Kiss Me, Judas

And my life went to pieces, like a love letter in the rain.

Which do you prefer, she says. Sex or Violence? I try to smile. What's the difference, really.

Disappear, she says. I love that word.

I am so stupid, so easily fooled. It's really almost funny. If I could lift a finger I would gladly kill myself.

He has the expression of someone who wishes the rain would stop.

I crouch beside her bed and stumble through the only prayer I know: now I lay me down to sleep and pray the Lord my soul to keep. It's a appropriate, I think. And still I feel worthless. I want to comfort her, to chase her fears into the snow. But sympathy is buried in me, like a stone in the belly of a goat. And the goat is the rare animal that will eat garbage. I hold her hand until she falls asleep, then steal fifty dollars from her purse.

It's been too long since I sat so close to a woman and my first impulse is to move away.

I think of animals in cages, pressed close against each other.

my life comes apart like a love letter in the rain.

My face is still marked with Henry's blood and I bend over this boy as if I'm taking a drink from a fountain in the park. I brush his nearly dead lips and they are dry as the back of my hand. His tongue barely touches mine and pulls away like a thief and oh Lucy if you had only asked me for this.

...because there is nothing so arousing as fear and submission and the threat of violence.

I stare at Isabel without blinking. I stare until I can see the pale roots of her natural hair and the expensive skin cream that changed her skin from milk to olive and the colored lenses that gave her yellow eyes and I wonder how she changed her breasts and ass and shortened her legs. I stare at her until her eyes are pointed and her teeth glitter like fangs and I have to close my eyes. If she said her name was Lucy and she faked her death I would believe her.

The urge to flee is a high-pitched whistle and I stare into a black cavity of space that stinks of urine and dead flowers. Of rotting oranges and leather and spray paint. I crawl into the space and find a corner. I stare into the shadows and I see several corpselike figures, coiled in burlap sacks around me. Sleeping drunks with the faces of dogs, of horses. I blink and they’re not there.

I must be dead for there is nothing but blue snow and the furious silence of a gunshot.

I can even hear the sun. It sounds like a jet taking off in the middle of the night.