Jack of Hearts
01-09-2011, 05:01 AM
NB: This is the most experimental piece this author has ever written. He has been reluctant to share it because of that nature. In many ways it lacks the aesthetic quality that the author considers good form. The most appropriate reader of this piece would be one who is interested in esoterica.
1. Now
Helena had a nice butt but there was always the stipulation that the Great Used Car Salesman in the Sky would never let me take it off the lot without buying it. She was climbing through the driver’s side door where a shower of moonlight began to spill across the dashboard and the back of her jeans. I pinched her.
“Ow!” she squeaked while trying to leap away. Then she turned to me and said, “Don’t pinch my butt!”
“Ok,” I agreed while imagining the low low-mileage at my fingertips, “no butt peenching.”
“Don’t make fun of my English!”
I pinched her butt again.
“And don’t pinch my butt!” her accent resonated into the middle of me, the ****ty parts, and made them light and beautiful and magically tense.
Silly girl knew the way, took her time crawling along to the passenger side and let her tiny butt thrust itself a bit higher than before, a bit more outward and vulnerable. I decided to leave it alone because I liked it that way, but my eyes drifted down the seat, and laying there, almost insidiously, was a black pair of thong underwear. Helena had crawled over it and didn’t seem to notice until her gaze traced mine.I slid behind the steering wheel, threw the underwear outside and closed the door. She looked at me expectantly.
“… What was that?”
“Clearly you’ve never seen eco-friendly dental floss before,” I said and absently flicked my middle finger at the pine-tree air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror.
She started laughing, “Victoria‘s Secret does not sell dental floss!”
“That depends on what you floss with.” Or what you cut your teeth on.
Helena leaned forward and covered her mouth as if trying to hold the laughter in. “You think you can keep out of trouble by making me laugh?”
I started mouthing a one liner, stopped and finally just shrugged. We sat in the dark and on the bench seat and stared through the windshield for awhile.
“It’s going to be wet soon,” she said while gazing out the window.
“Pervert. Help, rape.” I began to call out.
She rolled her eyes but couldn’t suppress a smile entirely. I rolled my eyes too.
“If I was thirsty,” she started to say, “I would go out in a storm and drink up all the water.”
“I’d just drink from the tap,” I admitted.
“You will never die of thirst, at least.”
There was a residential wall out there. It had the makings of rain out there. I eyeballed her, tucked away against the passenger side door. The window pressed against her hair and was chilled where moisture longed to seep in- that sort of thing would just not be denied. Another moment passed and I looked at the empty middle seat between us. I looked at Helena again. I looked at the empty middle seat.
“You are like Prince Charming in your big white truck you know. It is like your big white horse,” she said while falling into a huge smile.
Like hell. I squinted, frowned, and pat my hand against the empty middle seat.
Helena watched, scrunched a thought in-between her eyebrows and then her lips drew tense. She had brown hair. She had olive skin. She had freckles on her nose and only her nose and they were like sprinkles of dark cinnamon. Eased into a smile again as though she had come to a conclusion, Helena wagged her index finger back and forth, “No, no, no. No .”
She looked at me. I looked at her. A wave of silence washed over us.
“Get the hell out, Frenchie,” I demanded.
She tried her best to sharpen her features and give me a stern look but I still found the mirth in her expression. Amusement. When she could bear the tension no longer her laughter erupted into joyful sing-song. Everything began to flow like a wisp of flowery scent, the aroma of flowers that followed her into my truck and permeated the air and lifted my stomach into my throat and made my head dizzy. The scent of her. Her figure with its slenderness and orange-sized breasts made me suspicious or a different kind of drunk.
Helena slid her hip against mine and warmness flushed all over me, seemed to crawl into my spine, the back of my neck. She clicked the seatbelt, “Ok, you win.”
“No hard feelings, kid. I’m having a good season," and then I looked past a window full condensation into the mostly empty and scarcely lit parking lot that surrounded us. It was cold out there. I was suddenly very grateful to be separated from it.
