Thursday, 29 April 2010
Untimely #15 – Wrong Song Boys
He, he could feel his nails too long as he rubbed his hands together, fingertips brushing. Not like a girl’s, not really long, but long enough. Long enough to cut something. Like sometimes when the skin on the hands is dry and splitting, chapped and windblown and cracking fit to bleed, sometimes then when his nails are too long he’ll accidentally jab himself and it will split the skin and boyo will that hurt. And once you get one cut there, the fingers just seem to find it of their own accord. Drawn to it like magnets. And maybe he’ll forget and go and squeeze a lemon and the juice will run all around and over it and sting like a thousand bees inside his eyeballs and boyo will they water. Then he will shake his wrist very quickly and vigorously to try to get all of the blood out of his hand so that it won’t hurt. Or maybe to flush the hand with blood so that it won’t hurt. Anway he’ll shake his hand very fast and it will almost start to hurt his wrist and his fingers just a blur and the pulsing citrus burn will ebb a bit and he’ll be OK unless he smacks his hand on something else as he waggles it. Holy hell that’s just the worst, isn’t it? Also once he let his whiskers grow too long and they started to curve around and poke back into his face. Like what the hell. Since when is your body a booby trap, you know? Also his toenails are cracking and white, but she can’t see that. She spies him through the glasses from the pawnshop. Long scraggly beard and dirty nails and just looking like a drowned rat of a wreck. But there is something she is drawn to and, when her evil but misunderstood father is not looking, she slips out the door and down the hill. She finds him lying in a heap at the foot of a tree. His eyes are closed and his legs tucked up under his chin and his arms wrapped around them. Probably she could fit him inside a crate of melons, that’s how small he looks, all bunched up under the tree. And her heart goes all to water: she wants to be his woman. She stares at him a long time and when he doesn’t move she gives him a little nudge with her foot. Still nothing. A little nudge right between the ribs, right where his arm is clasping his legs. He groans and with a twitch he opens one eye. Why did you do that? he asks. She is not expecting a Spanish accent. I don’t know, she says in Spanish. Why are you playing the clarinet? he asks, still with a Spanish accent but not in Spanish. She looks down at her hands. They are soft and smooth and smell of sandalwood. She is not playing a clarinet. She looks back at him but he has fallen asleep again. This is not how it was supposed to be. Slowly, slowly she turns and makes her way back up the hill to her father’s shop.
Labels:
Untimely #15,
Untimely Philip
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