Silhouettes
by Darcy Bruce
There was a moment when birds exploded from my chest and every gasping soul swept in to pull away the remnants of what you left. Every breath and piece of tongue and bit of beating heart until all that remained were clumps of hair and feathers and mewling voice. Not even shadow, but perhaps a silhouette.
Empty is our house as blind you stumble forward into the rising sun, seeing only red hot pain, although I wish that you could see my cold white hands and how they lust to reach inside your chest and grasp at tangles, working deftly, quickly, just working.
Of flesh, of thirst. Sightless eyes and brief, unpromising touch. Of heat and pressing bodies. Legs and arms, as the crook of your neck is salty from the sand of a sea you visit only in your fevered dreams. Eyelids blinking tears and sweat, and thirsting. Thirsting.
I want to scoop what darkness runs through your veins like silver running through that cliff, to rub each flaking piece into the heart of that little porcelain bowl.
To take and hold you, to lick and swell from what I take knowing I’ll be done but you will not. But I’ll return to see, to weep, and watch and to be watched by other silhouettes who’ve run their course and jealous, turn to us.
Knowing that you’ll long to know of what became of me. Knowing only how I loved you as dying embers love a breath of air. Knowing not of how now, I can grow beside you, both strong and reaching toward that sun and what we see of other worlds.
Darcy Bruce is a writer from Oakdale, Connecticut. When she isn’t writing she is usually shelving books at a giant used bookstore.
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