bleed out
april twenty

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Thursday I am watching the houses go by past the mountains of my brown elbow, it’s hot and the sun setting wetly all around, all dissolving into hills. Windows rolled down and still there is sweat on my neck and dripping out of Tavis’s hair, his brown sideburns on white face. He is asleep with wet face slipping off his closed window. And then there is Jacobs, driving. Jacobs hasn’t said much to me since we got back in this car newly browned, skin smelling like sun and sand and heat.

My name’s Jim Chase, Chase like the bank but I am not a creature of wealth. Tavis swats at something in his sleep and mumbles and Jacobs turns up the radio until I feel the air sear and thud. It’s hot, hot and I put my head out the window and breathe in wet sunset air, the smell of the south and my skin and sweat, cypress and that dry, hanging moss. I want to be filled with these things, like I own spaces.

Both Tavis and me sit in the back seatbeltless but only Tavis sleeps. Jacobs likes to pretend he’s the only person in the world. He wants to feel like he is, like he owns. Jacobs never knows things for sure.

Leaning out the window toward sunset air this sensitive part of me, war-wounded, brushes against the leather of the door. Tuesday night with scotch heavy in my stomach Jacobs and Tavis held me down on the floor and Jacobs let his black fountain pen kiss through the white skin beneath my collarbone twenty-four times, twelve on each side. I counted each of them in my head and I watched Jacobs’ face screwed up in concentration, I felt the bones of my wrists rub and slip off each other, both held in one of Jacobs’ long-fingered brown hands, I felt the ceiling spin and my body shake and my bones expand and contract and I felt Jacobs’ breath hot on my face and I felt how hot my blood was and how it oozed through the troughs of my collarbone down to the hollow of my neck.

And when Jacobs had finished with me he sat and finished up the scotch. Tavis still with eyes closed slid off my ankles and knelt next to me and he asked me how I was without looking. I told him I was fine but my voice was all breath. We were all primal, tribal. Here was Jacobs, the priest, witch-doctor. And Tavis, bystander, shaking with eyes closed in this awkward awe, and then there was me and I was blood, blood sacrifice.

I didn’t want him to do it. When Jacobs pinned me down on someone’s hardwood living room floor, setting aside their imported, half-finished scotch I was saying, “No, no, no.” But now I am glad he did it. I am glad he mixed blood and ink beneath my skin, witch-doctor that he is.

Today it hurts, this refreshing pain. Tavis is sleeping but he is worried about me. Everything spins past different, colors are brighter. All the blood inside me is hot, boiling. My blood is all ink, now; everything has changed.

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We spent two weeks near Pensacola Florida, island-hopping from summer house to summer house, drinking their scotch and meddling with their air conditioning. We did not know these people except that they came round in the season when the waves came in sun-hot, dry, they were out of our hands and far away, in other worlds. Only Tavis was nervous, but Tavis is always nervous. We were alone on beaches, three sets of footprints for miles.

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Tavis wakes up when Jacobs and I get back in the car with dinner from an Arby’s near Savannah. I try to shut my door quietly but Jacobs slams his and starts the car without speaking and Tavis stirs and wakes and he blinks and then he asks for his fish sandwich. Tavis doesn’t eat those delicious things that come out of slaughterhouses and meat grinders. He asks me how I feel today and briefly I see Jacobs’ eyes piercing in the rearview mirror. I tell him I feel fine. In Arby’s when I bought Tavis his fish sandwich I felt different and stronger with the white fabric of my shirt pressing against the swollen holes in my skin.

“Lemme see,” says Tavis and I see Jacobs’ eyes in the mirror again but I pull down the collar of my shirt and Tavis looks at me with this lips pursed.

And the eyes in the mirror. Jacobs, Jacobs.

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i might take this off soon (as in, this week). so um, if you really like it, review it while you have the chance. thanks cuties