In the Room of Decay (toronto, june 2009), Day 7

The hot air of summer coats her body in a pool of moisture, dripping down the sides of her head and onto the tips of her hair. Raindrops trapped in spider webs. Her hands crawl down to find the blankets; hot as she is, she needs to feel as though she is suffocating. This is the only way she knows that she is still here, alive, here. His room is unnaturally humid in the summer, and her hands obsessively pull open the small window to the side. Delicate pieces of moth wings fall gracefully onto her arm. She has been in these rooms before, been tangled in cotton blankets covered in pills. But never in a room as hot as this, never one where decaying insects fall from screens.

As he places his body on top of hers, she fights the pleasure that overwhelms her body by imagining a decaying human body; a hard skull crusty and grey, empty sockets where venomous eyes used to sit, a ribcage without a heart to fill it. As she shuts her eyes she imagines her skin brimming through the spaces of his ribs, soft peach clashing against the bitter rotting yellowed bones. In her mind she visualizes what is happening to her, as she normally does, in one clear image; she is no longer the one under the bones but instead the observer.

She can see the bed covered in a mix-match of blues and purples, the puke orange shag carpet covered by various pieces of clothing carelessly tossed on its surface- a sock, two shirts, an unidentifiable piece of lace. She cannot see their bodies but instead a cluster of black lines, disjointed and scratchy. If she closes her eyes tight enough, she can see herself in the various shades of ivory that fill this black outline, the skeleton. She is the color that fills his framework and, dead as she may feel, the one who makes the stiff bones ease, the missing heart appear.

She lies still. She does not want to pour any life into this carcass, she does not want to be the color that fills its outline. She can hear the skeleton’s bones rattling, can feel the bony hands glide up and down her thigh.

Stop it, she thinks. Stop it.