12. Perfect
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Stare at the shoes. Hard. Brogues. Hole-punched lovingly. Crafted. Soft caramel brown, hot like it’s still swirling in a pot over the stove. Shiny, maybe freshly polished. Get on your hands and knees to sniff them to find out. 8 a.m. commuters might find that a bit distasteful. Maybe they wouldn’t care, too busy gazing out at nothing.
Black walls speeding past windows hi-bye, hi-bye, wait,
wait! Black holes of each other’s eyes. Black holes, a vortex in phones sucking brain matter out of ears
slurp, slurp, you can hear it gurgling,
messy and wet as it
s p i
l
ls
Feel some drip onto your shoulder. Glance up, try to lock eyes with the culprit. Try to write a scathing review with just one eyebrow twitch.
Except, it’s him. It’s brogues. Your caramel man.
You let this one slide (sliding down nicely-cut coat arm) because God, his shoes are gorgeous. You want them. You need them. Maybe they will do. Fit the monsters you feel spilling over the sides of sandals, caressing train carriage floor.
(Nothing is made for you. Nothing is made for you.)
Ears go: pop, pop as train zips faster through tunnel, eventually delivering you (Literally, not Biblically). Brogues makes to leave too. Soulmates? Soulmates. Brogues will be the One. Follow as coincidence. Follow as Fate.
Pretend to look down at phone. Shoulder-check as you speed past him on the street. Faces magnetised, North Pole calling south. He wants to berate you. But you are soft smile, soft words. Doe-eyed.
You are pulling him, eyes back on ground. Focused. Then, looking up so that he won’t look down (At your demons, your downfall, the big sign proclaiming: I am all wrong, no, no, no in the form of two large feet slapping against pavement. Bursting at the seams; overfed kittens. So big in a physical sense it has become metaphorical. Almost comedic. Your guiding star, your roots in the ground, down, down the stairs to Hell. They have ruined you. Unless. Unless he is the One.).
Licking lips to make-do for how you wish to lick leather.
You are pushing: “Back to yours?”
* * *
Somehow, you’re fucking.
Can’t quite remember the jump from here to there. To penis entering barely lubricated hole, because really, you don’t give a shit. Wet sheen of excitement from unbridled, unable-to-be-tamped-down hope that maybe, maybe, his shoes will fit your feet.
He finishes; soft, choked-out grunt. You were finished long before fornication began. You were finished while he was distractedly stumbling to bed, leaving namesake carelessly on floor. You wouldn’t treat them like that.
What a bastard, you think.
The caramel man (Not yours anymore.) rolls over, breaths deepening.
Finally, finally, on your hands and knees, gripping shoes, a little moist inside, a little warm too. Bread fresh from oven; steaming, ready to be devoured. You are ready to devour, shoving your un-socked left foot into the enticing hole as hands grip and splay the leathery sides.
Foot is choked at neck of big toe. You are choked at throat. An I-told-you-so.
A whisper and lick and nibble of guilt in the ear, taunting.
You tie the shoes together by their laces, allowing them to stabilise on the inner knuckle of your middle finger so that it may say fuck you to them, consistently, as they are carried away. They reply: we already did that. You are silent.
* * *
Silent on the journey home, breaths just slightly whistling in and out of each nostril, loudest sound you’ve ever heard against the threatening vacuum of dark sky and empty pavements.
Key in lock. Slips in easily. Easily. Easily. Easily. Bag: bulging, slippery on one shoulder. You will pay for this somewhere down the line. An image: yourself, hunched and teetering, unbalanced. Left shoulder dragged to heaven, right reaching for hell. Your face is the same as always. Your feet are still
swollen, cracked, sucking
everything
into
their
orbit.
She calls you: “Sweets?”
You feel like honey, thick and dripping in all the wrong ways. Like when it gets stuck to that one part of the roof of your mouth that you can’t quite reach with your tongue. An annoyance. But you don’t feel so sweet now, even with the added help of the caramel man.
“Mhm, just a sec! Putting my bag away!”
Hurry, hurry.
It’s kick ing at you now. Throbbing: your side, your temples, your hole.
Clamber onto bed, freshly made. Shit, your feet are all sloppy from the wet outside. Never mind, never mind. Deal with later. Reach arm
up,
up
up,
grasping onto metal lip, pulling metal lip down, metal lip leads to ladder leads to garish 1980s floral shower curtain shoved hastily aside so that you may be reunited with heaven/hell/secret/self.
