Don't Kiss Me: Stories(14)

This boy went with a girlfriend of mine. But sometimes that’s just tough shit.

I threw pebbles at his window till he came down, told me that was his little brother’s window, told me his little brother ran and told him some queer bitch was standing in the lawn and he better do something about it.

Show me your truck, I told the boy, and we went for a drive.

The boy told me after high school he was joining up, told me his favorite food was meat loaf, told me he put the transmission in his truck all by hisself, told me he had a dream about me two nights before where I sang like a canary bird and fed him a pizza.

And then what, I asked the boy.

He laughed too hard, covered his mouth with his fist like he could cough. Where we going? he asked, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t give him no destination cause then we’d have gotten there. And then what.

He turned us down a dirt road, parked us alongside some trees. Well, he said.

Well, I told him, come here, and the boy did, pulling himself across the bench seat and me under him, the door handle at my neck and that was good, I like to remember it ain’t always ideal, and the boy kissed me, his tongue fluttering in my mouth like it was a wounded butterfly, I realized this was his technique and I was touched at the effort.

You need to tell me something, tell me anything, the boy said, holding himself up, he was breathing hard, I thought of his girl, how she gave me some gold hoops for my birthday, how they turned my ears green but I never said, how she snorted when she really got going.

I can’t sing, I told the boy. And I ain’t no bitch like your brother called me. The boy lowered himself back down upon me, that weight and that heat making me feel all exploded, I was like to breathe him all up and in, Yes you are, he said, I could feel his breath on my face, yes you are a bitch, I could see up close how he was freckled, he smelled like grass and dirt, his heart like a mallet, ain’t you, he said, ain’t you?





YOU AND YOUR CATS


You got the cat you came to know as Milton the day that Indonesian man phoned up to say he wouldn’t be meeting you at the Sizzle Steak because your new hairdo reminded him of a hive of blood beetles, which was a bad omen, and while he was at it your perfume reminded him of his momma’s deathbed breath, and finally he spluttered how you make him sad, and that was really the thing of it, this put you off so much you didn’t deign to ask him what a blood beetle was, even though that was the best part of the Indonesian man, the exotic facts he could drop into a conversation, like that time he mentioned in passing that he boiled his shoes every week, and was a blood beetle an annoyance similar to the house roach or was it a horror similar to a flying ant, you don’t know and now you never will, you daubed some hand soap on your pulse points so you wouldn’t smell like breath no more and you went to the Pets ’n’ Friends and walked straight to the kitten bucket and pointed, a little boy said, Uhl, that thing got a noface, and you told the boy, Better than too much face, biglips, and you named that cat Milton and you tried not to look directly into its face, cause you remembered the Indonesian man saying how cats can hypnotize you into digging out your own internal organs and offering them up as an afternoon snack.

Then you got Posy cause Milton had gone, you came home one day and he was nowhere, and he was nowhere the next day, and you didn’t waste much time after that cause you found yourself thinking of the Indonesian man, how his mouth was just a line, how his eyes were the color of moss, how his jacket smelled like an old onion, which you now realize was likely his body odor and not some secret passion for cooking he would reveal after you had taken him into your bed, which you imagine happening after he had fought off a rapist he found in the alley, but you don’t have an alley, and you ain’t got Milton either, and you got tired of standing in the fridge light to sniff an old dried onion from the salad drawer, and so there you was at Pets ’n’ Friends, pointing again, this one you named Posy cause of her little bud nose, and let’s face it cause she had a prominent pink butthole, which she seemed proud of or at least comfortable with, in a way that made you start thinking maybe your hivehead and breathneck weren’t ugly things, they just were, and maybe you was all right in the long run, you had nice fingernails after all, and sometimes when you was tired your eyes didn’t boggle quite so much, and Posy loved life the way you wish you did, you caught her sitting in the sink so she could watch her own face in the mirror, and she was always rubbing her sides on things, like contact with the drywall was a pleasure sweet enough to be repeated daily, you tried it once but there was nothing there for you.

Then one day Milton was back, flopped in the kitchen watching Posy lick her private details, and you had the feeling you had just walked in during the pillow talk portion of procreation, and you was probably right cause Posy birthed a litter a couple months later, had em right underneath your dining table, left a stain the color of the fancy drink you had on your first dinner with the Indonesian man, Pink Sunrise is what it was called, Posy basking in her spill and Milton somewhere else, what did he care really, four kittens lived and one came out balled tight and not breathing, and you buried it in the backyard, and you cried cause you figured someone had to mourn the loss.

So now you had Milton Posy Pink Sunrise Squints and FluffFluff. And one day you saw the Indonesian man drive by your house in his white four-door, very slow, the sun running a flashing diamond from the hood to the trunk as he passed, you couldn’t see his face but his hair looked big, looked womanish, you did not let that stop you from believing it was him, you needed it to be him, and that night you finally relented and welcomed the two stray cats you had been feeding inside, Posy clawed the one but that seemed to be the end of the matter, now you had eight, and you were nine. You had been watching from the window every day and part of the night. The Indonesian man had driven by, it was a fact that snapped into place with a satisfying click, you pulled it out, no it wasn’t him, you placed it again, click, it was him, you clicked and clicked and clicked.