he remembered the first time he had undressed her. so carefully, as if he was afraid he would break her, somehow. his fingers tracing her porcelain shoulders, nails digging ever so slightly into her skin as one hand crept, slowly, up the back of her neck, and the other found her spine.

she fell easily into his silences, and he enveloped her, intensely; and things were good, for a while, as such things are.
she once told him that he wrote like he made love. he only nodded his head slowly, flicked the end of his cigarette, and told her she was wrong. he made love like he wrote.

it was the dancing, in the end, that always got them into trouble, of course.

*

still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he turned to her one morning, and asked why.
she arched her eyebrows, in that particular way of hers, meaning etched in every crease, and asked him what on earth he was talking about.
why, he repeated. why us, why now? why like this?
why anything, she asked, shrugging her shoulders ever so slightly.
i haven't written anything, he said, suddenly. not since i first touched you. why.
should i know?
well, i don't know, he said, slipping another cigarette out. empty, now, almost. what i do know is- my silences refuse to turn back into sentences.
when there was anguish, there were always her arms, wrapped around him. 
i don't know, baba, she said, abandoning her two-step. i don't know where your syllables are hiding.
and he may have believed her, if they hadn't circled around and around each other, so often. the same old ground, the same old fears.
you act, he said. 
you act, and i'm supposed to write. but all we do . . . all we do is dance.

- its so erotic when your makeup runs - 

half dressed and pacing, the scent of sweat rising ever so gently off his body, he asked her if this was what became of life.
he didn't like the cool air, in these moods. sometimes she thought he wanted to swallow the world, to consume it so that there could be none left. 
he liked the heat his body generated, it's temperature rising rhythmically as he circled his room once, twice, a hundred times.
it is a sort of life, he said, out loud, to no-one, recalling Greene, and then Fanon, Maugham and Heller, Chesterton and Irving, Updike and Plath. 
There were times when the words drowned him. they were too much.

- the scent of his sweat -

the walks didn't help.
more and more often, these days, she found herself haunting the streets and paths around her home, late at night, searching, perhaps, for the answers to her compulsions.
she didn't know if it was his violence which drove her away, or his great love for her. they were, ultimately, the same thing. but her appetite for violence had waned, over the years, and now she had, more frequently, only silence for his words.
there is no feeling more startlingly empty than not hate, nor loneliness, but indifference. she had become, quite suddenly it appeared to her (though she knew, of course, that it had taken years of careful progress) irrelevant. she lived on the edges of her children's existences, patiently tidying the borders of their lives.
and, somehow, after walking for miles around the twisting alleys and safe streets of her organised, neat, little housing colony, she always found herself at the steps of her own driveway. and always with the same, inexplicable, question.
'what if,' he had whispered into her ear.

*
he had told her so many stories, once, and she, being young and fond of the violence inherent in the telling, had loved him. and they had made love, in the moonlight, madly, her skin being pushed into the cold, red earth, her fingers clutching at the night as he made her scream. 
she still remembered feeling the cold air on his warm skin, the taste of his syllables as she carressed them out of his mouth and into her own. the-

*

and, every night, she took that question, and placed it, neatly, in the back of her mind, for another night. for a night when she felt, perhaps, a little stronger.

- auntie em's story -