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The bruise was the size of a Healthy Digestive laxative tea bage; the color of his tattoo seventeen years after a needle tampered with his arm. It was my bicepnow, however, that winced. I rolled the reminants of a Grey Goose, Tonic and ice, curled in a plastic glass, across the pain, through my skin, back and forth.
The voices, their voices, returned, resumed and I plucked my feet from the ground and tucked my knees up close. It was a tentatively guarded position of frustration and restraint.
I visualized through clentched eyelids a second swing, another thrust, a final kick. I could see myself falling, down the stairs, into the mirror, my head buckshotting against the corner of the bar. The sharp pain and drowning darkness, the snap of the cord as a plug is yanked out.
Might I add that none of these events had occured, would occur, could occur. Despite this revolting anticipation I pressed firmly forward with a dread filled desire of my own self destruction.
He didn't kill me, he killed her. But that was last week and I couldn't even remember yesterday.
I shook. It was a habit. A birthright. An unexplained phenomena. The doctorscited a thyroid issue. But their tests were routinely inconclusive as my patience wore thin. I evicted the medical establishment.
My arm was still bleeding so i wrentched my neck in order to maneouver my mouth over the wound. The moment excited a certain sensuality in me and I lapped at it, delicately, then giggled. Its salty taste was not far off from semen but it seemed as if forever had passed since I had tasted either. A naked girl walked by just then, and I only noted her because she was just bottomless. I had grown accustomed to the topless jiggles and full nudity. But this brunette stumbled past with a pink bikini top tied in three places around her neck and shoulders. The sight and accompanying thoughts of bikinis inspired memories of the beach. The souvenier shops. My howling as i got clamped by a crab while wading through the water. Holding hands while walking down the boardwalk. That king sized hotel room bed. Discussions about homosexuality on the balcony admist the sound of the waves and the scent of the salt.
Reality. REALITY.
I caught myself, grimaced and clentch my eyelids together most tightly providing a momentary escape from the past and a thrust from the present.
I rubbed my toe into the tile, into the blood, sorting the redness through the grout in the tile. It was two days ago that I noticed the cross. It was dug into the corner of the table by a long, thick strong thumbnail. No taller than a penny. Not deep enough to do anything but indent the paint into the wood. I grazed my fingertips across it, pauseing to trace the symbol in the same manner which it was created. I think I want to cry again, but my eyes sting, my cheeks throbbed and my head pulled me away from the moment.
