[thisislife]

I thought of leaving him, but resolved that he would only fester in my cupboards and cause a great mess, and so I was forced to root him out using an ingenious – if I do say so myself – trap composed of a burning watermelon. Sure enough, he was drawn out of the dark and toward the sizzling, succulent flesh of the fruit. (I cannot think of a single man who would not do the same.) After that, the procedure was easy enough: I merely detained him in a bag until he tired himself out – passed out, rather – and then fastened him securely to the aforementioned chair.

He came to when a particularly boisterous gust of thunder rolled through the office. Eyes darting about, heart palpitating rapidly, I was forced to give him a sip of Fireball, and then myself a sip of Fireball, and then him a sip of Fireball again. “Mr. Peters,” I stated with equanimity, looming over the poor soul as Jesus must have loomed over Lazarus – although I’m certain that in his mind it was more akin to Poseidon towering over Aeneas – “what exactly is it that you came to ask me?”

There was no answer. Instead, Evelyn’s face contorted into a sordid mess of sweating stress, the bone-numbing fear preventing him from exuding any utterance. I was about to reach for the pliers when he squeaked nothing more than an undecipherable gasp; still, it was enough to prevent my further interrogation. I had realized what needed to be done. I turned to inform the poor Evelyn of my plans, but the unfortunate thing had passed out again. No matter. I lit a new cigarette and picked up the phone.

Sea-sprayed and rising it sang through the teeth, hissing, spitting, clutching at itself in a desperate bid to be whole, to spite its severed parts, to grow and to tempt and to bring men to their knees – women to their knees – their dirty, dirtied knees falling skinned and bruise-bent; what a breath would drip in whispers, doubled and dribbling on the floor while waiting for a pinprick, a slight shock, a wick of warmth to send shivers gasping rampant through the flesh — what a breath indeed this was, curling in the throat for the taste of a paphian heart, swimming on the tongue for a morsel of man – just a taste, a drop – hungering in the blood-beat for one jarring flash of tremble, of hold me, of eyes wide. This breath twisted like whispers, or thunder in the flesh. I could taste it on his skin; he was a long way from home. The door opened.