We lay down together.
Unable to move.
Our smell the same.
Skin stretched out.
Holding each other’s hand.
The days and weeks we hadn’t been eating properly didn’t show on her figure as it did mine. She still looked full.
Muscles and waist growing tighter, thinner. But hers,
Hers
Her face, ******* lips, hadn’t changed.
An animal in love with beauty. Old beauty, future beauty.
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia. We had been travelling Europe for some time. That’s where we were. One of those places. All of them.
And the heat kept beating, making me sweat.
It made her sweat too.
But we always had enough energy to be together.
As our bodies become hungrier, our need for each others skin increased.
Her sighs and moans and thighs becoming louder. Penetrating darkness.
The cicadas. Black trees. Collapsing. Grinding. Feeding.
Our love, returning to dusk my dear...
Giving life back to the morning. Killing each other.
Controlling hell.
A stretch of green. Hard hills.
Sand inside our **** and hair;
The ground, and her perfect smell.
We stand-up, and continue to walk through the breeze towards the train station.
I pray the monies been wired. We stop. I pull her into myself.
Tell her all these things.
She smiles
our bodies join
and hills the size of Gods
Became nothing again.
:::
‘We will be fine.’
She said gracefully.
:::
There was nothing at the station hardly
but a shop was open in the blazing afternoon
the unknown shop-keeper didn’t smile
but sold us enough with what we had to get us drunk;
There were no people or trains/we had five hours to burn until the next one came
the day stretched out and up into the evening as we laughed and screamed like two boiling oysters drunk in a kitchen time passed into and through the hours we wound around each other like two fighting seas her thighs tensing with absolute strength on my lap moaning from her stomach and into the sky
as I did
we kissed again, slowly and absolute - celebrating release
making the day travel into night
my back lay against the cold wood of the station seat
we began to wind down.
and the need for hope faded as we both began to sleep
I said one last thing to her to make her laugh a little, before we rested in wait for the last train.
She began to curl into rest, her hair across my lap, but I notice that she sees one more thing before her eyes shut. She was looking down to the end of the station where the entrance was. Her eyes burst. Her laughter stopped like a match being put out.
Her nails dig into my leg.
I smile down telling her she can’t fool me with the same old tricks; then I look too.
He was coming.
He moved like slow clay.
‘No.’
‘There’s just one of him... I can take him.'
We have to get this train...’ I think.
His lips lay still like two grey worms on top of each other. Emotion.
Less. Moving towards us.
And there was no-where else for us to go. No more running.
And I wouldn’t have run even if I could.
And this is what I thought seconds before he was near us.
11.46 pm.
the train nears
the night mixing with the hopeless age of the station
gently moving her body to one side I began to run at the man walking towards us
i call every mutilated thought I can from my mind and air
silence them
and pour them only into my movemnet
He was Russian like her. Old school Russian. No sympathy for an English ********** wanna be saviour like me.
No sympathy.
I jumped into the air - I could see he hadn’t expected that
the time I hung there expanded for miles dying slower than normal
i have time to see his cold receding head,
the lines across his wide brow/the shoulders of a man half-bull
eyes etched into wood
he looks up as I connect
I land an elbow directly to his face before I land fully catching him with my momentum
all of my weight landing on his nose and mouth
‘let this slow him down’ I ask fate
the adrenalin jack-knifing through my body like a restless rush of pure red almost bringing it to a halt
tt rocks him, a little...
next: left
left
straight right
the biggest one i've
Blood.
His head hung slightly low in sudden contemplation and pain
he still has a lot left. I think
A gorilla dancing with a fly.
i follow up with more punches
his hand shoots for my throat faster than I can react
I can punch. But he’s taken many a man like me.
I think
No air.
I hear Russian
And parts of the station again.
I hear her voice
Straight in its pitch and unchanging melody
But-without-the-laughter.
I can tell she’s scared from the way she puts too many words in her sentences, too fast.
I see his grey outline pushing a much smaller one against the wall.
I think about Natashka back inside one of those rooms.
I think about her sorrow and strong will.
Defiant, but captive.
I was certain at every turn that she was misleading me.
(She was)
She had bent my logic so far back it stayed there and made sense again
like a wild contortionist miming a perfect song
I had travelled miles to find her
after three months of dream I finally did.
“ah Jerome”.
She Said.
We drank and made love for hours.
reality adjusted to us
not the other way around
dark forms behind the curtains of an apartment
a bed of velvet sweat
wrapped around you, inside you.
***** No air. New life.
“Jerome” She said after three days.
“You-must-go. I have lied. They come here when I call them. They make you give money...”
“I know hon.” I said.
