in parentheses

She sees him, across the indistinguishable throng, nodding his head when necessary, adding sparse words here and there when expected, smiling acquiesced to this numbing play of words, they hug and part, by the many coloured bottles he stays and feigns posed interest in the contents, finally deciding on the dark wine he takes it and pours his glass full then turns open to the whole numbed-to play,

his wife by the piano with the other wives all gibbering while drinking down their hard sodas, his eldest daughter along the wall chatting up another old man she will disappear with and return home from some weeks later triumphant again in her undeniable talent for destruction, his younger daughters at home, playing asleep, awaiting the nunly nanny’s nocturnal submission to their liquor cabinet, so that they may run, wild in all their new flowered blood, a blood mad within them, a blood insatiable on their tongues for drunkenness and flesh, a blood they want to release,

he without thinking drinks his glass whole and turns about and plays the game, chats up the two already there, recommends the darker one on the far left and takes a spirit for him and pours it obliviously to the rim, they watch him smile then part, and he turns back around and sees nothing but a mural of faceless faces that has begun to lose its voice, so a blur, a shaking mass of blurs slowly losing definition, a blob blur blacking ou

Hey

A blur caught in an orange blaze within his glass, he drinks then looks at her clean, she is not pretty but rather plain, her body has little in shape, her hair is bunned prudishly, and her lips are almost flat lines, but there is some ghostly attractiveness in her, something in him that hacks up a strong distaste but then enjoys the slow ugly of its sliding back down

A bit of a nod, no

Yea, who are you friends with

No one, just heard the noise, decided to come

He looked her up and down, and she felt his hands all over her back, his hands grabbing her by her tightly bunned hair and bending her over only to scream turn your head I want your eyes while I f

Not a bad idea, free spirits

She is relentless, her eyes dead on him as he continues his tilt, up her and down her again an imaginary tongue, and she, she is there with him in his thoughts, just as he is beginning to let him slip into hers, as she tilts down him and settles on an adequate bulge

Free food, good fun

Laughing at people to yourself

A smile, what a smile, deceit and longing bound into one, It was my plan

What’s your plan now

I live upstairs

I’m welcome

You’re welcome

Two leave, it is no big thing, fore no one cares for another until the time to ride home, even then perhaps not, fore a ride and a ride with a stranger is always more exciting than a ride and a ride with a friend, or lover

They wait little for the bed, the walls, the steps, the air, out in the open air, on a balcony just two floors up, the pulsating sound of the throng beating on his back as she smacks into him, waking him from the numbness for a greater numbness, one in his bones, and a mad looseness in his jaw and limbs, and all the brutality upon his chest, clawing open his heart, throws her hard against a white wall and breaks her open, as he did on her 16th birthday, a present for baby he said, but this is not in her mind, it is a shard from a mirror long ago forgotten, and it causes no pain, fore pain, pain can only be this strange rush that breathes sweetness through gnawing teeth bleeding her teet, pain can only be something strange and sweet, fore that pain was even then only one shard of a broken mirror that never showed anything but a splinter of cracks to one day become a whole cracked face that belonged to no one and yet to everyone, everyone including him, and the smile he felt all over him warm as those weak boy’s hands trying to push him off only made him harder on that summer night, and her beating hands said no we were never broken we were just born in opening, and his beating hips said no we were never hollow we were just born in opening, and their beating bodies said no you just don’t understand us because you were born in closing, and all the human rushed down and rushed up and at the meeting of their thundering their crack beat the numbness out of their bones and ripped open their eyes to see the human, and the pain