“Henri,” Helena shined as she pulled me back and looked up into my eyes, “we always go out but you are never serious.”
“Henry, dear,” I corrected. “Say it with the ‘h’. In America even our consonants are incredibly violent.”
And she rested her gaze a moment before laughter overtook her. Helena could barely speak as she tried to say, “No! I was saying ornery!”
“It’s good that you can keep yourself entertained, I plan on getting a lot of paperwork done tonight."
Two of her fingers reached up and brushed stray strands of hair from her forehead. “Zut. Yeah right. Where are we going, ornery?”
“That’s a secret,” I said because I had no idea. I was way too horny to want to think about it anyways. I poked her in the ribs and she sprang forward. I quickly slid my arm around her waist and pulled her closer. A faint tremor came over me like a flash of light and was gone as suddenly as it came. I loved it and hated it and wondered if I had learned nothing.
A stare dug into me. I almost second guessed myself. While watching me, she smiled softly and said, “Mmmhmm.”
She continued, “… but you know no sex. Maybe not marriage-”
“-I’m an American, marriage is against my religion, I have rights-”
“-but some commitment is nice!”
“I always get the crazy ones.”
“You think I am crazy, do you?”
"Do you realize how crazy that question sounds?"
“Answer! You think I am crazy?”
“Well you were just talking about being committed."
“No! Tell why I am crazy?”
“You believe in useless things,” I said a little too honestly.
“Is it that you want me to change just for you, Henri?” she asked me without moving away but boy was she prepared to.
“Yes, change completely,” I said as I tried to think of a way to keep her exactly the way she was and still nail her. I already knew it was going to be phenomenal. She wasn’t bat-**** crazy, just a little nuts, and it was nice to play to a different crowd. Also she was smarter than me and I liked the thought of taking her down a notch. Snooty bilingual *****.
“I think you really like me, Henri.”
“I think we should just be friends,” I answered.
Her eyes grew wide. “Jerk! You do not! You want to get lucky!”
“Everyone wants to get lucky, so what?”
She stopped smiling. Something in French, I think she said ‘douchebag' but I didn't speak the language. Helena remained silent a moment and I tried not to flinch because I knew what was coming next... where the air gets a little thicker and the laughter dies.
She slowly said, "Henry, you are atheist-"
"-I am not."
"What?"
"I don't know. Nevermind."
"Oh yes, ok, ok. Agnostic. Why do you not follow the bible? Not even a little bit, like me? Be serious."
"It's probably not true, you know."
"I know that! It has a good message, Henri! Love, respect, friendship..."
“(indecipherable)-blocking..."
She frowned and turned away, "You think anything that is in front of what you want is a joke."
"I think you're too smart for your own good, you little brat," I lamented. Dumb women from here on out, I thought to myself. "I only want what being alive tells me to want."
She jabbed me a good one with a finger to the ribs, better than I could've gotten her, probably. "Answer my question!"
"Damn! Fine. Following around two things at once seems like a pain in the ***, I guess. I already know what to do without readin' it out of some book about ****-blocking." Then I twisted the ignition to life. When the radio came on, Helena looked away for a long time...
"I don't understand. You are the most alive person I have ever met," she said with sweetness. Then she did her best to sing along to the American pop songs, which she knew by heart somehow. When she came upon a line that she did not know, she seemed to know it's equivalent in French, and so it was sung in French.
In between the lines that I could understand, I thought she sang that a man can value anything he wants. I imagined that I heard her singing wetness is life, that water is life.
2. Before
A mirage-like swelter rose off of the road and pressed upward against the sweat beaded against my forehead, stopped it from moving. Nothing could move, the harshness of he heat fastened everything into place like a punishing glue. Nothing was anything but oranges and reds and dull browns and dull skies. Nothing could swallow...
Half a plastic bottle's worth of warm water. My grip, sweat, sweaty grip. It was slowly evaporating out from underneath my fingers...