It used to be neat up here. You used to be organised. Shoes in descending size from right to left. Subcategorised by shoe brand (Nikes are an inescapable favourite, you have found.) then shoe type (The Air Force 1s, specifically.). You used to feel clean.
Now it/you is/are chaos.
Plop the brogues down with little gusto. Exit down, down ladder, down to ninth circle. You will only be reminded of your failure if you linger. Put everything back into place. The stark white bedsheets have two muddy footprints on them. Pull each tightly tucked corner out and flip sheet over. Cover yet another of your sins with yet another piece of cloth.
Enter the open-plan living area. By calling it that, you make it seem contemporary and chic, rather than secretly small and suffocating. Size 18 US, 55 EU is sitting on the couch. Like the couch cushion, she is sagging. Like the house, she is suffocating and getting smaller by the day.
She used to be the most reliable. The closest size you’d had so far. Her sandals were your sandals were our sandals (modern communism). Still –
Not good enough.
Her smile is close-lipped, tight at the corners. Her nostrils twitch. She can smell you l e a ki ng down one leg all over her freshly mopped floor. She is bursting yet deflated.
Tell yourself you are sated with what you have. Perfection will never rear its gorgeous head. Tell yourself it won’t happen again.
* * *
It happens again the next day.
The next day.
The next day.
The next day.
Your blue Gucci loafer man. The blue Gucci loafer man. Your yellow Onitsuka Tiger man. The yellow Onitsuka Tiger man.
Your / the man,
your / the man,
your / the anyone. Anyone at all. (Circle just one, never the right one.)
You want to (be) possess(ed). You want to (be) own(ed).
It’s not you. Surely it’s not you, making it happen on purpose. You love her you know. You know you do. Surely it is nature taking its course. Like the bad-boy syndrome, the sperm-spreader. You feel that way but opposite. A sperm-collector. It sounds so clinical. And it is, to you. Because it’s not the part that matters.
* * *
Key in lock. It fits, it fits. You have a fit over it.
Turn to your bedroom (Only yours now, no more communism. She seized the couch when she left, arse adamantly glued to that damn slouching cushion.). The liquid isn’t just oozing from you now. It’s oozing from them. Your newest ex-lover. They will discover this when, maybe, they wake up again.
You are thankful your bag is black. You are thankful you have such a plain face, a boring face, a face so dull that it makes you stop and forget every face you’ve ever seen.
Pull the shoes (Grey Converse, All-Stars.) out of bag, careful now, no spilling! Ankle to sky. The blood, tendon, bone is borscht in a bowl, no longer frantically seeking escape. Balancing. Go up the ladder.
The blood smells enticing. You begin to understand the thrill of cannibalism.
Leave the feet, still shoe-enclosed, upstairs. Come back down to kitchen. Need to grab necessary utensils. Need to work fast, before blood runs cold. Need to fix self. Need to be perfect. Will be perfect.
Scissors, kitchen knife, cooking twine, needle…where is the needle? Okay, is that everything? Towels? Maybe some towels. Grab the neck of the vodka bottle. Take a swig. This will fix things. You will fit now.
Go
d
o
w
n,
go. Back, back. Back upstairs, up the ladder. To redemption,
to salvation.
Fall,
colla
pse,
fold in on yourself.
Extend foot, bent at knee. Need to reach. Collect the goods.
Snip away, trim away, carve away the parts of yourself that never fit.
Red toxins seep out and out and out onto the towel, through the towel, into the wooden floorboards.
This is your juice cleanse.
We’re all worthy in the end, if we make ourselves so. You are making yourself so. You are making yourself sew. Thread through needle’s eye. Thread through their cooling flesh pressed tight and heavy and sensual against your skin. Undergo the necessary trial by fire, fire burning hot and heavy, searing, alive, so alive. So alive you feel dead within it. With each flick of the wrist, you feel like a peach,
a fresh peach
sp li t
op en
juices spilling on a summer’s day but in reverse. You are placed in the silky shadowy safety within. Vision black. You feel engulfed and consumed and overcome.
Finally, finally. You are made whole
Ruby Klammer is a writer, creator, and art-devourer living in Gadigal/Sydney. She is currently studying writing and publishing at UTS.