“Let’s play ten fingers,” you say. It is last year or maybe the year before and we are all younger. We sit wide awake in a wide open night that palm trees and pavements have bordered into a backyard, where we will tell secrets.
“How do you play ten fingers?” i say.
i don’t want to tell any secrets.
i sit on a hammock that’s stretched between trees, the fabric of my skirt stretched into a triangle of twisted legs, and as i sway its slit slips open and i am in familiar nightmares in which my clothes all fall off and everybody laughs.
You explain ten fingers, and everybody laughs, holding the night in tight mouths, between tight teeth, till it can’t hold me anymore. Till I get cold. Then they fall together into silences between the un-confessions, into remorseless little rhythms I can’t hold up with my two hands.
I hold up my hands for the dirty sky to blacken, open my ten fingers for the black night to fill. For i am sick of being clean.
And then i pretend to blend into the night, and its laughter, and the swinging i’m tied to, trying to balance my skirt’s slit closed and my mind open, open enough to let in the whole goddamn world.
It’s not working.
Everyone falls into silence, waiting for you to break the heart of Night (with a secret) until it bleeds over the backyard fence, into parties and cars and Jacuzzis that I have never known.
Earlier, they broke the night so open, it ached, and ran empty. We fed ourselves on the fluorescent lights of dollar store to (un)satisfy our hunger for the darkness, and we stole 1 dollar sunglasses and 1 dollar chains and a 1 dolllar hats to fill ourselves up. And i was scared with no real reason to be scared, as together you and i held the boys (who were high) in a circle of sidewalk, like Rama drew Sita into safety in the sand. But the boys wandered out, into candy stores and streets and bushes, where we couldn’t find them, where I couldn’t get warm. I was afraid and poor at pretending I wasn’t, and you knew, and I knew that you knew.
I am afraid now, as you sit across from me, saying something you have never done. It’s something with a lot of clauses, like, “I have never stolen anything worth over $137 from a store on the left wing of the boca mall.”
Then:
I hold my silence on my tongue a long time, before I surrender it to them. i have never smoked pot. 3 turns. I have never been drunk. 3 more. I’ve never been with a girl. My turns fall upon me faster now, and the world is spinning faster. My mind is splitting into fragments of unrelenting innocence that waver into words that fall off of my tongue. I want to force them all back into my mouth, down my throat, swallow sharp edges softly, so I’ll never see them again.
I stretch back, and see the stars waver above me, drawn by gravity into the frantic mass inside my mind. My awkwardness rivals the night, in its power. It has spilled through the cracks in the fence, and now the neighbors are awakening to cold awkward sweats and clingy sheets. And only I know why.
I don’t know there is nothing alright left to say. “I have never given anybody a hand job,” I say. And you say nothing but you look away and I know my words have been taken by the night , and I have fallen into it, and you can’t even see me anymore. I am clear and black and starry. I am nothingness. I slip away from you, into hands and mouths and stories.
It’s just so cold.

Labels: By Ana