With a Cigarette.

"Come on. You know you want to call me a slut; you know you want to call me a whore. Break me down, break me down, break me down." She's laughing, whistles erupting from her chest, merging and folding into the smoke of the lonely cigarette shivering between her fingers. She's lying on that cold couch, in nothing but her skin and the imprinted traces of clothing on her chopstick legs and glossy paperback back. The ceiling wasn't that dark or that bright, just the right shade to see the faces and mouths the smoke formed. It was all eyes and silent screams that caught her attention.

He's just watching her blow smoke doves -fluttering all over the place- and nurse that cigarette without any sound. How could you convict someone who's already been to the electric chair by their own two feet?
He knows what she's like, what kind of person she is, but he still can't swallow it. Comprehending something is fairly different than simply knowing it. You can know that your body's gonna die sooner or later, but you can't comprehend that you're dying right now. Your mind just doesn't get that fact that you're decomposing alive with those little unborn baby worms hidden somewhere beneath your flesh, with unformed thoughts of devouring your cold bloated corpse. Getting something is not like knowing it.

"Some people find intimacy with a hug and a kiss. In a warm fireplace relationship. I take it by the fix. Through sex. Instant pleasure, short-term closeness then it's all gone when I start talking again. I can't do relationships and love like you do, like everyone does. It's not meant for someone like me." The slim cigarette is moving in sync with the vibrations of her larynx, as she presses her lips together and stares at him, all eyes and eyelashes, waiting for a response.

"That's just an excuse." His breathy voice mingles with the remains of hers as reaches for her arm, the one with the fingers nurturing that lonely cigarette, and holds it.

"You think I like this? That I like sex for the sake of sex? I fucking hate it. Sex is dirty, gruesome and just fucking ugly no matter how pretty the people who're having it."

"Then why do it?" He tosses that question at her, knowing it's a miss before it ever left his mouth.

"'Cause I'd be alone. 'Cause no-one'd love me. 'Cause I'm addicted to the pain in my chest when the clothes on the floor disappear. And 'cause everybody loves naked people. Not 'cause it's arousing or sexy, heavens no. It's 'cause they're curious; they wanna know what you look like under the fabrics; they want to make themselves better by knowing they're more decent than you are, naked as you came. Matter of ego. Does that make sense? Probably not to you anyways."

"It does...it does." His fingers take away that lonely poor cigarette from her own and put it aside, right in the middle of the empty guts of the dotted-glass ashtray. "This'll kill you," he mumbled under his breaths, shifting next to her unclad body seeping body heat that's dripping all over the floor, soaking up the fabrics and teasing his skin.

"Then why do you keep asking all these questions?" She looks down on him, sitting on the ground and kissing her fingers. Long eyelashes tickling joints and fingertips.

"'Cause I want you to lie to me once in a while."

"Honesty's the only virtue I've got left. It'd be a shame to waste it." She's watching him kiss her fingers and inhale her skin, and it's disturbing. "Don't go down as far as to want me. I'm lower than the sole of a shoe. It has a purpose, I don't. If it's ripped apart you can fix it, you can't fix me."

"Yes, I can."

"Better men tried. Besides, God doesn't even give me a fucking chance to sew myself shut before tossing another calamity between my ribs."

"I'll sew you shut every time. I'll sew you before he even gets the chance. I'll patch you up and stop the pains. I'll make you human again."

"I'm human as human can get. I'm the epitome of humanity. Naked, scratched up, and unfixable." She flicks her hair and smiles with that exhausted overused expression. Those lips stretched far too wide by moans and orgasms and other rougher lips.

"But I'll fix you." He lifts his body up to sit next to her, smiling back with innocent clearwater eyes.

"No you can't." Lightly, she shoves him away. "You're too innocent for that."

"Innocence is something only kids have."

"Do you mean the ones who slaughter their parents, kill each other or throw themselves off of rooftops?" Her smirk radiated off of her lips to get a hold of a new cigarette., "I'm not trying to put you down, but...I know what I'm talking about. You can't."

"Yes I can."

"Are you stupid? Honestly, are you stupid?" She's starting to flare up; persistence was something new to her tired eyes. She was humanity, and humanity was fucked from the start. Who's this kid to say otherwise?

"No. Just hopeful."
And he's gonna end up hopeless, eyeless, earless and speechless.

"You know that proverb with the three wise monkeys? You just reminded me of that. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Back in the olden days it probably meant don't stick your nose where it don't belong. Nowadays it means bury your headandconscience in the sand and flap your wings like a fucking ostrich. The three wise monkeys couldn't survive us. Couldn't survive our lust for destructing everything good. Gay meant happy. Speed and Ecstasy were just nouns. Sex was the biological differences between males and females. Long story short, we'll always look at the uglier faces of life. We'll distort it with all our might, with Sales Smiles and Big Wide Grins. It's like selective hearing, selective vision and selective talktalktalktalktalk; see, hear and say what you want. How can you go against that? How can you save the ones who willingly poison the honey? Can you fix those blind eyes, deaf ears and mute tongues? What God takes doesn't come back. You can't fix what was broken to begin with."

"Yes-I-can." He's resting his head on her bare shoulder, a yawn climbing out of his lungs. "Too much talking."

"How?" She's uttering with punch-drunk words oozing from her lips, looking at his face. Stupid stupid babyface without any care in the world but dreams, dreams and more cherry-coke sweet dreams. She thinks, lighting another cigarette to make love to her mouth producing baby cancers and future parental tumor-pride.
Congratulations, you've got a deadly baby growing in your lungs!

God, his daddy's gonna be so proud.

Where's he?

He's crushed in an ashtray somewhere.

His daddy's decayed and full of nicotine, piss and saliva. His daddy been thrown out and used. She's thinking again, grinning at the thought of coddling a baby tumor. This stupid little boy's not better than a cigarette. She's sick of his questions, sick of his stupidity and sick of his persistence.

"How?" She thinks aloud, one more time.

"Have a little faith in me." He clings to her unclad arm, kissing her skin with fluttering-gold eyelashes.

"...interesting." She smiles, a faint ghostly glow trickling down her rosy-taffeta face towards his. "Stupid stupid little boy. But fine. I'll give you a little faith." She leans, planting a kiss on his sleeping lips. "You just gotta keep a hold of it."

She's staring at the ceiling, at the silent-shriek swirls of smoke roaming the air, and she's slowly putting on her decency back, every fold of cloth flooding her naked chipped-crystal skin. Crushing the halfway lit cigarette with her palm, she stares at his peaceful form, at the ashes sliding to her chest and the pores of her semi-sheer blouse. "Except you're nothing but a cigarette."

Crushed before you know it.