Mitch slapped my shoulder and thrust his arm forward, "The hayle is that?"
"Don't know," I said while trying to squint harder, "maybe a baby cow lying in the middle of the road."
"BS it is," he answered with needless defiance. "Maybe it's dead."
"Looks like a giant oreo." I raised my shoulders slightly and continued my stubborn stagger against the pavement. Half a minute passed.
"Dude, we gotta take a break," Mitch said.
"Shut up," step after step after step.
"Dude, Henry... come on."
"Shut up. You make me sick, I'll kill you," I said while wandering onward along the two-lane road and chafing like all hell.
"I can't walk anymore!" came Mitch's straining voice, "I need to sit , right now! I mean it!"
My slow lurch forward would not cease. Could not cease. Might not start again.
"… stop!"
"Look," I said while measuring my pace to nearly no pace at all, "it's hot as hell out here. If you sit out here, you're going to die." I peered ahead into the distance. "Up there. Next to that freaking cow thing is a tree. I'll drag your *** there if you want but no stoppin' here. Can't sit in this kinda sun, I'm tellin' you. Damn! These shorts are sawing me in half!"
I reached down into my pants, into a mess of moisture, pubic hair and what I imagined to be blood at that point. I had to pick the fabric away from my tender flesh. I think it made everything hurt worse. All Mitch had to do was adjust his red ballcap and shift his greasy brown hair around. He spat on the ground wastefully and watched me make faces and noises.
We kept walking.
Eventually nearness and familiarity colored the details of the black and white spot laying ahead of us on the road, head in one lane, hind quarters in the other. Somberness struck us somewhere that hadn't been dried up yet.
"Is it alive?"
I didn't know. "I don't know."
"Freakin' a'..."
Holy crap, I thought as I saw movement. "It's moving. It's... breathing..."
First I broadened my steps to a bounce to a run to a sprint and I was then towering over the labored form of the pup. I kneeled down, but when the road burnt my kneecaps through my pants, I opted instead to squat upon my ankles like Tom Joad or Pa or the other men as they drew their plan westward. "Hey little guy," soothed my whisper, "... easy, little guy..."
I sat the water bottle down next to his head. My fingers, I wished my fingers to be ice cubes as they stroked the fur on his neck. The little body whimpered and offered an enervated lick to my hand.
"How... how are ya sure it's not a girl?" Mitch panted as he caught up.
My hand then gently lifted a hind leg which exposed the testicles. "You think a ***** would have had the good sense to make a run for the tree shade?"
"Not the ones you run around with, man-whore."
"Helluva way to talk about your own mother."
He didn't like that. I put the leg back, "It's just a pup. no collar. Why aren't you wearing a collar, boy? Do we need to get you a collar? What is he, a border collie?"
Mitch nodded, "Yeah... what do we do here? Do we... have to kill it?"
I shook my head, "I'm not killing him."
"Henry, you gotta do what's humane here..."
"Yeah," I continued, "he must have been going for that shade over there." I took the water bottle and poured a bit of the remaining drops into my hand. I offered it to the pup's mouth, who could barely lap any up before it had dispersed completely.
"What the hell Henry! What the hell! We need that! What the hell are you doing, dude!"
"Shut up!" I said. "You can have the rest. That was my half. Here."
I handed Mitch the water bottle and then I carefully scooped the pup away from the earth.
"What the hell are you going to do, Henry? Lug around thirty pounds of dying dog while you're dying yourself? Put 'em down over here and get outta the sun already. He's gonna die anyways." Mitch took a swig of the water and turned toward the promising branches.
"Catch!" I called as I threw the truck keys over his head and at the trunk of the tree. "In case a car comes by, get 'er towed someplace nice."
"*******," I heard him mumble.
I started walking away.
"Hey... hey, where the hell are you goin'?"
I pointed to the shape of a dot on the horizon.
"Stubborn jerk! You'll drop dead!"
