And in the hallway, when she was running along the corridor doors,
drumming her tiger paw length fingernails, never fake; she was never
fake. And there where the flowers would be lined up, waiting in the
damp smoke. Always the smoke. She ran her nails over the glass vases,
she stroked the coloured patterns, poured her skin into folds and smoky entrails; his skin was
barely harder. To be rougher was not to be less soft. He may have to
shave every morning, but who shaves his heart? And in the hallway, her
fingers sang of his moist lips, how they had taught him not to crush her with desire and despair.
How she had been his tears in exchange for a patience no lifetime
would grant her, their silent hours of teaching skin to speak behind
curtains of hair. She would shave all of her hardened shell, her skin
like a reptile's. In her mind; he'd say; in her mind. In my eyes you
are what the world cannot be. So he ate her like a fruit, he ate the peel and he ate the core. He ate what she could not
bear to be; not what she thought she would
have to be.
And in those tears, was she not the thing that folds between the
layers of a man, this man; whose skin was that of a reptile, but whose heart spoke in lengths. She,
only scaly within, within the
moist juicy center. But his fingers would not peel her, would only have
her whole. So, in the dark, where he could not see, she would peel
herself, between his smoke playing on her skin and his breath braiding
her hair. There they lay entwined.
In the hallway, the flowers were
hushing her tiger paw length fingernails as they drummed against the hardening surface, folding into his
soul, tearing him apart.