The static on the Tv flickered chaotic static and commercials for car insurance and sleeping pills. The blue gaze of the television set was beating against the white walls and brown window shades, drawn past the edge of the sill. Except for the anonymous cracks from the wood floor expanding into the frigid air, the apartment was silent. But it was that vision on the Tv that perpetrated my sleep.
I sat up from the couch, unwrapped myself from the blanket and chugged down a glass of water. The cold liquid streamed into my stomach, electrifying a shiver throughout my body. I jumped into bed with Michelle and pulled the covers over us. Her body felt cold, too but Michelle’s eyes were shut tight against the arctic temperature. The covers had gotten away from her throughout the night. I reached around her waist to pull her into my warm body. The clash of skin exploded through my circuitry, initiating a response of a warm trace of capilaries and veins that began at my sternum, ending at the base of my testicles like a long red river.
I swept the sinewy dome of her breast into the cup of my heand, feeling the hardened nipple like the copula of an ice tower. With the other hand I moved down her smooth stomach, over the belly button. My hand crept like the devious snake of lore down through the entrance of her cotton sweat pants, feeling her bristled pubis and then rubbed her latex clitoris.
Like a newspaper press, I began working both of these erogenous zones, reporting the story of my desires that were printing on my enlengthening penis. I pressed myself against the back of her thigh then dipped a finger into her but my digit reported dry lips; my efforts didn’t arouse her sleeping body. I pulled her pants off anyway and turned her onto her stomach. I began working into her, taking my veined apparatus, poking through her cleft to drill myself through the arid mine of her reproductive system. She didn’t move or even twitch, providing me no assistance for this arduous job. After these efforts, I pulled her pants back up to her waist and turned onto my side to gratify myself and sleep.
The next morning arose without Michelle because she was still lying in bed, legs akimbo from the assorted positions I had arranged from my failed attempts. I awoke to the bleeting alarm clock in a contorted pose of a miserable masturbatory romance. In the shower, I thought about the day ahead; I imagined my fingers flying at the keys with mechanized precision. It wasn’t a job where thinking was valued. I kissed Michelle’s forehead and went on my way.
I returned later that evening, retreating to the balcony to smoke a cigarette. On the concrete embankment was a disembodied head. It looked a bit like Michelle. I grabbed its hair and took it into the bedroom. There Michelle was, still in her provocative pose — although it wasn’t her fault since I had left her that way. Her eyes were open, jaw slacked in an unintentionally suggestive manner.
“Hey look what I found, love,” but her eyes were trained on the arcane pattern of moldy stains on the wall. I shrugged and carried the head into the kitchen, laying it on top of the counter. I looked out of the window for clues of the giftbearer but found the usual suspects posed in different positions inside the apartments across the way. There was the young girl who showered without curtains to conceal the prize of her youth. Another woman washed dishes beneath phosphrous lamps; and yet another sat near a window reading a book. I suspected neither of them had known the secrets of this head.
A coma is all I had considered of Michelle’s condition, which wasn’t so bad since people awake from those…The hadn’t said anything either. Its two hardened eyes were forged in terror sockets as if the refrigerator had been an assailant from its past. Maybe it was the steel door frame that had reminded it of the diagonal edge of a guillotine. I always felt at the edge, too as if my life was the razor end of a decapitation machine; my teeth red with the blood of kings, queens, and mistresses. Michelle was neither of those figures. Sleeping all day was just another expression of her unremarkable existence.
Without a captial figure, a head of government, or moribund plight it had always been difficult to make a decision between the two of us. Michelle and I didn’t have a head of family so we made no decisions together. On the Tv, fictional characters moved freely in elaborate homes inside the black box, wearing exquisite makeup; fucked beautiful bodies. On the tip of my finger, I would feel the rubbery sinew of the remote control’s directional button; designed with the razor angles like an arrow of a dubious compass — up and down.
Pressthebutton. Pressthebutton. Pressthebutton — next show. 7:30; suffer unto a coda of so many evenings of silent wails of boredom and self-destruction. On the screen, bacchanal cartoon characters danced, singing praise for toothpaste, laundry detergent, toilet paper, cereal, drugs. Then static flickered on the screen with a scrambled fury: 7:30. 7:30. 7:30 — next show. Every night followed this moribund routine.
I later purchased a flight to Jacksonville for the next evening. I went to work and notified no one of my destination. There’s no good reason for Jacksonville except that it’s only an hour drive to St. Augustine, which had always been for me a mysterious bastion with a violent history and a haven for terrible colonists from another era.
At work, I suffered bleating chest pains. My heart thumped in my ear and I was consumed by the blurry vortex of unconsciousness. I opened my eyes again to an environment of manifold cables and machinery attached piecemeal to my body. The whole room was alive through me and the lights flickered with the steady beep of my heart beat. A tube ran from the pale visage of my arm into a sack of clear fluid, presumably water.
A nurse entered. Her Russian features told the story of her migration. “Good morning. My name is Natasha.”
Of course your name is Natasha.
Her non-regional accent gave away no secrets of her heritage. “You’ve suffered a mild heart attack. We’re going to keep you here for a few days for observation then you can go home.”
“Impossible,” I croaked. “I have a flight I must be on this very evening.”
“You’re going to have to make other arrangements.”
When she exited the room, I disconnected myself from that milieu of death, gathered my belongings and snuck away.
I continued buttoning my shirt outside of the hospital, dangling a lit cigarette from my mouth and then vomitted against the side of a parked ambulance.
…to be continued.

























