blue_eyed_monster_corp

She first noticed it as he moved on top of her. A sort of smudge on his right pectoral muscle. Later when he was dozing, and she lay basking in blue light trying to finish her beer without having to sit up, she had a chance to examine it. Upon closer inspection it wasn’t a smudge. Whatever it was it was more like a faded image beneath the skin, wriggling its way to the surface.

She stared at the mark trying to extract meaning until he opened his eyes and smiled at her. He sat up and rested his thumb on her ear and caressed the cartilage.
“I love you”
“I love you too, but I’ve said that before and only realised afterwards I didn’t mean it, couldn’t have meant it”
“Didn’t you?”
“What?’
“Mean it?” She looked up at the damp patches and peeling paint of the ceiling and didn’t answer.
“There was this schlager song he used to sing around the flat, everything has an end only a sausage has two or something”
“Kinda Buddhist ain’t it”
“Is it? Sorry I don’t mean to talk about him after we -”
“It’s fine” He kissed her and told her he loved her again then rolled over. With her view of the mark blocked she went back to sipping her beer and staring at the ceiling and knowing she wouldn’t be able to sleep.

Her body glistening with sweat. Her thoughts harassed by the flies that buzzed in through the open window along with a slight cool breeze and the sounds of people cackling over brown bottles of lager on the corner and, behind that, the distant rattle of the train.

It was already light when she finally gave up entirely, kissed him on the cheek and got out of bed. Careful not to wake him she closed the door to the one room flat they shared in the last un-renovated block in a district otherwise completely beautified by gentrification.

She bought a beer at the späti by the station and sat on the fold out table outside. She lit a cigarette, aimed her eyes at the elevated train and tried to distinguish the faces of the early risers amongst the rushing, clattering, glass and steel blur. She thought again about the image under his skin. She felt like she’d seen it before. There was something non-specifically familiar about it, like a street you’ve never been on in the town you grew up in.

Under the shower head streaking water cut ridges in the sweat and grime that caked her back. She kept forgetting to wash. As her mind wandered she initially failed to notice the water rising around her ankles. When she did she began searching for the cause of the blockage with her fingers, the tips eventually finding and gripping hold of what was lodged in the plughole. She tugged and the water started to drain.

Her fingers emerged pinching a fleshy coloured scrap. She examined the strange scrap for a moment and recognised it to be, without a doubt, an unusually large flake of skin imprinted with the same tinted image she thought she’d seen on his chest the night before. Despite her initial disgust she decided to keep it and put it in one of the empty powder coated baggies that littered the kitchen table.

She lay down on the single mattress and found herself thinking over and over again about one of the worst periods of her life. Then she slept for not long enough. Later, smoking and drinking coffee on the toilet to get her neurons firing she heard the door open, the bed creak, the whirring of a hard drive and the click of a clipper igniting. The paint on the ceiling was flaking and she watched as a large piece came loose, broke apart, tumbled through the net of smoke that spun itself from the end of her cigarette and cascaded over the scratched enamel of the bathtub.

He looked surprised to see her. His hand moved quickly to close the laptop.
“What you up to?”
“Not much” She joined him on the bed and kissed him on the neck. Her lips registered the way his skin flinched at her touch.
“What’s wrong?”
She saw the white smear next to the touchpad and the plastic vial on the windowsill. A shard of it was stuck in the web of hairs in his right nostril, like a fly in a spider’s web. He caught her looking and squeezed his nose, sniffed it gone.
“What?”
“You seem, I don’t know. Did something happen?”
“Nothing ever happens. When are you going to work?”
“Not just yet. Why are you doing that now?” Her eyes led him to the vial.
“Just felt like it” He got off the bed and started going through the stack of records on the floor.
“I was wondering if maybe you’d have a chance to help me with some German paper work before your shift, your German’s better than mine”
“I can do my best but not today. Have you see my work stuff?”
“They were stinking so I hung them on the balcony” He selected a record and put it on, a slow throb, a beat rising from a distance. It followed her to the balcony.

Her work clothes had fallen into the puddle of gathered rain water and dead leaf mulch and pigeon shit that had gathered in the corner of the balcony. As she shoved them in a big bag she heard him lift the needle and start the record from the beginning again. Just like he used to drive her mad doing. Restarting songs over and over. Obsessing circular over beginnings. Except it wasn’t him who used to do that. No, that was someone else.

Pots and pans floor to ceiling. Nothing worse than a backlog.
“Dishwashing is hard, dirty, physical work, but you know that right schatzi?” The head chef had a cokehead’s dry red skin and a flattened nose. He claimed a background as an amateur boxing champion. She suspected he was just a type that attracted fists. His face, sleek with perspiration, blocked her off from the rest of room.
“Have you ever fucked on a waterbed? Oh baby, schatzi you’ve been missing out. Waterworld baby! Waterworld you understand? You bounce…you bounce.” He held a steak in his hand which he wobbled up and down. The flopping of the meat mimicking the bouncing of the bed. He tore a chunk of the steak with his teeth. The room reacted like it was a great joke or like he had had just won some sort of a game. High fives all round.

Burnt oil. Chefs’ sweat. Hot bleach. A bin bag burst and its contents spewed down her back and seeped through her t-shirt. Then it was dark out. Her fingers masticated other peoples leftovers. She broke a glass and cut her finger. Blood ejected in pink puffs and lightened the water speckled with grease and clouded with muck. Her eyes were drawn to what looked like crackling sepia footage of trench warfare but was actually just her hands working. Moving without her knowledge. She pulled the plug and watched the battlefields swirl down the drain.

At the end of her shift she was rewarded with two grubby notes, a handful of coins and a line of coke she didn’t want but took anyway. The creaking of her bike’s continuing decline echoed over cobblestones that threatened to break the rims through half deflated tyres. Sirens like jazz horns. Her hands gripping tight, cut-red, dry-cracked.

