Peepshow Ruffles

Christian’s muscles froze into a shadow of icy discontent, his eyes bare with winter’s frost lingering in their usually tropical gaze. He began shuffling aimlessly, his fingers entwined with the coarseness of a dreary bed sheet upon which he had experienced both love and loss within seconds of each other. Loss and love, a vicious, constant collision alike the stirring of a drunken poet and a dazed burlesque darling. A loss of innocence, a loss of love. The discovery of love, and a caustic exposure to love. All had passed but the loss of love. Above all, he still clung to her memory with every distressed type-writer ribbon and exhaustively parched bottle of gin.

Studying the gashes and impurities on the painting before them, Christian’s pupils saw a reflection of what only his heart, and liver, had experienced. The tortured press of a typewriter’s key, the searing touch of charred glass as it disintegrated into a surprisingly strenuous grasp. A grasp intended for the framework of women, rather than the brutal bitterness of alcoholic raindrops. Before him, Christian saw a tarnished beauty. A statue in memory of the fairness of the world, simply vandalized by those with malevolent venom pulsing through their blue-blooded veins.

His question remained unanswered, as both figures sat stilly on the bed where three days previous, each had expressed vigorously their need for companionship. Their want for conversation and a lover’s gentle graze against the unbearable brutality of outside’s ignorant tones. His stained fingers lingered between her brittle claws, each shaking in turn, as if hiding some elaborate plot; yet all she aimed to contain was her tears. Christian held her shoulders, repeating his query over and over again, in reply only receiving breathless gasps. He dropped his grasp from her tepid figure and placed a compassionate palm upon the blossoms of her summer cheeks. Each feature began to grow in emotion; her eyes fixed upon his, the wildness of a dandelion swaying throughout her lashes; the quiver of her lips reducing with every tainted breath, as her tongue graced them with a brief encounter; her hand echoing throughout the field of citric curls, dangling each spring around her forefinger. Her head tilted towards Christian’s, and with a swift movement both distressed poses lay intertwined upon a familiar mattress. Her lips met with his for a second, sharing a brushing compulsion, before moving to his russet-crowded jaw. Christian’s mind raced with the exhilaration of the moment, grabbing her face between his smooth hands, yet slowed with the knowledge of her silent pleading.

Placing her immaculate posture to his right, Christian watched as Adele’s tears wiped the passion from her eyes, destroying the curl upon her lips, and leaving her hands limp and frail. Winter was once again upon them, producing potholes in their lustful attachment, as icicles emerged between their solemn figures. Leaning upon his elbows, Christian winced at a closer inspection of the signature of a sadist. He dared not disturb it, to distress his poor patient. Without shifting his eye from her abandoned blemishes, he spoke with a concoction of softness and urgency:

“Adele”, his ability to form words was vastly collapsing, as her pain stung throughout his skeleton, an empathy rising from his own torment, “ Adele, I need you to tell me who-” His thoughtless begs were ceased by a taut clasp upon his wrist, yet he aimed to continue. This time, with a slower pace, and a feeble pause, he simply murmured “Adele”. He considered her name, and all that it produced. The image of her flawless frame, the feel of it upon his, the music of her movement and melody of her voice. The crumble of Adele; the shielding of her beauty from such awful a moment, the tearing of the moments they had shared beneath scarlet bed covers the other night, the silence of her footsteps and a muted, marvelous mouth.

For a final time before he would embrace his future, Christian manipulated his figure to mirror the stumbled woman before him. Beside her eyes lay a trail of charcoal smudge, travelling from their empty abyss of a concealed gaze to the trembling shudder of rose petals as they enclosed secrets too scarring to be stolen. Her face lay a canvas of vulnerability, explored through the torments of a maniac.

With the sight of her broken body next to his, Christian realized what he must do. She lay in dazzling shards before him. Before him. She needed him. She needed him to protect her from the repugnant smirk of the violence of men, of a man. And, somewhere beneath his reasons and riddles, he knew, in some way, he needed her,