Blue Peepshow

His name is nothing. Perhaps it matters, or maybe it doesn't. In this hybridized instance, this laid-bare world has granted him a crack of light, and he's come to accept labeling opportunities as a right of reason. He finds a fissure in the plastered wall of suite 16A, the peeping source? Animalistic reactions hold his fingers by their tips as they graze past a hairline fracture in this all-seeing (no denying) window into her frame.

He lowers both hasty hazel eyes to catch a glimpse.

A room infused with colors of burnished lavender and cyan, embossed hues as if they're kept there by force. There's no carpet, just pale concrete. Within this room, a woman with the smoothest ivory skin sits on a low stool with a cigarette braced in the soft vise of her mouth, unlit for now. The filter rests on the closed gate of her teeth. She is not waiting. She is practicing the act of not waiting, as if time were his muse and she'd only speak if he could remember her fucking name.

He was never meant to see this. He was never meant to see her. The crack deepens with his attention, or he imagines it does, widening its pupil (as his dilate) to quench the thirst of what it thrives on. He smells vulnerability, yet the bluebell canary in this cobalt mine is still unaware of his presence.

She touches her cheekbone as if testing the edge of her own face, then draws the cigarette out with two strumming fingers. The ember is like a cool thought waiting for proper elocution. She tilts her head. He cannot see her eyes, but he knows she is looking at something just beyond his slit of vision. A piece of chalk sits beside her bare ankle.

Chalk, in a room like this? "Sign language is enough, darlin, show me more" he mutters.

He wants to ask what she's planning to draw on four faceless walls, nothing kind, nothing withstanding. The woman inhales, holds, ghosts her exhale into a ring that finds the azure ceiling, and smoke hovers above her like Chinese Whispers. The silver skintight bodysuit says it all; she exists for some semblance of satisfaction, perhaps his? Is she a working girl?

He tells himself he's not in love. He's never in love, it's just lust.

She speaks as if reciting to an audience inside the hazy, quiet freneticism of cabin fevered captivity. “The first man ends,” she says, “when the second woman remembers it.” The words travel clean through the crack and enter his ear as if his skull were attuned to some strange frequency. Her voice is low, unhurried, and assured.

An intuitive F-L-A-S-H of light sparks somewhere to her left—in tandem with the rapid pulse of what seems like her heart. No wires on her, no monitor, at least none he can see. The room may be the patient. The room may be the brain, and she the cerebellum curse or cure. The cigarette is a metronome. The ember tick-tick-ticks away seconds like they're washing in hours.

He leans closer, and somehow the crack grows large enough for him to enter this curatorial space.

He's always been a voyeur. In childhood, the crack of the pantry door where his mother wept into cupped, unwed-locked hands. In adolescence, the gap between the school bathroom and that cubicle where a girl avowed and disavowed with boys cheering each other on. In early manhood, the grainy pixels of a forbidden camera feed on a stranger’s phone, depicting privacy on demand. Now, he's face-to-face with her, and his feet are frozen to stark ground.

She is watching him with intent, yet she continues inhaling and exhaling her cigarette. Habitual motivations die hard.

He wants to apologize for intruding, but he doesn't. "Typical," she quips, she douses the bleeding edge of her cigarette with two, inflexible fingers and tosses it behind her head. He wants to introduce himself, but she presses those same two fingers, soaked in ash, to his blue-tinged lips. The temperature dropped, but when? He's shivering, clad in an overcoat, yet she's oddly immune to the fluctuation.

The woman tilts her chin sideways, her face is flawless. Fine features, demure browbone. Nothing is dramatic about the way she looks, which is to say, EVERYTHING is dramatic in the way her skin makes a stage for capri reflection. He eyes the unusual color of hers: dark irises, blanketed by navy or a slipstream of tonal blends, awash with chatoyant blues amid the black. He'd never seen anything like them.

She grips the back of his neck with a firm hand, licking his cheeks and nose in upward strokes with bravado. "I'm the prize, and the consequence, of all the girls you loved and lied to," she mouths.

He feels her taciturn breath before her lips swallow his, and the world folds inward on its hinges as life and death hinge on her mirrored discipline. He's kneeling now, in some vain attempt at courting mercy. She moves around him with the patience of a priestess anointing a sacrificial lamb, tracing sigils UP and DOWN his bare neck with calculated aptitude. Every woman he’s known rises behind her, they're speaking = he's silenced. His once-slithered tongue belongs to this temple now, shaped for invocation.

The arctic room dissolves into subliminal paste. Walls bleed into concrete, turning to salt and silt. Cool shades of an atmospheric color wheel run red hot as this "is it real?!" fever dream climaxes. She's still lip-locked, and her saliva stings. The saddled fabric of clothing on his back unseams itself with ease, even his leather boots disassemble like disassociation kicks. He’s weightless and naked, suspended in (dis)belief.

The world? Now a wound. Ten, twenty, thirty, so many more women appear.

Retribution was always watching.

(c) Edward Swafford 2025

***Title image by Magapls. from Pexels.