How many grains of pumice till the brail of your freckles is sanded away from her skin? Did you know she could feel them?
Every single one as there wasn’t much else to keep her mind busy with other than studying the gold emblems repeated on the sheets.
3…4…5…
She’ll keep counting them so to pretend the number she holds in her brain is of gold paisley not the number of thrusts you buried in her conscious.
.08 would be a guess. Higher if it didn’t imply her wish for your poison considering your hands were so cold it was a miracle you had blood pumping your spirits.
A room built for two. Miraculously the dimensions of a bed to be exact. Am I making this up?
Only a doorway accessible by a floor of goose feathers and those gold. Paisley. Emblems.
Keeping the cold air from preparing her skin for your arctic touch.
It was an occasion, that was for sure. Such one that she let herself bring out the tacky skirt from the bottom drawer for when she was to celebrate properly. Picked out for her as a project “Why can’t you be more like her?” Because if she had been like you, she would have stared into her own eyes and claimed her promiscuity instead it was claimed for her and thus her body evaporated.
Mobility was lost. Sinew draped where it used to hold strength. Her skeleton hollowed to coral the holes guiding her breaths through joints so to not escape her own emissions. She held her eyes down, hoping what was left of her wouldn’t be seen. That maybe if the headlights she counted would miraculously match up with the number of gold paisley patterns she could go back to counting sheep instead of threads by her cheek.
She didn’t how to ask for help, the same gestures of moral support combined with the kind loving words of sympathy are made from the same chemical bond of what brings her blood to a boil.
She knows what they will say. She knows every phrase for she has offered them herself to others.
But when a body not longer exists how does it heal? If there is no skin on flesh on bone then what is left to exist in exponential beauty?
If the space defines her figures and the textures replace her gamy fibers, will her skeleton root from the wooden floors? If theories take on her intellect and replace her heart with intentions beyond plucked strings. Could her face exist via another’s?
If her body is never seen must her existence cease? Can what she creates promise the turning heads in a room to a human less figure? If pumice cannot sand down the brail of your freckles on her skin, can her existence as art be the beauty she will never achieve as a physical being and remain in the shadows of dark theaters or empty spaces where her face cannot be connected to her name? After all, a name is only affiliated with the words and actions post mortem
So,
Let her declare her own death of this beaten body. Let her work exist so to only know her by name. Let her physical body live so only to make something more beautiful than the body you skinned her of. When a drowned proclamation of love in pulls of plastic bottled molasses watermarked a memory only as visible as the words your skin scratched into mine. “How could you let such a thing happen to you?”
