the door cracked and light came through the windows to lather dumbing static with a buttery radiation. The smell was sweet: a perfume maybe? no. a musky sweetness that sticks to the wall paper in gray clouds and to lungs in black paste and lives inside royally trimmed boxes and that house-- her house. 4 gray fingers wrap around the door and the devil walks in without even making eye contact. Now, a glowing orange stub, she sucks it out and her cheecks sink in and there, there is a skeleton beneath the wall paper, breaths out a cloud (one could almost see the forked tongue), and snaps the cigarette into the vinyl of the seat next her. Fire and plastic. the toxins snake into one another across my feet, across machines, and into disappointingly tangible (while seemingly passable) window panes.
"Shit", creaks the hag. "They really did a number on you, didn't they?"
My leg is asleep, i think.
2 pasty glowing logs protrude from gray wallpaper rags, two Black bricks of "welcome to walmart" shoes for women for walking for not enough money. A renewed sweetness is ushered in as she lights another cigarette, her fingers slipping only once in a failure to master the green plastic corner store lighter. I watched, amused by 1) the cruel indulgence that set sculpture to her eyebrows, sucking in.. sucking in, 2) how on exhale, her face would wilt into satisfaction, and her eyes would open and see the sunlight, as if it held new meaning, and 3) a turn from satisfaction to remembering that the satisfaction could only be extended, or renewed, by another inhale, and a twitch of desperation as she concentrated on drawing her fingers, then her wrist, then her arm, into a habitual twist, and landing that paper, god, the paper, back to those jaws. suck the blood again, live immortal, again.
Eventually this one too is reduced into a similar glowing stub, and further reduced into ashes and toxic plastic fumes, not three inches from the other. Again she wrapped her fingers around the doors pages, but this time, I was acknowledged with a slight smile that either had something to do with secrets, or exposure.
