Optional Playlist:

Dear Boy: Blond Bones

Blaqk Audio: Semiotic Love 

 

Her smile danced cryptically across her face. Her precarious pink lip-gloss glittered in the sun. The tips of her fingers stroked the sand at the mouth of the strait. Her long hair and hot-pink tank top rustled in the wind as she dipped her painted toenails into the cleansing sea.

She jumped. It’s cool touch on her feet burned like condemning holy water. Her fingers moved quickly to her pocket. She sighed as they tightened around the small glass bottle that rested there. She pulled the bottle to her. She held it to her breast.

The bottle was slender like an antique syrup bottle. It was corked at the top. On it’s inside it held a rolled slip of paper. The asphyxiated words were sleek and sharp. They scrambled to escape.

She had traveled to the waters edge at noon each day. It had been a month. The light touch of her toes to the water’s surface told her the tide was right. Today was the fist day the bottle had left her pocket.

She bit the tip of her tongue and licked the bright gloss from her lips. The copper swirled with strawberry in her mouth.

The glass bottle shimmered hot between her thumb and index finger. She inched forward. She crouched on her heels in the sand. The water lapped treacherously on the shore before her.

Slowly her mascara-heavy eyelashes flickered closed. She froze. He was there. He was shining on the backs of her eyelids, dancing and faded, as if projected from an 8mm.

Her body tensed. She watched the beaded blood drip from the sharp edge of his mouth. His eyes were perfect pearls, silver and unmoving.

It was dark. The air was sticky and calm. The boat hummed as the water ate at its hull. The key clicked. She needed silence. She needed the dark to hold her. He couldn’t.

She traced her finger down the side of his blue, bruised neck. She could still taste him, dark and oozing in her mouth. He was sweet, unnerving. She tangled his hair in her fingers. She placed her cheek to his. His cold was an intoxicating rush. It bit at her, white-hot and searing. She inhaled. His rigid body was thick and heavy as she moved him. Adrenaline was coursing like poison through her black veins.

The cement blocks hugged and scraped at his perfect chest as he slid off the edge of the boat. He fell whole into the water’s foamy mouth.

Her eyes shot open. Her sides ached. She exhaled. She had been holding her breath. Her fingers were sweaty, numb, around the bottle’s edges. She shook it. Its ink spun like a flame down a fuse, ready to explode. She jerked upright, her body shaking. She slung the bottle.

The bottle landed gracefully. It floated and rocked in the water. It was calm. The bleeding words left to exsanguinate. It drifted from the shoreline.

He lay, turgid and slippery in the strait. Below the surface, he was drowning in death, consumed in his watery purgatory. His fingers lay open and stretched towards the surface. His arm swayed with the current. The glass bottle glinted with warm sunlight at the surface. The light bounced playfully on his blue skin below.