Femme Fatale

Femme Fatale

Mark Coleman

  We began to have sex. You pulled away. Not so much physically, but in an emotional way that manifested itself in your body. A physiological deprecation. It started in your eyes. A whirlpool dropping amphibian cool down your belly. 

   Your breasts turned into winter sand castles. Sculpted mud. Inside an unheated kiln, I moved. Just the tiny thrusts of an uncertain, certainly unwanted lover.

  I was determined to come if just to spite you. After Burt Bacharach, this is how you treat me? I gave you all the C.S. Lewis an atheist knows.

  The spirit you profess aloof and nonchalant as a nun in habit. Lips chapped to desiccation. Cigarette ash to the filter. Nonexistent drags. Lungs blackened by unspoken nothings. 

  The dying laurels of love make a pitiful bed. I rest my head but no one sleeps beside me. The street and field. Cold and empty. Rabbits in burrow. Cars all parked or tangled around lampposts. Both outside and inside the night is christened in virginal blood. You can’t dam the flow with your tourniquet.

  Decked this limited world of mine with all the flowers that meant something to you. A fistful of daisies. Parched sunflowers that once lit up your eyes and turned up the corners of your mouth. Such a simple flower able to add to your radiance. That natural glow that you carried through germanic countries so many years ago. Red roses with sneaky little thorns that I’d carefully snip off so you wouldn’t prick yourself. Done in private, of course, because it seemed such a feminine task. 

  Bunches of what were surely weeds wrapped up in little bows. You’d politely and carefully sniff them in the same way a sommelier would work over a sip of wine. Pensive in your consideration. The irony of a forget-me-not. Jaundiced about the pupil. I trust the lack of reflection in yours. 

  The flowers that I would adorn your head with. A May Queen half drowned in the bilious self hatred of a remorseless child. You dance. I fall behind the hedges. Not really bashful. Just unwilling and unforgiving.

  The pirouette of a music box ballerina on an unborn daughter’s grave. The tombstone looking down in indifference. Just ticking off the time in a cage of likemindedness. The stars have all gone. I embrace my own irrelevance. I will go too. Down the hangmen’s drop that no well meaning outlaw ever returned from. 

  Another vanishing act will not kill me. It may land me in a hospital bed with insolent nurses sticking I.V’s in my hand. The veins all blown elsewhere. Except where they go blue and chase each other across my chest. Pigs in wallow. Snouts abounding. 

   I tried to sail but I always confused fore with aft. The sirens belching out their once appealing tunes. They are not melodious, anymore. Glued to the rocks like fat seals. A cacophonous battle between alphorn and rainstick in throat. It comes out somewhere between a gurgle and a growl.

  You became synonymous with me. I wish it was mutual. I dreamed, last night, that the crabs were carrying all the pebbles on the beach away. They seemed so unconcerned with what it meant. Despite their hideous side-walking, they did not seem malevolent.

  Footstalks twisting caduceus. Eyes vomited upon the tile. Down the murder-hole at the waxworks. Dripping fresh. Growing. Expanding. Preparing to devour every deed done in private. Wagging tongues and beaten women.

  The faithfully still gone marionette. Playing Punch and Judy in the gallery. Cutting with surgical precision, they come down all claws and teeth. Screaming in clench. The wicket closing off the breakfast warmth. Slow splinters in pubic curls.

  Smashed together in a bed like a press. The screws spinning out. Unaided. Into the occipital bulge and temple. Making foul noise. Blood along the contours. Down nape of neck. Cysts in the socket. Knuckles branded in rage. Up and down your face.

  Crawling along the floor with a broken nose. I take a hit then aim the bottle at the knot of hair growing like an unruly tumor out the back of your head. Bring it down. Shards across the grain. In your palms and knees as you dog it to the kitchen. Stilettos in scramble. Step on a heel until it snaps. Then onto the other.

  You look more like a whore than you ever have. The mascara running with your tears as I kick you in your ribs and spit in your face. I drag you back a good five feet. Belt you. And watch you crawl again. A bachelor at the other end of the stage waves a dollar. You’ll just have to make your way across this broken glass and he’ll be yours to sell your body to for the rest of your life. The little harlot in your heart will finally be able come out and sing.

  You just stand there with a glass of water. Stare at your freshly manicured nails. A bored femme fatale behind the white rimmed shades. A bullet for every year. Another in the chamber for tonight. Wind at the curtains as I move and you play dead. It was always like this. I was a fool to think it was ever anything more.

  Always these pity fucks better suited to alleys. Hand jobs at the Drive-in. Footsy at Thanksgiving dinner. Surreptitious powder room blowjobs. Stolen quickies in filthy gas station bathrooms. The aging condom dispenser hanging on the wall. Unused. Not for lack of change. But the desire to roll the dice. Chance fate with an unplanned pregnancy and an assumed commitment to monogamy.