Iris

10.13.02

I am the messenger of god she said, legs spread. My name is Iris and if you love me you will hear him speak. It did not seem likely that here was the prophet he had come to see. An unlikely sibyl in unclean Delphi. On the table next to the bed where she lay was a collection of small hard objects. A syringe, a spoon, and a flattened cotton ball that had become sharp as it dried. A single candle burned in the middle of the small table, augmenting the hard ball of light from the lamp in the corner, seeming to surround it, instead of merging as it might.

He took his clothes off and laid them neatly in a pile on the floor next to the door, setting his slacks and shirt on top of his shoes, and his boxers down last. He wondered how he will get erect in this place, this dirty hole he had come into. He did not understand any of this. He did not understand the motion of the room around him, he did not understand the weaving of the snake before him. She lay there, eyes empty as ghosts, skin pale and dirty white, track marks showing a vile sort of red along her arms. Here was the voice of god lying in these crumpled sheets, hair a twisted natty mess that merged with the sheets and sunk into the darkness as if she were attached. He sat on the bed near her, listening for the voice of god in her breath. She rolled next to him, her skin cold and clammy against his warm dry back. She stroked his back with the front of her shin. He felt the prickle of hair along his spine and shivered. Something inside him bowed under the weight of the place, the heavy darkness, and the fetid air. Bowed and broke. He began to cry.

He cried. He wept. He sobbed sucking sobs gasping at the air even as he sought a way to empty himself of whatever it was that twisted inside his chest. His stomach had become a cold round ball, and the things that he had put away for so long, the things that he had tied so tightly, unwound, ropes snapping again and again at the back of this throat till he was sore from the violent lashing.

As the sobbing passed and quieted, as he opened his eyes he found himself curled into a ball on the bed. Curled around himself gripping the black sheets tightly in his hands. She was there behind him, stroking his arm with her cool hands, blowing quiet noises between her teeth to soothe him, to calm him. An artificial wind to bounce the bough he had wound himself around for safety in the midst of the breaking. Her hand moved in a long smooth motion along the soft wave of his body, rising with his lungs, dipping into his waist and cresting over his hip, dragging idly across his buttocks and along his spine to start again.

He found himself. He found himself aroused. He found himself drawn into the clean seeming cold that separated her body from his. The plasticine skin that did not stick or cling to his as the hand moved rhythmically along his body. His breath lengthened and flattened as his cries subsided, his eyes opened more widely to see in the dark. His body extended itself, seeking her embrace. Aware of his new interest, this pointed question his body asked, she answered with the simple motion of her hand. The pattern did not cease, it continued its stroking, evolving to fit the new circumstances of their embrace. She took his erection in her hand, holding it, learning it, stroking it. Pulling him quietly from deep blue into dark red. He remained with his back turned, being lured quietly to the curve of her body against the darkness, her hand continuing to pull him closer and closer to what he is seeking.

She turns him gently over and they begin the ritual. They kiss. The candle quivers and they embrace. He lies motionless on the bottom of the bed, rising into her as she descends upon him. Her motion begins again as she is filled by him. As she is filled by him. As she is filled by him. Their rhythm builds upon the tiny cues of their skin, the slow intimation of bodies. His hands are stretched out on either side of him, clutching the sheets in anticipation of a strong wind. She lies astride him, knees bent, head back staring at the ceiling with blind eyes, her hips swaying, full of water.

The rhythm builds bone upon bone, understanding spreads. A slow rising and falling, each trough and crest more intense than the last as the wave blurs the line between them. She is shaking and mumbling to herself, long intricate prayers without pause, a long string of sounds pulled across her tongue. His eyes are shut tight and his hands clenched to the bed as the pieces of what was broken melt and flow together below his stomach, between his legs. He comes, the voice of god shuddering through him into her. She screams a word that he does not hear, and could not understand, collapsing across him, her dirty hair over his face. He pants hard against her body, now heavy and dead on top of his, his body releasing each of the muscles he had clenched as he came. She did not move except to breathe shallow breaths into the pit of his neck. He rolls her off of him into the corner of the bed, feeling the prickle of her legs as she slumps against the wall.

He left his fifty on the table, next to the guttering candle.