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Bite my tongue, I taste your blood
Never thought that I could bite hard enough
She told him a story once.
They were seated on her balcony, legs slipped beneath the railing to dangle over Conduit Street, and she had a glass balanced perfectly upon her index finger. He could tell, by the way she was gazing at it with such sincere adoration, that it wouldn’t last another five minutes intact.
Her story went like this.
“Did you know, Sebastian, that when I was seven I stole my elder sister’s lizard from his case and vivisected him in my room with our mother’s sewing scissors and a paring knife? Well, I did. And the next evening my sister decided she would place the tin filled with her lizard’s crickets beneath my pillow to get her revenge. I woke up early in the morning because they were crawling all over me, getting into my mouth and everything, burrowing underneath my tongue, squiggling and niggling and whoops, I do believe I might’ve bit down, just a few times, for show. Then I got up and I walked all around my room, spitting their bodies out here and there and letting them drop hither thither and I fetched the sewing scissors from where I’d left them on my desk, still absolutely covered in lizard blood, and I walked out into the hallway into my sister’s room and crawled over her with my hand over her warm red lips, crickets showering her when they went a-tumbling off of me, and I took the scissors and I—”
She smiled then, fluttered her finger, and let the glass fall. Neither of them bothered to watch it shatter, she too caught in reminiscing, he too occupied watching the bones in her wrist form and reform.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Snip snip,” she said, and shrugged her milk-white shoulders.
“Snip snip,” she says, and holds out a pair of shears.
They are in his bathroom, with its tiled walls that have mold stains in the grout and a dirty mirror above a failing sink. She sits on a stool that’s been set in the tub, damp hair gliding down between her shoulder blades. Her fingers tap a fugue against the side of her thigh, bada-bump-da-baa-dum, always a fondness for Bach.
He takes the shears, tests their edge on the pad of his index finger. All of it, she told him. Part of the game. He rests the cold metal upon the back of her neck. “Here?”
“Shorter.”
He repositions. “Here?”
“Mmm…”
Her legs cross and uncross and cross again. He cuts in time to her tapping, snick-ba-da-da, doesn’t watch the black clumps fall. “Wie bist du so erbleichte!” she sings, her voice ringing off the walls and ceiling like a shriek, and he can see in her eyes the wish the hope the prayer that his hand will slip, like so—
When she kisses him it’s after and they’ve rinsed her hair down the drain, after she’s wound his dog tags about her neck, dabbed the edges of her eyes with black powder, tested her new smile in the stained and broken glass. He gets bits of her hair all over him, prickling against his skin, and she watches him scratch, licks the corner of his mouth, whispers, “Cricket, cricket.”
“Cricket, cricket,” and tomorrow she’s going to die.
(He doesn’t want her the way he wants other women. She absolutely guts him, turns him inside out, makes cuts beneath the first layer of his skin so he can’t even watch them bleed. He used to wonder if it’d be easier had she lived in a man’s body, but decided, one night, watching her slip through a perfumed crowd in a black suit and silver tie, that there would be no difference, none at all.)
He will teach her how to hide the gun, will press the tips of his fingers into the grooves of her ribcage, tap goodbye in Morse. “You can do anything you like with me,” she’s going to say, to a stranger, a shadow on a rooftop, and the worst part is, she’s going to mean it.
(She sits beside him in cabs, sees him home at night, tells him ‘sit’ and ‘fetch’ and ‘kill’; pulls him in, chokes him. She wants to be king, she wants to be queen; “Half Josephine, half Napoleon, dear,” Penelope, Odysseus, or Kora, or Hades, or God, or nothing, or no one. More than the sum of her jagged, pretty parts. “I despise boxes,” she tells him, putting on his shirts, his ties, his dark, leather gloves. Becoming herself beneath another skin.)
Tomorrow. Short hair caught in the breeze, white fingers wound about the trigger.
(“Sebastian,” she says, shoulders square with her hips, a bone, a ghost, “I rather think you’ve gone and fallen in love with me.” Beetle-black and singing, creeping, crawling. Undoing him utterly.)
She’s going to tell him a story.