“Lets go.”
We made final, violent, love.
And then left.
I will now owe ‘at least 25,000 Euro’s’ she tells me
I figure it’s all worth-it
“That’s alright” I reply
and light up as we leave the building
My rib-cage roars into the ground with disgust and rage.
My remaining spirit pours into my hands and knees as I rise.
A dead sprinter.
A dead man
still rising;
A spitting snarl. A scream.
The rats are woken.
Old angels are woken.
And I ask all the beer drunk spirits that are close to help me.
I tackle him hard into the wall, we crash into Natashka
but she moves just in time, even his legs are heavy, they slow my rage,
i only manage to get one, its under my right arm, held with both hands, my left leg steps inside his remaining right, behind it, I pull, the trip works,
he falls.
I hear the train. I follow me in
again
all I have in the world is surprise
and his squat body is the strength of three of mine
emptied into one.
And at the maddest of times it’s the strangest of things you remember:
i see the lights of the train flashing across her whole body
and for a moment she transforms
and is complete light...
I’ve climbing on top of him
i strike down with the madness of ten days drunk on whiskey.
aortas ventricle pulse
His powerful fingers grasping at my limbs trying to stop me, but it’s no use.
spears made of bone ****** down into his face
and the old angels watch, as I connect, drooling and enjoying the show, happy to throw me a few chips
His arms begin to flop down like tired wild animals returning to sleep
and perhaps my fury and revulsion can break even him
my hands on her body;
i force her on the train with the last of our money
the conductors can only see two drunks fighting beside a beautiful bystander.
I force her on.
“Jerome.” She says screaming.
A clay hand takes my breath again as it locks around my mouth from behind me.
I manage to hold the door shut long enough while being suffocated so that the train is moving with her inside
and when the train is leaving, I finally feel joy.
“Jerome.” She says still.
And finally I hear not.
Not the man choking me or the time of day.
In the seconds that my lungs drown, I feel only the bliss of having known you, a last toast before I rest within the driving sea, salt-water changing my lungs
but I know my last action was with all my soul, my mind, my body.
Natashka, I drink to you, fully. Finally.
This thought fills my gut.
His hands across my mouth, my eyes begin to shut.
Her smell.
That was the last thing I thought about.
...
I’m looking down at my body, the Russian’s beside me breathing hard.
Tired. Big.
And then to my shock I see Natashka again.
Walking from the far end of the station back to the area where all the scrapping happened;
one of her knees bleeding and ripped, she limps, as if something is completely broken, her foot perhaps, out of time with the rest of her body.
She drags her handicapped body all the way towards me and clay man standing beside me.
I can only watch.
When her tattered body gets close, I get to see all the cuts, one side of herself is badly damaged where she jumped from the train
and dislocated half the joints in her body
And when she is only a reach away from him. She touches his chest.
Hands that can change anything.
And I look at them both.
And death saves you from nothing at all.
You just observe the same things, at a slower pace, from a different position;
you try to tell the suicides this, but; few want to listen...
there’s nothing wrong with oblivion, just remember that once you’re there, you still need something to do...
I break down. Knees hitting the ground.
I see her body slide into him, closer, her hand disappears behind his back
like thin snake wondering around a rock
searching
Now
she stands pointing his own gun at him. A shot goes into his head. No hesitation. Now she looks down at me, beside my choked corpse, a gun still in her hand. Weeping.
My hand wants to reach up to her.
I can't.
Another bullet fired
it discharges through her mouth, destroying her head.
Now she lays down beside me too
between me and russian hit man
The station endures our blood as we bleed out
forming one river that trickles down onto the tracks and gutter
you can’t tell whose blood is whose
or who is bleeding out the most
I look up at a light-bulb in the roof;
it tenses one more time, making the mosquitoes dance in quiet frenzy, before it lets out a final scream, cracking out of life. Going-out-softly.
My head comes back down and I see another person standing only a few steps away from me.
With a turn of her head she suddenly flicks me a half-smile
the kind she knows I like
the kind that rips the spirit right out from your chest and makes it feel good.
Before we begin to walk away together something makes me turn
and we both look behind ourselves. The Russian looks down at his body too, the lines in his face are still, and yet we know how he feels.
He looks across at us as we walk away down the tracks
we can see only the deep set hoods of his brow, shadows for eyes;
he moves his feet slightly so he now faces us flat
he raises one of his palms
as the other searches for his cigarettes
in the first movement I have seen him make casually all-day
I hear him say the words:
“Do svidaniya. Moi druz'ya. Byt' khorosho"
And although his language isn’t mine, I know this means:
"Goodbye."
"My Friends."
"Be well."
...