I didn't answer.
"The dog ain't gonna make it, he'll be dead in ten minutes tops! So fquit already!"
Mitch couldn't hear it but every time my feet pressed against hard earth there was a wavelike deafening of virile roar and I grew stronger.
"... Henry... don't leave me man... Don't leave me here, man!"
I called without looking backward, "Quit being a whiney *****! Drink that water real slow while you wait... water is life, my friend. Like grandpa always said, get pecker deep in the wetness my son! Not sure whether he was talking about poon tang or booze though..."
I think I heard a whimper.
"Get there man!" I could hear tears in Mitch's voice. "I need you to get there! I don't wanna die, man... don't leave me out here..."
The warmth and the weight of the pup made it feel as though the front of my shirt was made with wool. Eventually everything got dizzy. I began to wonder whether or not my feet were really moving.
3. Now Again but Later
It was hard to watch the road while I watched her. I liked the street lights, seedy emanating tint passing over her in thick stripes. The dirty lighting and the pretty girl. Helena had decided that she wanted to gaze out upon the stars from the passenger window but not move apart from me. She was stretched out amongst the front seat so that she might touch me and touch upon the night sky simultaneously. My fingers stroked her smooth shin where her jeans had risen up, then back and forth- my fingers, I wished my fingers to be whatever it is that makes a life flourish. Her ankle rested in my lap which strained against my pants uncomfortably. And that's the essence of touch, a word that means many things but only invokes the thought of one. The night sky- sometimes she would write poems about things like moons beaming or specks of light in the darkness. They were terrible. Girl couldn't write poetry worth a ****. Her prose, however, was good. In prose she followed the strongest, most beautiful impulses.
Rain would soon fall.
"Henri, do you ever dream about the stars?"
"Yeah, sometimes I dream about nailing Jenifer Aniston."
"I don't understand what your expression is saying. What is nailing?"
I smiled. Everything was symptomatic, I wanted to tell her. Helena got distracted and reached down to retrieve an object that had fallen somewhere underneath the seat. First she shook it and after I heard the sound I knew what it was. "What is this?"
I smiled. "Dog collar."
1. Now
Helena had a nice butt but there was always the stipulation that the Great Used Car Salesman in the Sky would never let me take it off the lot without buying it. She was climbing through the driver’s side door where a shower of moonlight began to spill across the dashboard and the back of her jeans. I pinched her.
“Ow!” she squeaked while trying to leap away. Then she turned to me and said, “Don’t pinch my butt!”
“Ok,” I agreed while imagining the low low-mileage at my fingertips, “no butt peenching.”
“Don’t make fun of my English!”
I pinched her butt again.
“And don’t pinch my butt!” her accent resonated into the middle of me, the ****ty parts, and made them light and beautiful and magically tense.
Silly girl knew the way, took her time crawling along to the passenger side and let her tiny butt thrust itself a bit higher than before, a bit more outward and vulnerable. I decided to leave it alone because I liked it that way, but my eyes drifted down the seat, and laying there, almost insidiously, was a black pair of thong underwear. Helena had crawled over it and didn’t seem to notice until her gaze traced mine.I slid behind the steering wheel, threw the underwear outside and closed the door. She looked at me expectantly.
“… What was that?”
“Clearly you’ve never seen eco-friendly dental floss before,” I said and absently flicked my middle finger at the pine-tree air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror.
She started laughing, “Victoria‘s Secret does not sell dental floss!”
“That depends on what you floss with.” Or what you cut your teeth on.
Helena leaned forward and covered her mouth as if trying to hold the laughter in. “You think you can keep out of trouble by making me laugh?”
I started mouthing a one liner, stopped and finally just shrugged. We sat in the dark and on the bench seat and stared through the windshield for awhile.
“It’s going to be wet soon,” she said while gazing out the window.
“Pervert. Help, rape.” I began to call out.
She rolled her eyes but couldn’t suppress a smile entirely. I rolled my eyes too.
