for b (god, this is so old)

Solipsist Quiver. Of the late at night variety.

Txt: I am ready
Txt: For?
Txt: That old metaphor.

[2:43 a.m. Boy and Girl walk along railroad tracks past lumberyard. Girl is trying to be artful, stable. She balances slightly on vector, using Boy’s shoulder as support. They come from a mediocre playground with a mediocre swing with a mediocre view.]

Girl: Do you believe in karma?
Boy: No.
Girl: What do you think the world is made up of?
Boy: Other people’s children.

[Girl falls. Sharp left turn into forest of stacked wood. Wind whips, clouds rush to cover full moon. Milk crate beats against chain.]

Boy’s room smells like a barn. Pigs and goats and hay.

Girl remembers the first time she was drunk, drinking beer on a tractor until her body caught on fire. She left, walking home in the grassy middle of dirt road. There was no moon and the stars were too bright to be real.
She sneaks in her bedroom window and undresses, her clothes smelling strongly of space heaters and gasoline and she wants to go ice fishing. Girl takes the pile in her arms like a newborn and throws it out the window, watches it flutter like sea foam and turtle shells and spotted brown trout. She listens to the owls and breathes the cold, cold air until she falls asleep and dreams the liquid adventures of the absurd, sepia-toned double- exposure, beer foam dripping on her pillow.

[Boy watches Girl drink a metaphor from a mason jar. Boy thinks of how strange it is, how personal to hear someone else swallow and think in the dark, without shirts and knowledge.]

Boy: Do you want to make love?

[Girl kisses Boy. Boy does not kiss back. Boy pulls away.]

Boy: I hate kissing.
Boy: It’s too intimate.

[Girl rolls over. Boy apologizes and runs his hand up and down her body, clavicle, neck, sketching compacted breast, avoiding nipple. The ripple of ribs, over slope of ass, like a hill, a knoll. Girl opens her legs and closes her eyes. Boy accepts invitation.]

Boy: You’re stomach looks so good.

[Girl pulls in her stomach like when she was young and had to walk in front of people sitting in a line. Girl feels boy spark and sweat. She pushes her fingertips into the flesh of his arms, his back. It feels like mud, resistance and firm. Girl wants to kiss boy. Girl puts a pillow over her face.]

Girl thinks about contradiction. Girl thinks of old prostitutes in the church district of Paris, Girl thinks of a plastic bag full of Boy’s hair on the sunny mountaintop. How the prostitutes laugh and giggle like Catholic school girls must. She thinks of navigation and compasses and Sunkist jelly coins the color of rainbows and how it felt so good to submerge her hands into them by the wooden barrelful. Girl thinks how she would like to be Boy, just to know, just to feel, how it is to be inside another person. Is this less intimate?

[Boy moans. Hot and sticky. They sleep on wet sheets.]