Our Man

Don’t worry, I said. This will hurt, and then it won’t. Or go ahead and worry, I said, if that’s the kind of person you are.

How about this: a man bleeds in velvety ribbons. Our man is a teapot with two spouts. His heart is still intact, if that’s what you’re worried about. (His heart is the problem.) Our man bleeds blackly, redly, deadly. Our man was gone in a few great gushes. I’m a collector and I came to.

It’s me. You can be you. I’ve been honest and I’m being honest now. Blood is just as thick as we’ve heard. Blood doesn’t cool if you admit relief. That rust-colored pump will throb on and on.

Somebody tarred Daddy to the floor.

I can’t deny it’s gorgeous that a brain sees what its experience has trained it to see. If you’ve never known love, it’s clear you’d mistake it for something else. Loneliness perhaps. Greed.

How about: blood congeals and forms a skin. Or: our man’s dying breath lasted fifteen seconds. This: we both love(d) you more than life itself.

The detective set out. Squeezed the last bits of whiskey from the Ziploc he kept in his breast pocket. The road unfurled in the white wash from his headlights. He had her underwear in his fist, damp with blood, and when he held them to his mouth he smelled iron, or something that should be called iron. Perhaps it really was a man’s blood.

When they found her, two severed ears were gripped in her bloodslick hands. She declined the offer to hand them over. She was naked except for the underwear. A lady cop was called in to cuff her.

The detective held his breath driving past the cemetery, pushing the panties into his mouth just short of gagging.

I was born with an extra spine in a lump on my shoulder. My parents had it removed but I can still feel it. Like a ghost limb. Like a ghost twin. She grew up and lived and she weighs me down and we share everything. My parents called her Imaginary Friend. Sometimes it’s just too hard to relate to the real thing. None of this is true, of course. It’s just the easiest way to explain.

Of course, none of this is true. I’ll try another way. There was a girl that died mysteriously down the street when I was growing up. After her funeral I saw her white face in her bedroom window, watching me, mouthing, wait for me, wait for me, and I waited and I’m still waiting. Every once in a while I hear her name being called but there’s never an answer.

No. No. No. No.

Here: her room was across the hall. At night I stood outside her door and listened for her breathing but I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of silence. I watched her chest not move. She was dead and then the morning would come and she was alive. There was no way she could die. There was no way she could be revived. We wrote notes to each other and slid them under our doors. Mine said, I wish I was alone. Hers said, I miss you.Ω

drawing by Jeremy Tinder

What am I here for, if the crime’s been solved?  

First you hafta name the crime.

Easy: murder.

That’s only the beginning, Tin Ears.

One of those.

One of those. Better you than me. I’ve got enough blood on my hands.

I’ll start with the scene.

When you find out where that is, you let me know.

Women.

Women.

The detective set out. Squeezed the last bits of whiskey from the Ziploc he kept in his breast pocket. The road unfurled in the white wash from his headlights. He had her underwear in his fist, damp with blood, and when he held them to his mouth he smelled iron, or something that should be called iron. Perhaps it really was a man’s blood.

When they found her, two severed ears were gripped in her bloodslick hands. She declined the offer to hand them over. She was naked except for the underwear. A lady cop was called in to cuff her.

The detective held his breath driving past the cemetery, pushing the panties into his mouth just short of gagging.

Oh, and the way he’d kiss me. Like I was you. Like I was the you he always dreamed I was. If you are discourteous with a rose, its petals will bruise. That’s how he kissed me, so gorgeously discourteously. I could feel my heart beating in my lips. I could feel the throb of blood.