Whispers from Venus' Grave

The young lady in the memorial park is your best companion, so you take her domestic. The night is a bruise between you, a smudge of rebel in the traveler window; the colour of natural product cleared out out to putrefy. The body pries at her seatbelt, a finger, at that point two. The radio echoes inactive, the body rearranges in her situate. You consider the confront; the comparative cut of jaw, the nose bumped from where a baseball had hit her at twelve, fair somewhat off middle. The skin like a rain-licked plastic sack. The stink of musk and sulfur. You need to see absent but you cannot. She's so lovely, indeed like this. Your headlights rake chattered openings through the soil street, a yellow like jaundice. Your hands are firm from the cold, your lips split. The young lady close to you is dead and you are bringing her home.

Four days back you’d ventured into a equipment store and risen with a scoop durable sufficient to lift a life on. Four days you’d went through burrowing soil in your claim patio yard until soil muddied beneath your fingernails and whimsical gaps part cultivate beds like the mouths of covetous mammoths. Until you may filter through soil with your eyes closed, with a hand bound. Four evenings you had laid in your bed gazing at the blemished ceiling, pondering what it felt like to burn lively. Presently, the scoop beats gloomy against the skin of your trunk, your hands holding the controlling wheel like a throat you’re attempting to silence.

The body turns, day break fading the salmon-grey of her skin. The cleared out eye slips from its attachment and she pushes it back in with the heel of her hand. She grins, head lolling like a marionette’s

“Sorry baby,” her voice comes out strained, “I wasn’t anticipating company. I’m beyond any doubt you understand.”

In a sickle of citrus moonlight, Adeline Marcus grins up at you with shell-pale gums.

——

Adeline Marcus kicked the bucket on the 31st of October and was buried a week afterward, the date on her tombstone a month bashful of her eighteenth birthday. In the court, the boys would claim it was an mishap, that they didn’t know she was interior. For way better or more regrettable, you accept them. The fingers striking out matchboxes, the brew cans constellating the walkway; a trick gone as well distant, the off-base put, the off-base time. It doesn't have to be on reason. She didn’t have to be domestic.

The coroner ruled it suffocation, but all you can envision is fire like a hardened palm, striking over and over. Adeline had crept from the mouth of the domestic on her hands and knees. She was dead by the time she come to the asphalt, her Sunday dress scorched up to her knees, the dress you knew well enough.

Either way, the boys were cleared out with twenty-five to life and the Marcus’ were cleared out with a dead girl, a ring of cinder like chalk on the asphalt. You were cleared out with a lost blame like starvation, a blame like an ouroboros; choking on the tail, gulping the head, eating yourself lively and being incapable to halt, indeed as it expends you.

Because this wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to great people.

——

You observe water twist down your shower deplete, carrying with it funeral home cosmetics, multicolored creepy crawlies and jasmine bubbles. Strings of earth extended out like ligament. The body’s head rests on her knees, vertebrae needling through her back like a line of molars. The electric lights wash her green, dim veins established beneath delicate skin. She turns her confront to the showerhead and picks at the fine silt beneath her fingernails. The shower floor is a mess of coarseness, and you think of a child scooping up the sand. You turn the warm up until it burns, and clean buildup from the base of the shower entryway. You think, if you can as it were get everything clean, everything will be alright.

She turns her head and looks at you through eyes darkened by glass framing. She says, ‘It's not as terrible as all that. I do not indeed think I felt a thing.”

But she says it through lips the colour of ruined plums, so the opinion doesn't ring true.

You lift frayed towels from the bottoms of your cloth closet. You walk three times around your piece and return to a carcass sat on your couch like she has no place way better to be.

____

There are ants in your sugar bowl. You attempt to evacuate them, lift their crystal-knotted bodies on the prong of a fork but they slip between the crevices and you are cleared out with a mess greater than when you begun; tea-brown slime dying from thoraxes and the stink of vinegar. There’s a dead young lady on your couch but let’s center on the ants in your sugar bowl, the way they string through sores of white like veins on a leaf, like the capillaries that run through the skin of your face.

You make tea besides. You include as well much drain and sit cross-legged in front of the body. She gazes at you. You gaze back. The two of you drink and strips of watery drain pour clean out her trachea, the expanding gap in her chest, but she doesn’t halt drinking until you do.