“If I was thirsty,” she started to say, “I would go out in a storm and drink up all the water.”
“I’d just drink from the tap,” I admitted.
“You will never die of thirst, at least.”
There was a residential wall out there. It had the makings of rain out there. I eyeballed her, tucked away against the passenger side door. The window pressed against her hair and was chilled where moisture longed to seep in- that sort of thing would just not be denied. Another moment passed and I looked at the empty middle seat between us. I looked at Helena again. I looked at the empty middle seat.
“You are like Prince Charming in your big white truck you know. It is like your big white horse,” she said while falling into a huge smile.
Like hell. I squinted, frowned, and pat my hand against the empty middle seat.
Helena watched, scrunched a thought in-between her eyebrows and then her lips drew tense. She had brown hair. She had olive skin. She had freckles on her nose and only her nose and they were like sprinkles of dark cinnamon. Eased into a smile again as though she had come to a conclusion, Helena wagged her index finger back and forth, “No, no, no. No .”
She looked at me. I looked at her. A wave of silence washed over us.
“Get the hell out, Frenchie,” I demanded.
She tried her best to sharpen her features and give me a stern look but I still found the mirth in her expression. Amusement. When she could bear the tension no longer her laughter erupted into joyful sing-song. Everything began to flow like a wisp of flowery scent, the aroma of flowers that followed her into my truck and permeated the air and lifted my stomach into my throat and made my head dizzy. The scent of her. Her figure with its slenderness and orange-sized breasts made me suspicious or a different kind of drunk.
Helena slid her hip against mine and warmness flushed all over me, seemed to crawl into my spine, the back of my neck. She clicked the seatbelt, “Ok, you win.”
“No hard feelings, kid. I’m having a good season," and then I looked past a window full condensation into the mostly empty and scarcely lit parking lot that surrounded us. It was cold out there. I was suddenly very grateful to be separated from it.
“Henri,” Helena shined as she pulled me back and looked up into my eyes, “we always go out but you are never serious.”
“Henry, dear,” I corrected. “Say it with the ‘h’. In America even our consonants are incredibly violent.”
And she rested her gaze a moment before laughter overtook her. Helena could barely speak as she tried to say, “No! I was saying ornery!”
“It’s good that you can keep yourself entertained, I plan on getting a lot of paperwork done tonight."
Two of her fingers reached up and brushed stray strands of hair from her forehead. “Zut. Yeah right. Where are we going, ornery?”
“That’s a secret,” I said because I had no idea. I was way too horny to want to think about it anyways. I poked her in the ribs and she sprang forward. I quickly slid my arm around her waist and pulled her closer. A faint tremor came over me like a flash of light and was gone as suddenly as it came. I loved it and hated it and wondered if I had learned nothing.
A stare dug into me. I almost second guessed myself. While watching me, she smiled softly and said, “Mmmhmm.”
She continued, “… but you know no sex. Maybe not marriage-”
“-I’m an American, marriage is against my religion, I have rights-”
“-but some commitment is nice!”
“I always get the crazy ones.”
“You think I am crazy, do you?”
"Do you realize how crazy that question sounds?"
“Answer! You think I am crazy?”
“Well you were just talking about being committed."
“No! Tell why I am crazy?”
“You believe in useless things,” I said a little too honestly.
“Is it that you want me to change just for you, Henri?” she asked me without moving away but boy was she prepared to.
“Yes, change completely,” I said as I tried to think of a way to keep her exactly the way she was and still nail her. I already knew it was going to be phenomenal. She wasn’t bat-**** crazy, just a little nuts, and it was nice to play to a different crowd. Also she was smarter than me and I liked the thought of taking her down a notch. Snooty bilingual *****.
“I think you really like me, Henri.”
“I think we should just be friends,” I answered.
Her eyes grew wide. “Jerk! You do not! You want to get lucky!”
“Everyone wants to get lucky, so what?”
