Dead Air Space

Under her nails it was dirty, little parasites were content to brood and breed there, all copulation and heavy eyelids. The subservient ones danced for all their kings and queens, prancing coquettishly and lamenting over their lost autonomy, but in wanting to please their rulers, took off their shirts. These parasites had even smaller parasites under their nails, who didn’t need to dance, or move at all, only needing a breath to carry their seed from one womb to another, plucking virginities and planting lineage into a line of patient females, static parasites without nails. She washed her hands plenty, but her nails were to always stay dirty, a resistant sign of potency, that she was a girl of movement. This sullied hand was implanted deep within a warm and fleecy orifice, settling into the perfect spot of comfort, to be found only by a touch.

 

Once inside she need only flick and twist her fingers to make the body move, through its mouth came her mouth, felted and dry and capable of only second hand speech and forced behaviour. It was lost without her hand, it became deflated, mind shrunken into less than a memory, a cavity, so limp was it, that a simple gust pushed it into the dust. Her hand and this body formed a third, an in-between, hovering in the space where the real and the pretend made a child; an infant who never cried. It frightened most with its unblinking stares and gaping mouth, but it gave her a pleasure with playfulness and thinly veiled disguise. The purple and green marked it poison so it had no fear when moving in between beasts.

 

It said, I cannot swallow, my throat has closed, and behind I have no organs. Its mind held no memory, only the stains of blood and dirt marked its passage. She said, welcome, and so it said so too. They said, together, a bow, and gave one also, at the waist and the wrist with legs dangling and gently crumpling clothes. 

 

An audience gathered beneath feet whose mouths also gaped open as their necks swung backward, holding eyelids open. They picked their nose and rubbed it on pants, carpets, gums, their best friend’s skin, the back of their day-old girlfriend’s jumpers, jumper’s girlfriends, flicked into the hair of their enemies, once one-day old girlfriends or anyone who wasn’t looking. Ear wax mimicked the colour of boogie men and was tenderly rolled into balls and pushed away. 

 

The sun was bold outside the window but hidden behind black sheets tacked onto brick. In the cracks between fibres it peeked at the children gathered on the floor but soon gave up to spy on neighbours cheating at both wives and poker, deposits of fat licking grease off fatter fingers, arguments between families and nations, the migration of animals and the onset of winter. She was only pushed on by the moon.