Blue

Not sure what it feels like when you step through the fire storm. Perhaps, it’s something like this. Hot and cold at the same time. Cliched and novel. Something new that you can’t really describe because your teeth are chattering and your hands are shivering. Try to remove the lens from your eyes but you can’t, because your fingers twitch.

It’s almost a special sight, watching those fingers, artistic like your father’s, long and tapering, with small blunt nails like your mother’s, and they can’t enclose the lens between them. It’s a piece of blue ellipse, something that you imagine a supernova of your mind would look like, but you can’t really be sure, because you’re stepping through the firestorm, and that means everything is very uncertain. The forearm starts to hurt and you remember the bite that he gave you earlier this evening.

***

Earlier this evening. Met him at the bus stop outside your building, and you thought to yourself that there must be some other way of doing this. There’re other creatures to kill, other than yourself. You’ve never been the kindest, mellowest person to walk the earth, but this time, and the times before this, your prey is yourself. So you bring him up to your apartment and shut the door, and he looks at you.

It’s clear he doesn’t want to waste time, and as soon as he’s had the water you offered, he wants you. You wanted him, too. You wanted the debasement, and the supernova flames and the bites. He bites you while he makes love. He’s older than you, much older, and there’s a certain level of servility in that. Of course it’s kinky. It’s because of the kink factor that you close your eyes and beg him to eat you alive. You feel the fires even then, and wonder if he’ll get them from you. A tingle in your nose. A sharp ache in your throat. Your pharynx constricts. A shout. Is that what an orgasm is called? The remnants of torture and the memory of a bite.

You can see the crimson mark his fangs left on your arm, and you shudder.

***

Brown skin pales there on your arm. Red mark glistens with water. The shower jets do nothing to abate your fever. Stand there under the jet for some time. Let water drip. Dtip. Drip. Drip. Laugh while you stand. You don’t know at what. It’s a mystery. You’re burning up. Names of medicines that you can’t recall. Pop a pill. Any pill. But no, you love yourself too much to do any of that.

It’s all in the day of Garp.

Find that amusing. Reach for the soap. Rush your hands through your scalp. Knead the skin there. Tight. I wish I was in love. I wish I was in love. If I say that over and over again, can I make it true? Can, I? Can, I? O, please Santa, can I?

Find that funny. Laugh like Garp would.

***

It’s a gay ball. Streamers. Balloons. Heart shaped ones at that. How tacky. Laugh. Drink like a fish. But you’re burning up. So fast, and the image of the blue lens in your fingers comes back over and over in your mind. How did you manage that, you wonder. Somehow, you did. Somehow, you grasped that slippery blue half-orb in your artistic fingers and touched your eye. Somehow, you could see again, though it was through veils of water. Veils that kept on flooding your eye as you rushed out of the apartment, past the bus stop where the man who bit you stood earlier in the evening, and you rush into the cab.

“Take me to hell,” you urge the cabbie, flashing an extra tenner at him, and then you notice his horns, as the car surges forward. It’s a circle, and that’s when the supernova fire storm and the burning and the shower sequence finally make sense to your fevered mind. Somebody hands you a dry martini at the ball, and you wonder how he knew what your drink was. It’s a day of coincidences, but you know that there’s no such thing as that.

Sip. Swirl. Sigh. Soothe. Stir. Shiver. See. Sip.

Dance. Droll.

Effort. Easy.

Fag.

Spot the blue lens in the story, and that’s your pass out of Hell.