ONE
It’s summertime and the feverish heat has an estimated 5-7 business days before it breaks. It’s one of those sticky nights where, if you squint hard enough, you could probably fall in love with anything. It’s the yawning stretch at the end of December and your skin is crawling with desire. In your dreams, you’re yelling at a burning bush and begging for an epiphany, but if you close your eyes the cicada song makes shapes in the dark, and your yearning is a lighthouse that breathes lazily against your neck. Maybe the walls of your childhood bedroom whisper at midnight, or maybe you just need to go to bed.
You’re probably heartbroken because, let’s face it, this time of year seems to bring nothing but wishing on lucky stars and a bioluminescence that sits in your teeth like old sugar, fuzzy and slick. You will be better at flossing your teeth when the new year comes, rushing like a river mouth. You will not spend as much time on your phone, watching faceless hands crush those fucking pink snail eggs against the rockface and wondering what they’d feel like between your jaws.
It’s you, spitting pink into the porcelain, laying in a tepid, half-filled bath at dusk, crumpled bed sheets cast in the cobalt glare of your near-dead vape, metallic and acrid on your dry tongue. Your eyeballs feel like grapes under your slick palm’s heels. You’re young and you’re lovely and you make the best sacrificial lamb, pliable and soft-fleeced and slow blinking, and you’re bored and you’re alone. You open Hinge.
TWO
She’s got the tattoo that you’ve wanted for months. Maybe that’s what got you hooked in the first place, but now she has a hand around the back of your neck to pull you close and speak in your ear over the thumping bass and she smells like rum and coke and hairspray. The ceiling is draped with a kind of silver chicken wire and the floors are somehow stickier than the air in here. In the neon light, you feel a river silt kind of soft, gliding and gilded, like if she gripped you too hard her hands would pass right through.
She says she’s sick of all the cannibalism allegories but then she sinks her teeth into you and you think you get it. There’s something delicious about all the blood, the expanse of skin, and you hold her close and you think for a second maybe I’m dying.
She did everything right, but the hands of the one you really wanted were always a little sturdier. Treasure hunter, pearl diver, already dead girl, you’re the kind of intoxicated where your hands feel like they belong to someone else. Offer up your marrow on a silver plate, or smoke it and cook it into soup, dole spoonfuls heartily and watch her drink. Braid your hair gently and tuck it into the heart of a shell, be a post-post-modern girl with her own Victorian mourning jewellery. Bend your radius and ulna into a wishbone and offer up one of the ends to snap. Knit your veins into a sweater and offer it to keep her warm.
You’re alone in the bathroom, choking down endless longing like it’s wine, watching it drip burgundy on the white lace of your bra as you undress, the stain dark and all-consuming. It’s a snake eating its own tail, it’s the dry heat of a cigarette filter burning your fingertips, it's a heavy metal silver caked into pores.
You’ve been listening to old Charli XCX music and even older Grimes and even older Panic! At The Disco. Cheek pressed into the dirt, or against the cold tile, or in swampy pond water, you scratch at your mosquito bites and you hold the wanting under your tongue like a pill, soluble and bitter. It sits in your stomach like the pit of a peach, heavy with a desire for something you know you can’t have: hungry, lustful, gnashing.
THREE
At dawn, on the walk home, you take a shovel to the soft soil of the nature strip and bury yourself there between the clovers and cherry pits. In one pocket you’ve got a half-empty pack of Double Happiness cigarettes, and in the other your canine teeth sit like tiny little stars. Sharp-edged and off-white, you fiddle with them as you stop by the Ezymart on the corner for a Red-Bull and a Nerds rope and a hot-pink lighter. The air is water-thick through your lungs, so you take your oesophagus out delicately and put it in the green bin, rotting with the rest of the apple cores and lawn clippings. Half-girl, half-knife, half-knotted, coming undone to the TVSN ads and the early morning televangelism, lips blue as death, or maybe the midday sky. You have a photo of Mother Mary on your dresser and your vibrator needs new batteries, but you’ve bought the wrong ones the last three times you’ve been shopping. The empty holes in your gums are soft and bloody under your tongue — you take your teeth from your pocket and plant them in the terracotta pots on the windowsill of the kitchen and pray that they grow something beautiful. Something blooming. Something edible. Something to fill that hungry cavern between your ribs, just below the rabbit heart.
You can feel the wingbeats of the cicadas in your bones. The midsummer heat shakes beasts out of poets instead of the other way around. Little lamb, there’s nothing here but the smell of smoke in the distance and the shadows of magpies on powerlines. This summer is going to eat you alive if you don’t bite soon.
Fingers sticky, eyes wet, the blue hours turn away from you in some semblance of privacy as you look for a guiding star and can’t quite find it. You open Hinge again.