She stopped smiling. Something in French, I think she said ‘douchebag' but I didn't speak the language. Helena remained silent a moment and I tried not to flinch because I knew what was coming next... where the air gets a little thicker and the laughter dies.
She slowly said, "Henry, you are atheist-"
"-I am not."
"What?"
"I don't know. Nevermind."
"Oh yes, ok, ok. Agnostic. Why do you not follow the bible? Not even a little bit, like me? Be serious."
"It's probably not true, you know."
"I know that! It has a good message, Henri! Love, respect, friendship..."
“(indecipherable)-blocking..."
She frowned and turned away, "You think anything that is in front of what you want is a joke."
"I think you're too smart for your own good, you little brat," I lamented. Dumb women from here on out, I thought to myself. "I only want what being alive tells me to want."
She jabbed me a good one with a finger to the ribs, better than I could've gotten her, probably. "Answer my question!"
"Damn! Fine. Following around two things at once seems like a pain in the ***, I guess. I already know what to do without readin' it out of some book about ****-blocking." Then I twisted the ignition to life. When the radio came on, Helena looked away for a long time...
"I don't understand. You are the most alive person I have ever met," she said with sweetness. Then she did her best to sing along to the American pop songs, which she knew by heart somehow. When she came upon a line that she did not know, she seemed to know it's equivalent in French, and so it was sung in French.
In between the lines that I could understand, I thought she sang that a man can value anything he wants. I imagined that I heard her singing wetness is life, that water is life.
2. Before
A mirage-like swelter rose off of the road and pressed upward against the sweat beaded against my forehead, stopped it from moving. Nothing could move, the harshness of he heat fastened everything into place like a punishing glue. Nothing was anything but oranges and reds and dull browns and dull skies. Nothing could swallow...
Half a plastic bottle's worth of warm water. My grip, sweat, sweaty grip. It was slowly evaporating out from underneath my fingers...
Mitch slapped my shoulder and thrust his arm forward, "The hayle is that?"
"Don't know," I said while trying to squint harder, "maybe a baby cow lying in the middle of the road."
"BS it is," he answered with needless defiance. "Maybe it's dead."
"Looks like a giant oreo." I raised my shoulders slightly and continued my stubborn stagger against the pavement. Half a minute passed.
"Dude, we gotta take a break," Mitch said.
"Shut up," step after step after step.
"Dude, Henry... come on."
"Shut up. You make me sick, I'll kill you," I said while wandering onward along the two-lane road and chafing like all hell.
"I can't walk anymore!" came Mitch's straining voice, "I need to sit , right now! I mean it!"
My slow lurch forward would not cease. Could not cease. Might not start again.
"… stop!"
"Look," I said while measuring my pace to nearly no pace at all, "it's hot as hell out here. If you sit out here, you're going to die." I peered ahead into the distance. "Up there. Next to that freaking cow thing is a tree. I'll drag your *** there if you want but no stoppin' here. Can't sit in this kinda sun, I'm tellin' you. Damn! These shorts are sawing me in half!"
I reached down into my pants, into a mess of moisture, pubic hair and what I imagined to be blood at that point. I had to pick the fabric away from my tender flesh. I think it made everything hurt worse. All Mitch had to do was adjust his red ballcap and shift his greasy brown hair around. He spat on the ground wastefully and watched me make faces and noises.
We kept walking.
Eventually nearness and familiarity colored the details of the black and white spot laying ahead of us on the road, head in one lane, hind quarters in the other. Somberness struck us somewhere that hadn't been dried up yet.
"Is it alive?"
I didn't know. "I don't know."
"Freakin' a'..."
Holy crap, I thought as I saw movement. "It's moving. It's... breathing..."
First I broadened my steps to a bounce to a run to a sprint and I was then towering over the labored form of the pup. I kneeled down, but when the road burnt my kneecaps through my pants, I opted instead to squat upon my ankles like Tom Joad or Pa or the other men as they drew their plan westward. "Hey little guy," soothed my whisper, "... easy, little guy..."
