really minded, not when the foam crashed onto tired legs and she'd laugh… oh, she would laugh. Her laugh was like the sea foam, the waves, the thunder, sometimes it was water trickling into rocks... he would never forget his mothers laugh. How they'd throw themselves into the waves, kick water, scream when they couldn't feel the bottom.
They'd leave when their skin burned red from the sun, and still they'd laugh, I have a lobster for a son, oh, she'd cry. Her fingers rubbed lotion on his peeling back, skin flaking away and leaving soft pink spots like a disease that ate away at you slowly. But it'd go away in a few weeks. Maybe from the lotion. Maybe from her touch.
He dreamed of her laugh, of sunburns, of dying oceans. When his name was something else, something long forgotten and useless to him now, when his hands were too tiny and too small to reach around the cold steel handle of a gun. He dreamed of times when blood could be kissed away, and no wound was deep enough not to be erased by salt-water hands.
She was always gone in the morning, and he could never tell just when she took off, only that she was gone. She took off in the heat, when night faded into grey morning and the two were indistinguishable. All he knew was that he dreaded the sunrise, when the light crept in through makeshift drapes and he could feel even before opening his eyes that she was gone. Back to her own room- or did she go to Him?- where she would wash the remnants of him off of her and fall into her own dreamless sleep if the day allowed it.
But she'd come to him afterwards. Like water she'd seep into the folds of his body, the spaces between his bones and his flesh, her flesh now. She was the sea and he was the sky, indistinguishable from one another, layers of skin and something underneath that pulsed through their bloodstreams and awoke something long forgotten in each of them. She could feel his heart beating in her womb. They were one and the same.
"You were born on Ganymede" He told her, and kissed her fingertips, "I'm going to take you back there someday."
"You know I was born on this shithole Mars."
"No." He replied, "You were born of the sea. It's in your veins, in your eyes. I can taste it on you." He thought of the painting, the woman in a shell birthed of the waves. How the angels greeted her, but he knew there were no angels in this garbage bag city. Just smog and children trembling beneath the flesh of demons, that's all they were.
"We'll leave this place... it'll be like watching a dream."
She smiled, touched the lily skin beneath his eyes, touched the calluses on his fingertips, kissed his wounds away. He thought her touch could save him from some dying froth, some disease birthed of the sun and the waves- but her tears were never that pure. And neither was he.
He is so much a child, she thought, and pressed his head to her trembling breast. She saw him as the naked little boy, shaking from beneath the fist of himself. He saw her as the woman with the eyes of the sea, staring back at him through folds of glass caught between the layers.
He sculpted her from the sand and dirt and violence, and he came from inside of her.
So maybe there was hope there, hope that brought the tears to wash away sin. Maybe there was redemption.
And so maybe salvation rested inside of them, bleeding into them, and washing out the blood of monsters.
Something flickered for a minute
Then it vanished and was gone…