Waterboard at seven, Legacy parkade at eleven; she reclined in her seat, black plastic smoked to crystal, and with hand like pale candelabra reached for my arm under the gridded flicker.
‘You haven’t talked to me all day.’
‘I’ll be leaving to-morrow.
‘Perhaps I could——’
‘I don’t think tonight, I couldn’t.’
‘It’s all the same, really.’
‘Besides, various——’
Vague party fled the scene before midnight, then communion with syrup and Maynards peach; fifty and twelve rolled in with fatigue, and declining gambit, retreated to station.
Dampened patterns of Persia insinuating mould, and fluorescent glare above washed the walls out white. Blanched doors lined the sides, hiding sordid images within, eighteen or twenty-three, twenty-six or thirty-seven; the furthest receded before my steps that rose to meet it, hysteric, holding off the Polish frame to bar me entrance.
The divan on which she lay, adorned with faded florals with an unguent sheen, hinted musk and fever and broth. The stale glow from the sink reflected off the silk of her slip revealing the geography of her scarred complexion; she sat propped on bare elbows, eyes wide shut and looking in need of anesthesia. The walls, discoloured with rot, yielded to my fingers advancing with care, and the synthetic antiquity of Arabia concealing deformed architecture beneath; the cooler let out a convulsive whir and at once she charged, wrapt her arms around, shoving me under, pushed out into the floorboards, paralytic, whispered in unknown tongue before a shriek.
Under the sterile sustain of tubes above the aguey throb subsided to a soft hum. Tiled floor underneath supported no fixture than my bent form dozing off in delirium: ‘I’ve squandered away my pearls,’ sacrilege burnt into the cracked screen, then the eternal strobe of red, green, and blue assaulting the epileptic at the stake. Pure acetylene rising above the stalls lingered in double-dewed dawn then dissolv’d to Paradise.
