Box Life

It was a sticky summer night.  She smelled like chlorine that floated in her hair and she wore only a bathing suit bottom that tied in strings around her hips and a flannel shirt in a pattern of blue and red, unbuttoned, only barely hiding her breasts.

I considered her like a balloon.  She would swell and swell and swell and she would pop!  Pop.  Her pieces would scatter around my floor like newspaper stories, sputtering vomit and rumors of disgust and self-hatred.  The skin around her eyes were always swollen with bruises, veins broken from hypersleep, a statis.  She was homeostasis.  Or maybe I was hers.  Like a bad relationship, and we held hands in the car when she smoked and ash flittered through the window.

She hunted down gossip like they were ghosts, and ghosts like they would remember her life story and save her from making mistakes.  I found ghosts in family pictures and dinner tables that were never ate at, but she liked the whisper of cold air against her cheek and the suspension of her heart when she entered haunted houses or graveyards.

That’s where I kissed her first.  In a graveyard, surrounded by dead memories.  We tied strings around our waists so we wouldn't get separated.  I could smell the plastic of her skin when she brushed up against me, still damp with sweat from the hot, humid night.  There were no streetlights, only the waning moon and I could barely see my own feet as we stumbled through the headstones, her giggling as she crumbled the earth of someone’s body beneath her toes.

Finally, we crashed into each other and tumbled down together, a tangle of limbs and bad tongue-kissing and the kind of songs that come on the radio when you want to look into each others’ eyes.  Her nails scraped my skin so hard I thought I could feel it in the back of my eyes.  She smiled, pushing me onto my back, her flannel shirt giving way to flesh I had only seen in magazines, her creamy mounds of gorgeous lying before my eyes.

And then, I was collapsing.  The ground beneath me giving into my weight.  A black hole opened beneath us, and she pushed my shoulders until my head was sucked into the void.  My vision was blurry as I screamed for her.  Then, she threw my legs in with me, and I was tumbling, hands stretching out to reach for leverage.  Black edges and edged until it filled my sight, and my screams echoed within one another.

I reached over to the lamp in the dark.  It smelled of rotting flesh.  When the light flickered on, her corpse lay in my bed, under the sheets, hands held together like a bad promise.