She was a Wire Bird
She had wide, used eyes, like those of an abused child, that awoke the predator in me.Snow delighted her. I hated the cold. She waded naked into a black-water creek in twenty degrees, once, shortly after we met. I stood on the ice and watched her madness sink beneath the iron-flashing surface.
She went to Cornell for a semester, she told me. Arched her back beneath a nearby waterfall and drowned in autumn's colours. I don't know what she studied, maybe something like ergonomics or statistical philosophy.
She was a wire bird flashing across a window pane and I wanted to keep her reflection framed on my desk forever.
"You're too numb," she said once, and laughed.
I just shrugged and smiled. She stroked my "gruff" face and said, "Your eyes are almost as dead as mine," and we did it right there behind a scarred oak tree, brittle twigs snapping beneath.
I would like to say our encounter ended with her drowning in the bathtub and me stuffing her body in my closet to rot for a month.
It did not end so romantically.
She left a silver pen on my bed beside a blank notebook. She wrote nothing inside. She hated writing.
I guess she blocked my number and moved off to someplace with icier waterfalls. Maybe Sweden. Maybe Alaska. Maybe a few blocks down the street from her cold, crusty apartment.
It is raining now. Everything feels like glass. A twinge trickles through me as I think of her rabbit face and her carved-metal figure.
"Why do I love such twisted men?" she asked, almost philosophically, on a snowy spring night.
A ludicrous question, and the last thing she ever said to me.
I guess all metal must rust, eventually.
Short story by pok-a-dolt
Read 1168 times
Editors' choiceWritten on 2016-12-30 at 22:26
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Editorial Team |
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Lawrence Beck |
