12/13/11

WD-Forty
By Cheryl Anne Gardner


"Sing me an organ grinder's taxi ride gospel and let the tide coast in," she said. That was her way of saying, "poor you," when I started whining about how emasculating our relationship was. She had this fixation for white orchids and pain and a shotgun barrel of whiskey a day.

We hadn't spoke in a while.

She said she missed me but couldn't tell me why.

She'd invited me to dinner, expected me to look her in the eyes, but the sparks coming from the belt sander were a distraction. We'd had this conversation before. She said if I wanted to be her muse, "then I'd better just shut the hell up," but the straps were too tight, the stilettos too high. They made my legs look bowed like a cowboy who'd taken one too many rough rides. "You're a rough ride," she said through the side of her mouth as she lit one of them long brown European cigarettes she liked so much. She said she liked how they looked in her hand and between her lips when she watched herself smoke in the mirror.

She liked the taste of the tobacco.

I didn't like it. It left little dirty bits on my tongue when she kissed me. She rarely kisses me these days. She said she wasn't interested in that anymore, that for some reason, the number thirteen bothered her, haunted her like a lounge lizard with a caterpillar smile. She said, "I loved you once, when you were fearless," but I'm not anymore, apparently, so she put out her smoke and went back to buffing and oiling the rusted hinges she'd always said were mine.


- - -
Cheryl Anne Gardner is a hopeless dark romantic, lives in a haunted house, and often channels the spirits of Poe, Kafka, and de Sade. She prefers writing art-house novellas and abstract flash fiction to writing bios because she always seems to forget what point of view she is in. When she isn’t writing, she likes to chase marbles on a glass floor, eat lint, play with sharp objects, and make taxidermy dioramas with dead flies.