Drawn And Quartered

“Here. And here. There.”

Points marked, points memorized. Pressure, warmth. Slick and curdled as the dye seeps into your pores. Purple has become your white cotton garment, a byproduct of too little red to dominate the rich blue. The hue of your heart has been revoked and beaten to the deep bruise of iris blooms. False love-bites lie ingrained in the skin of your neck, the pinprick mouths of your flesh sucking in chemical paste with each throb of your pulse. The scorpion at your throat rears in warning to the fingers that depart their wisdom for all to see.

“A heartbeat. Bloodstream. It's indomitable until the fragile human body has been shattered or wound down. Never stops, just goes. My heart, yours. All of ours. Can you feel it?”

Yes, yes I can.

“Cup it in the palm of your hand. No, like this.”

Rewind, reshape. An embrace of purple willow branches curls into graffiti-marred twigs and they sway together. Blown by the whispers so certain and soft up toward the stratosphere where the sun and moon mingle. His hand guides your own with fingers intertwined. You part the unwashed ebony curtains as one and seek the source of the Nile, for his veins seem to stretch forever as Egypt's life-waters do. There beneath the white silk coffin-lining drums the heart that was torn from a dove, divided, and distributed to two children of the dark New Jersey suburbs. The heartbeat in his throat feels just like your own.

“Harder.”

Twiggy fingers press, bruise, threaten to cut the delicate casing and make a well in the crimson channels.

“I'll hurt you.” You say, and it is too quiet to be heard by any human ear.

Yet still he knows your plea, for his heart is two-quarters your own and cannot be deaf to itself. Sunlight peeks golden through the green bower of leaves ground into his gaze and perhaps you will spend your entire life looking up, up into his eyes that extend toward forever without a second thought to anyone else's space.

“You already hurt me.”

Press stop, review, discover the inconsistencies. Edit the film, photoshop the actors, make it perfect. But he has stolen your reel and released it on the screen. There is no air-brushing the past and the inaccurate previews have been your catalyst. If it were possible you would retract every printed proclamation, each photograph filched from your Myspace, the false words. The hand you held would be severed at the wrist and kept saturated by formaldehyde in the belly of a jar. Publicly you would banish the evidence of a guilty conscience and shout from your soapbox 'I was always his!'.

“Why did you have to exist?” You ask, plaintive as if he might regurgitate the secrets of the universe into your cupped palm.

“I existed first. Then I asked for you, when I was small and given one wish.”

Be careful what you wish for, little one. Why couldn't you have been printed in a catalog, custom-made and ready to order? A phone-call and short wait away from his eternal possession? Perhaps you would be one of one thousand models or rather a unique piece with all the desirable components. What had he requested, that you could be so wrought with fault? What had you missed? Make me a real boy, Blue Fairy.

The sharp scent of paint sands your rough edges, smoothing the grains of wood until they are dull and featureless. His hand departs much like the moisture in your eyes and slithers like rainwater down the curvature of your shoulder, the arch of your collarbone. It lays like a wounded lover against the source of your woes, the fickle cavity that contracts as if it is gasping for oxygen. The wineskin of adultery costumes itself as an organ and you wish he would plunge the ivory rods of his fingers inside. Puncture the pustule, my love.

“They shouldn't have given you a heart. It wandered and never came back.” He murmurs, not with bitterness but with resignation.

“No, it's always with you. They are the same, yours and mine, so they can never be strangers.”

You duck into the billowing curtains and find your half-dug well, filling it in with saliva and desperation. Forsake. Forgive. Forget.

“They write letters, but you never come home. Are you a POW, Callisto? Does she keep you captive?”

The vibrations travel from his throat to your mouth and ring down the line of your spine like speech on the telephone wire. So far to travel yet the echoes haven't the time to discard their Venetian masks. You do not answer but instead suckle with a fervor unmatched. You are bound by this blood and the stitches tangled over open wounds you have laid in one another. The skin soon tears like rice paper against your teeth and you caress the marks with the smoldering velvet of your lips. His skin is fragile and perhaps if you are cruel enough his flesh will melt and run like eyeliner, the milk of starshine trickling into an empty soda can. He is liquid eternity and you were all trying to make yourselves immortal, yet you have failed and grown gluttonous after he filled your every whim. The outside world's chemists tip vials into his mixture (and yours) and as each new preservative is absorbed your flavors have changed. You repel one another like oil on water and as torturous as the separation is you cannot drown yourself inside him any longer. He sinks to the floor while you float at the surface, your essence interwoven with the stinging spice of your second lover.

The colors bleed and tremble on their brushes as droplets fall to the pallet. You pursue him as he paints himself again and again, desperate to shed his own flesh like the serpent that his zodiac brands him. Thin, round, overweight, slender, thin, emaciated, thin, rounder. Short hair, blond, magenta, red, longer, blond, black, long hair, green roots, red back, blue streaks, white back, short hair, longer, short, too short, longer, long and black, short and white. You follow with your own inconsistencies shouldered high above the bog mud. If he does not change constantly he will be frozen in a frame for eternal sleep, a photograph of departed beauty that you keep at your bedside. You run to her constancy as you watch the black parade scuttle past. He tries so hard not to love you as the men (taller, bolder, more cunning than yourself) dismantle his soul again and again. Who knows the identities of would-be lovers as they disperse like morning fog. They struggle to remain attenuate but the boy is such high maintenance that it is fruitless. You think perhaps Réme is the worst kind of beautiful; the sort that launches ships but makes them abandon their quest prematurely (disheartened). Life is shifting like sand-dunes and you are in constant anticipation of losing your footing. Every time the grains of stone collapse beneath you his hand darts forward in rescue (because no matter how he flees he will never, ever allow you to be hurt) and all that transpires is the both of you tumbling down to the desert floor with limbs entwined. Always.