I sat the water bottle down next to his head. My fingers, I wished my fingers to be ice cubes as they stroked the fur on his neck. The little body whimpered and offered an enervated lick to my hand.
"How... how are ya sure it's not a girl?" Mitch panted as he caught up.
My hand then gently lifted a hind leg which exposed the testicles. "You think a ***** would have had the good sense to make a run for the tree shade?"
"Not the ones you run around with, man-whore."
"Helluva way to talk about your own mother."
He didn't like that. I put the leg back, "It's just a pup. no collar. Why aren't you wearing a collar, boy? Do we need to get you a collar? What is he, a border collie?"
Mitch nodded, "Yeah... what do we do here? Do we... have to kill it?"
I shook my head, "I'm not killing him."
"Henry, you gotta do what's humane here..."
"Yeah," I continued, "he must have been going for that shade over there." I took the water bottle and poured a bit of the remaining drops into my hand. I offered it to the pup's mouth, who could barely lap any up before it had dispersed completely.
"What the hell Henry! What the hell! We need that! What the hell are you doing, dude!"
"Shut up!" I said. "You can have the rest. That was my half. Here."
I handed Mitch the water bottle and then I carefully scooped the pup away from the earth.
"What the hell are you going to do, Henry? Lug around thirty pounds of dying dog while you're dying yourself? Put 'em down over here and get outta the sun already. He's gonna die anyways." Mitch took a swig of the water and turned toward the promising branches.
"Catch!" I called as I threw the truck keys over his head and at the trunk of the tree. "In case a car comes by, get 'er towed someplace nice."
"*******," I heard him mumble.
I started walking away.
"Hey... hey, where the hell are you goin'?"
I pointed to the shape of a dot on the horizon.
"Stubborn jerk! You'll drop dead!"
I didn't answer.
"The dog ain't gonna make it, he'll be dead in ten minutes tops! So fquit already!"
Mitch couldn't hear it but every time my feet pressed against hard earth there was a wavelike deafening of virile roar and I grew stronger.
"... Henry... don't leave me man... Don't leave me here, man!"
I called without looking backward, "Quit being a whiney *****! Drink that water real slow while you wait... water is life, my friend. Like grandpa always said, get pecker deep in the wetness my son! Not sure whether he was talking about poon tang or booze though..."
I think I heard a whimper.
"Get there man!" I could hear tears in Mitch's voice. "I need you to get there! I don't wanna die, man... don't leave me out here..."
The warmth and the weight of the pup made it feel as though the front of my shirt was made with wool. Eventually everything got dizzy. I began to wonder whether or not my feet were really moving.
3. Now Again but Later
It was hard to watch the road while I watched her. I liked the street lights, seedy emanating tint passing over her in thick stripes. The dirty lighting and the pretty girl. Helena had decided that she wanted to gaze out upon the stars from the passenger window but not move apart from me. She was stretched out amongst the front seat so that she might touch me and touch upon the night sky simultaneously. My fingers stroked her smooth shin where her jeans had risen up, then back and forth- my fingers, I wished my fingers to be whatever it is that makes a life flourish. Her ankle rested in my lap which strained against my pants uncomfortably. And that's the essence of touch, a word that means many things but only invokes the thought of one. The night sky- sometimes she would write poems about things like moons beaming or specks of light in the darkness. They were terrible. Girl couldn't write poetry worth a ****. Her prose, however, was good. In prose she followed the strongest, most beautiful impulses.
Rain would soon fall.
"Henri, do you ever dream about the stars?"
"Yeah, sometimes I dream about nailing Jenifer Aniston."
"I don't understand what your expression is saying. What is nailing?"
I smiled. Everything was symptomatic, I wanted to tell her. Helena got distracted and reached down to retrieve an object that had fallen somewhere underneath the seat. First she shook it and after I heard the sound I knew what it was. "What is this?"
I smiled. "Dog collar."