“You’re not looking at me,” she says, “Not really.”

“Yes I am,” you bend your hands in the shag carpet, “Aren’t I now?”

“No,” she says, “You’re not.”

You take off your teacup on the floor, saucer an iris of yellow, and go upstairs. You take two cigarettes from the carton squashed on your father’s work area and at that point think superior of it, press down with your heel until tobacco disseminates into the brownish carpet. You alter your bedsheets twice, eggshell white, no, dim with peonies. You make a moment glass of tea. When you get back to the room the body is still there. You are looking at her. You are not looking at her.

“Do I appall you?” she says.

“No,” she shakes her head, dim hair put to her shoulders like reeds, “No more than I continuously did.”

“You require to sleep.” You say.

“Baby,” she tilts her head to one side, “Sleeping is all I’ve ever done.”

__

The final time you saw Adeline Marcus lively was in the back of a stranger’s car, stopped on a outsiders road, with the taste of a stranger’s tequila new between your lips. You were never two built for parties, so the result was a combine of young ladies who looked like they were playing dress up. Blousey dresses with sleeves like a nun’s. Thrift store pieces of jewelry noosing your necks. Shoplifted lipstick which she covered up underneath her sleeping pad, more wax than shade. But in the citrus peel of road lights, in the moo trill of far off music, the two of you looked lovely. She had her legs twisted beneath her and was sitting sideways in the rearward sitting arrangement, her hand resting on your knee and the other palmed against the window, a melody on her lips that you couldn’t very put. You were as well near, but it was night, and everybody was interior and inebriated, and now and then we all require to feel closer than we ought to be, to lose ourselves a little.

The tune dissolved on her lips, gulped into the limp press of salvia and booze, and you said something like “I think I ought to go domestic now.”

And she said something like, “Have another drink.” And so you did. You let her pour the alcohol into the unstable mouths of ruddy plastic mugs and observed her swallow. She said, "You're so pretty."

And you said, "I think you ought to stop."

And she said, “Just let me say that, that one thing.”

And you needed to say halt fucking looking at me like that, and you needed to say I need to creep interior you and make a life for myself in the city of your intellect, and you needed to say let’s fair be calm, let’s fair not conversation, let’s fair not demolish a great thing by telling the truth.

Instead you pushed open the traveler entryway, lurched out onto the skin of vein-blue sidewalk.

“I’m going domestic now.”

——

The body lays with her back to your bed, hands worming in the botanical sheets, chestnut hair spilling over her throat, past the ballpoint pen-marred bed posts, over the dark skin of her forehead.

You are considering almost the smooth mouth of a coffin. You are considering of how she looked when you pulled her from the rose mouth of paradise. The radiator murmurs, a bind shade stomaches your open window. She rolls over onto her side, spaces her hands together like pieces of a rotting jigsaw puzzle.

“You still can’t indeed see at me,” her mouth moves as well gradually, words like chewing gum, “Why am I here, Bette? What’s it for?”

There are pink bow moons on the bed of your palms from the chomp of your nails. She pulls her knees to her chest and a bone splits. She pulls her knees to her chest and a molar tumbles from between her keyhole lips.

“You can as it were cherish me when I’m not here, you can as it were adore me when there’s nothing cleared out to love.”

You press your cheek to the cool spread of material next to her, you tune in to the relentless beat of your heart; the way you can feel it in your fingertips, totally singular.

“Don’t tell anyone.” You say.

“Did you need it to pass on with me, Bette?” she shifts and her hair falls against the scruff of your neck, “Were you happy it was silenced?”

“Don’t tell anyone.” You say again.

She murmurs, lays herself back down so you’re confront to confront. Warped nose, eye pulling from its attachment, the onset of grey-green rot wreathing her jaw. The scent of soil and spoil and cicada-heavy nighttime.

“Who seem I tell?” She brushes your hand, “I’m not truly here.”

And abruptly you can envision it is your clench hands part lager cans in two like overripe natural product, it is your fingers on the matchbox, your fingers striking out. But you both know the house would still be on fire, and you both know you’d take off alone.

You take her hand. You put your confront in the law breaker of her neck and ask pardoning from a apparition.