I’m in a metal box. It’s raining outside, maybe. No one is coming. Not ever.
Sleep provides a refuge in which mind becomes one with its habitat. But I must emerge. The jewel is coming. I buzzed her in. Soon she’ll enter between the bars across my window.
I selected her from thousands of possibilities. It’s how it’s done nowadays. Click on the image or hesitate too long and she’ll show up at you hotel room, even if it’s four in the morning.
Oh God, I could listen to her read poetry all night. Such energy. She tingles with it. Waves flow visibly through her all wobbly and passionate. Emotion is her purpose. If she were to lose her rhythm, she herself would be lost. But she never does.
She reads me the tarot. Well-thumbed fortunes from a purple velvet pouch tied up with string. She spreads on the bed, pretending like her cards can save me. She is the Queen of Cups. They are a channel for the world beneath the reality grid: a code the police don’t know. But it’s too late for me, so I smile politely and drink in the esoteric security they make her feel.
An actual human body, I think, with no plastic, no metal, no ornamental trash. Flesh, bruised and forgotten, comes alive with a touch. We are spinning scissors.
Human Stasis Device. She whispers it in my ear like it’s sweet and nothing. But it hits me like a
[hammer]
Her heart is a train chugging along. She screams like the brakes/breaks slamming in my soul.
Later she takes a look around, noticing detail that was only a blur to me. Coving, a crack in the wardrobe, a cigarette burn in the carpet. And here I am casting shadows on her floor.
Twisted sheets all perfume seem cold now. The unfriendly, generic decor and furniture that was never loved didn’t deserve her and neither did I.
All is still, so it seems.
Still moving.
A tune plays in my head, I can’t remember my own name. The waves never left, then. Nor did the things I can’t see. There they are, in the corner of my eye. Biotech in my blood, my metal box, somewhere beyond the veil.
Header image source: Pixabay
C.R. Dudley 