The
Last Time I'll Ever See You
Steve
Finbow
Then your moles, archipelagic, I swoop down and lick them –
my tongue island hopping across your back. The central line
of your spine, its stops and hidden stations, its concealed
entrances and exits, is shaded and cool. I speak to your skin.
It does not answer. Your sweat is a sweet-water river and I
am stationed somewhere along its course, silent, waiting. I
look away at the clock and listen. You breathe. I take a sip
of water, swill it around my mouth, let it drip drop onto your
buttocks. The liquid takes the hairpin bends of your cleavage
and sweeps down into you. I use my finger to follow it. I trace
your flesh as if outlining the faint meanderings of a stream
on an old map. I swallow. I call your name. Call you names.
I nestle in your hair and call your name. I bend closer and
whisper, ‘I fuck around.’ With my thumb, I adumbrate
the delicate wiring of the veins in your arms, blue and aquamarine,
violet and green, beneath the adularescent skin. The circuitry
of orchards. I shake you just enough to make your arse move
and then still you, watch it settle and calm. I can smell garlic,
wine, the odour of sour milk you give off – like babies,
I think. There is sleep in your eyelashes – nocturnal
pollen, motes. Your lips are dry and I use my tongue to moisten
them. You counter with your tongue, I catch it with my lips
quickly, and it is gone. I spread your hair across the pillow
and study its patterns as if I were reading the future –
I can see the outline of Germany, a death mask, a roaring. ‘It
doesn't matter,’ I say, ‘Not now.’ I move
down and hold your right Achilles tendon as if it were a bowstring.
I pull it back and let it go. Snap. I grip the muscle of your
right calf in my left hand, it bulges and I use my teeth to
move along it, creating small indents in your skin, these I
fill with my spittle. I move further down and take each of your
toes in my mouth, baptising each in turn; my breath drifts over
them and dries them and they curl like shrivelled succulents
in the hot desert of the bed. Sometimes, on nights like these,
I do not recognise you and, frightened you will disappear, cover
you with cotton sheets to hold your form. I watch you for a
while and then, as if discovering a new species, unravel you
for myself and for the world. Born again. I have done this a
thousand times, if not more. Moving up again, I press myself
onto you, into you, and you moan and spread your arms –cruciform
– and I match your shape and rest my cheek against yours
and I can smell your breath – nail polish and cake mix
– and I say, ‘What kept you?’
....
Steve Finbow lives in
London. His fiction, essays, short plays, poetry, and stuff
is in, or will soon be in, 3am Magazine, Big Bridge, Dicey Brown,
Eyeshot, The Guardian Online, InkPot, Locus Novus, McSweeney's,
Pindeldyboz, Über, Word Riot, Xtant, Yankee Pot Roast,
and Zacatecas. He writes the bi-weekly column Pond Scum for
Me Three. He is currently working on a novel. (Yeah, right).
Other TES stories by Steve:
Because you Just Lie There
and I Want To
Ghosts of Another Size