He was locked in the bathroom when she got in. She knocked on the door and he mumbled something indecipherable in reply. He was wrapped in a dripping towel when he came back in. She was looking at the flake of skin in the baggy and at the muted porn he’d left playing on the laptop.
“What’s this?” She meant the skin. He thought she meant the porn. He didn’t answer but turned to face her. It was clear now. No longer obscured beneath his skin. A stick and poke hangman tattoo. Someone else’s tattoo. He who spiralled the beginnings of songs. She looked again at the flake and saw it as a piece of a puzzle.

She woke up and reached for him and her arm brushed up against something in the ditch where he’d lain, the feel of whatever it was repelled her hand. She cast the bed in screen light. There was a long strip of dried skin, curled at the ages like an old parchment, lying in the imprint his body had left behind. She heard the sound of him coming from the bathroom. Getting up she carefully placed the large skin-flake on the chair they used as a bedside table. There was light and movement visible through the crack.

She got close enough that he was visible, sat on the toilet masturbating frantically. When he came back in she pretended to be sleeping. He kissed her on the back of her neck and her skin retracted. He slept. She didn’t. She couldn’t take her eyes off the skin-flake, which cracked as it dried, crumbled, until it was not much more than dust. The sun rose and the square of sky she could see out the window turned the same shitty cocktail of grey and pink as the murky blood tinted water at work.

That night the dishwasher took on a new form, that of a feverish, shrunken, powerplant. Coughing greasy steam and hot plates slick with chemical cleaner with the kind of controlled total aggression that only mechanism can produce. She started drinking schnapps made warm by the ambient heat of the cramped kitchen. Slick with fluid she stepped outside for a fag. The sky opened and thunder cracked. She called him, her hand shaking. He answered but then said nothing. She heard him talking to someone else in perfect German and then the line went dead.

Everything wrong started catching up with her. Burns and cuts. Shattered porcelain. Someone crowded her into a toilet cubicle. Served her a thick line of speed. He stood too close. His breath the same temperature and flavour as the steam. There were crude drawings on the cubicle wall. Stick people fucking. Fucking with no genitals. The fucking was in the positions. In the way one stick person dominated another.

She was too everything to cycle straight. Her front wheel slipped into the tram track. Her face met the pavement like a spark meets a fuse, suddenly, violently. Arching her back, she clambered up. Shadows and voices gathered in the swerve and she fled.

Crumpled into a doorway she picked the embedded gravel from her chin. Her tongue detected the metallic tang of blood and then framing herself with one gravel peppered palm she regained her footing, the rocking reset and she looked at the street ahead and then over her shoulder at an the identical street running in the other direction.

She got the quivering key in on the second attempt. Her innards twisted into a fist. The stairway throbbed with the distant sound of bass. Louder, clearer, ominous as she made her way up the stairs. Slivers of dried paint tumbled from the ceiling, pirouetting onto her shoulders and into her hair with the erratic movements of moths made lost by a flickering lightbulb.

The throb was coming from inside her flat. The door opened to reveal a squirming knot of people. Woodlice revealed under a piece of dead bark. Through the constantly shifting gaps she caught sight of him in the kitchen.

There was someone sat on his lap. His arm draped over them. His head nestled in their neck. They kinda looked like her but only in the same way anyone looks like anyone when they’re where you expect to find that person, or where a person expects to find them-self.

Her neck gripped by cold tremors. The fist in her middle clenched and unclenched, pumping like a second, palpitating, heart. She was guided to the kitchen by the shoulders and backs of strangers.

He saw her holding herself in the door frame and momentarily looked caught. But then he lit a fag and smiled at her and said something in accent less German to the person on his lap who giggled and looked at her with drunk, soft eyes. She tried to will herself sober. Sharpen her eyes to see what it was she was so sure she was seeing more clearly. The scene and him in the scene. Him, not but not him. Emotions streamed down her cheeks. Guided back out of her flat by the whispers and glances of strangers.

The city had undergone a scene change and been replaced by a backdrop of civilisation sketched in shadow and gaps. She was alone with this changed city, the clattering of the train and the metronome provided by her steps.

Under the elevated train line. Pigeons impaled on spikes. Figures emerged from the haze of the distance. A trio of dishwashers. Fat-stained aprons and chefs’ clogs.

Two held each other and danced to the tinny schlager music coming from a portable radio with one caved-in speaker.

The third was in a corner with his head leant against the wall. She assumed he was pissing but as she passed by she saw a hand pumping mechanically. Friction and spit. He gasped relief and dribbled onto the brickwork.

She passed out on a bench on the station platform. The day started again. The scene crowded with construction workers in brightly coloured dungarees and cleaning women playing puzzle games on their phones. Worn-out pensioners weighed down by bags overloaded with time and empty beer bottles. She awoke to the heat of midday sun drying the spit around her mouth. Her hangover something grand with resonance but not meaning.

Debris from the night before inside her and on the stairs. One mirroring the other in ways that made the mucus in her throat congeal. The kitchen door hung open, hingeing in the slight wind from outside. She could hear someone moving around and the sound of radio playing. Reaching tentatively she pushed the door.

It swung slowly open to reveal that where he normally sat was something large and semi transparent. The dry husk of a man. The discarded casing of him, the imprint of his features in crisp fleshy shell still recognisable. Lost skin all that’s left of him.

Then there was the other man, bent over the work surface, slicing a knackwurst, peeling the skin from both ends with his fingers, singing along with the song on the radio…
“…alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei,
Jawoll, mein Schatz, es ist vorbei,
Doch du musst nicht traurig sein, du bist ja nicht lang allein,
Denn alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei,
Mein Schatz, es ist vorbei…”