I Watch Your Hands When You Talk

Were you put together backwards, was your skull glowing hot with lightbulb filament before even your heart clicked on? I wonder. I won't say so, since it's prying, but yes of course I do wonder. Was the excess heat siphoned off through your mouth like rabid champagne, crammed dripping into Mason jars, kept and left to dust in the basement? Did you warp the wood of the walls of your nursery? (I wonder.) Your pillowcase must be covered in scorchmarks.

The vital heat in you is steam, and me - mine being smoke, there's not a lot can be done that can keep us from going the same places, and there's not much wrong with that or I hope anyway. In theory, anyway. I hope. Smoke is distractible sometimes. It's known to linger in lungs and the barrels of guns and crematoriums, it's seduced to licorice mischief by mirrors. Smoke is led around by the nose, by a breeze or breath, but as a vital heat if it's fed then it rises just fine just like any else, even steam, (I hope.)

When we get there I will listen to what you say and I will say things too and though I will try not to pry I also will. Sorry. I will pry and I will singe myself and be sorry for that. You are big strange money in the belly of a kettle, and it hatches a magpie in me. (Sorry.) I will singe myself until I know better but mostly though I will listen. I will listen, and while I listen I will watch your hands until (I can look you in the face) until I can know your words better, and that way I can hear you better when you talk, and know better what you're saying, and not shrink and peel away from the booming Dresden dynamo of the wires of your head, like the rest of us do. I will listen but I will also watch for fists.

She is a thing of the hothouse,

syrupy warm and soiled, scalp scraped down into a herringbone braid with the aid of a bathroom mirror. She is a thing of staying and keeping. Words can wait. The lines of her palms read like animal tracks, and were she to try and have them read they likely wouldn't be; not that she would. Foreign coin is no smell that's alive and well in the pockets of her houndstooth coat.

At the age of nine she decided to be a figure-skater and informed her parents, and while they gathered medical papers and insurance potpourri to sign her up for classes they discovered she was born twice: once, when she was born, and again when the certificate clerk was chemically flogged by the perfume of a liquid-hipped secretary. At the courthouse she watched anxious and ununderstanding while her parents slouched and flexed and bristled like wicker at the desk attendant who was everything but impressed. She said so in her posture and pucker. She was wrinkled all over like treebark and butcher paper and had a jaw like a sink full of dishes, and was doing everything in her power to show how very utterly unmoved she was because she knew that that too was a kind of power.

And she was unmoved, very utterly, except for the toffee-soft lumps of guilt that slunk under her tongue and stuck to the ribs of her teeth at the look on the face of the little girl: covered up to her nose by the counter, clawing it in a boxer's clinch, staring up at her hard and terrible with salt and quinine. The iceskates were pulled up to her sapling chest, too hard and with too little arm, like she wanted to attack her with them.

Instead of wrapping them and giving them away, for a gift, for little cousin Claire's birthday - which is what her parents would have liked and told her to do, over apology ice cream, on the ride back, her letting hers melt and wiping it quietly on the leather carseats when no one was looking - she sat up late after lights-out, with her back to the bedroom door and looped and noosed the laces into each other. Then she tightened them and noosed them again, and then tighter, and then again, until the skates were unusable, until someone would have had to dissect them like the skins of Siamese twins and ruin them because once she had them so noosed and so molded and mongreled to each other, that much, that tight, there was no one who could uproot that one from this one and still be able to use them for figure-skating no way no how no chance, except maybe God.

That made her suspicious. She waited, a moment, for the door to bust open like a thunderlit Black Cat and splinter inward behind her and crush her like a peach, or for the window to crack wide and hungry and for an unseen thing to begin sucking the air and toys and furniture and her from the entire room and to gobble her up, but if God was watching, it was without much interest.

She tucked her brand new skates between her mattress and its frame, up near her pillow. A kind of dreamcatcher for herself, she thought, maybe, to keep around just in case, unseeing the wet scrapes and pink leaks on her palms.