Anyway, I've written a sort of...thing for my friend. It's slightly odd. There's a back story to it that I'll put in tiny text so you can choose whether you read it before reading the story itself (if you do in fact read the story itself; so many choices!) Context is immediately below, and the story is farther below. Criticism is welcome; worry not that it be too harsh. I fear that some of the language is overwrought and the emotion contrived, so anything you say along those lines won't be much of a surprise.
Context: So, one of my best friends is gay but not out to his family because they're quite homophobic, and I had a dream that he was drunk and wanted to kiss me and I really didn't want to but his sister was there and would, according to dream logic, instantly realize he was gay if I didn't allow him to do so. I woke up before anything else happened and told him about it, and he of course used it as a way to mock me. As one does. The other day he told me that he had a dream that I had a huge crush on this girl but that it turned out that she had a crush on him and so she told me off in a movie theatre behind a big cardboard movie poster because she thought he and I were going out or sleeping together or something. I came out from behind the poster ready to cry, so he said something very rude to her and we left. So I wanted to put these two weird dreams together in a vaguely coherent but hopefully still slightly dreamlike way.
Story:
I sat on the corner of the bed facing the rest of the room. From the corner opposite I watched myself sit with my hands tucked under my knees, shifting uncomfortably in my own skin. The queen sized bed pushed us all closer together: the bureau, the bed, Matt, his sister Dana, and the unidentified woman on the other end of the bed. Dana sat above the fray on the dresser, swinging her feet and laughing with awkward but unchecked exuberance. The other woman was silent like me, dark and still, but I knew her mind wasn’t flush with heat as mine was. Her veins were cool like her stony exterior, which had been painstakingly chiseled out of marble down to the very last pore. She stared ahead at nothing, hearing everyone without acknowledging anything.
My attention—the most immediate danger, I knew—was most focused on Matt. He was moving in his seat, his hips twisting like his sister’s legs, his body an unwitting testament to his drunkenness. Everyone knew he wanted to kiss me: our mouths grinding and mashing together like the impression cylinders of an ancient printing press that haven’t been inked; rolling hard, dry metal onto empty sheets of paper—the screen of my mind’s eye saw it clearly, projected into the room before me. We all knew, but only I knew that he didn’t really want to, and why.
You don’t want to, I thought, the size and heat of the room becoming oppressive, Dana’s laugh intensifying, reverberating in my ears, the woman’s silence becoming unbearable, and Matt’s movements, each one more of a lie than the next, bringing him closer to me, to that moment.
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She’s beautiful, I thought, not with my mind, but with my blood. It carried the message to my temples, pounding it out along my scorched red arms, down between my thighs where it knocked at the door for admittance; each hair in its follicle across my body stirring with vague anticipation. I stood in the doorway between her and the night, waiting for her to come in. Matt and the others—the other people now, is what they were to me—moved about inside; I was only aware of their existence in the objective sense. Their bodies were provable, objects of empirical fact. I knew hers was real because I felt it. It moved in me and through me; her power compelled me, washing me in her blood.
She had moved inside, looking at me, and began talking with one of the other people; disguising herself in a cloud to speak with the ordinary ones. Matt stood there in his way, neither shrinking nor asserting, his shoulders slouched but his eyes upturned. She flowed about him, overwhelming him in a sea of curves and flourishes, not a moment of which escaped my greedy eyes: two shipwrecked sailors lapped at her waters as the stone stood unmoved in the center of the stream, not daring her to stop but not allowing her to move him.
Her eyes caught hold of mine a second time, and there flashed a look that sent me staggering. There were the unmistakable signs of suspicion and jealousy. I grasped for support, my mind reeling to find a cause when all of a sudden she was on me; a torrent of accusations and assumptions—all about him. Matt, her mouth repeated, Matt Matt Matt. I was a burglar in the home I had built for myself, it seemed. Blood drained from my body and surged in my face, the river of tears building behind my eyes as her words flowed ceaselessly. My mind found an immediate, encircling numbness which I clung to blindly.
I clung to it away from her; followed it back towards the others, from behind the wall. Like a child my face betrayed what my body knew, my placid smile a contrivance, and he saw it—he must have seen. She must see him and be smug and triumphant now—he’s even approaching her; they’re speaking, hushed now, now louder. He was yelling about something. Her face was a picture of mortification: wounded pride trying to wrap itself in tattered robes, blood pouring down its naked sides, fed on by the hungry crowd. A single rock had brought a goddess down from Olympus to be devoured by her own jackals.
For a moment I forgot who we were, and I pitied her. But pity is a transient feeling, it does not grab and hold onto you like bitterness. It doesn’t burrow through the first few layers of skin and make its nest amongst your bones and sinews, only to be removed by a masochistic frenzy that not many dare to undertake. I couldn’t have stopped them from feeding if I had wanted to, and I would never have wanted to.
A figure moved towards me, slowly enough for me to pull myself deliberately from my trance. Matt took my hand and we left the theatre together; I turned only to look at her feet, which were firmly planted to the floor.
Finis.
I'm including a picture of a Fennec fox in case that was too depressing:
