Guernica
Gone Baby Gone.
I’m screaming by the time the police show up; I’m screaming and I just can’t stop, hysterical and hypothermic in the freezing early morning air.
He’s gone. He’s gone, gonegoneGoneGONEgoneGone.
He’s.
Gone.
I want to say I saw his face as he fell, chalk-white and terrified, mouth jarred open with shock, “Frankie—”
But it’s a lie. I know this, have always known this.
There was no time. Nothing but one stifled scream, and then he was gone so fast that it seemed impossible that he could have ever been here in the first place.
And I know this too; I know it so deeply that I can feel it in the nucleus of every cell, like a microscopic chemical burn: he’s never coming back. They can drag the river for weeks and maybe they’ll find his body, vacant and worn as a moon shell, but Quinn – the boy I kissed for the first time on the rumpled sheets of a hotel room double-bed, lips that tasted like saltwater taffy, the boy I let touch me like nobody had ever touched me – that boy is fucking gone.
Now Kay’s gone too.
“You miss her?” I echo that stupid question from earlier; I’m sneering, I’m a deprecating circus clown with painted lips; a break-up, so fucking sad, oh you poor darling.
She bares her teeth in a jagged smile next to my jaw, the kind that rips your cartilage; “Yes, Frank. I fucking miss her.”
A couple of police officers are standing down on the bridge below me, trading a cigarette like this is entertainment, passing it back and forth between two pairs of lips – I think, anyway; all I can see is the orange ember glittering like a disembodied soul in the darkness below, floating side to side.
My heart is contracting spasmodically, trying to squeeze every last drop of blood from its swollen chambers, throbbing a new staccato rhythm:
Quinn.
Is.
Gone.
I can taste algae, Elodea Canadensis, underwater weeds. I can see searchlights; hear the steady whirring of helicopter blades getting closer in the slick darkness. So cold that I’ve stopped shivering, everything around me blurs like the Gaussian edges of a bruise, the indefinite line where watercolors run together.
A Signac dreamscape.
She’s still up here too, motionless now, frozen against the lightening sky; a cop is climbing the metal to where she’s huddled, hand over hand over hand, his belt tied to a carbine, carbine clipped to the bridge guide-wires to keep him from falling too far.
Slip, fuck, accident, never and never again.
He’s wrapping a flannel blanket around her shoulders; I can hear the faint pitchy lilt of her sobs reaching me as if through a sick inversed ocean, flowing water buried beneath layers and layers and layers of dead salty sediment and sand.
I’m terrified, can’t picture Quinn’s face, can’t feel the blaze of his body against my body, his bones on my bones— His touch, his voice, laugh, smell; these things are lost to the numbing cold, the roar of the helicopter engine, the sharp smell of death, blood from my cut hands, fresh urine.
I can’t feel it, but I’m peeing down my fucking leg.
Ohh…
My lips are emitting moans that I didn’t know I had in me; I’m an automaton, a clapping monkey; I’ll never stop begging for more. She’s biting my ear now, everything and nothing like Quinn was.
Spring break, in a vacant hotel room with windows open to the ocean; the first time he fucked me. Salty breeze blowing in through the thin white drapes, can I still feel it? The late afternoon sunlight, tanning lotion, tequila and sand and beach-kissed blonde hair… His hands on my wrists, his lips on my lips, his easy smile; never and never again.
Her words now were my silent words then, why the hell would you ever want to fuck me? Frank Iero, the dorky faggot kid with thick black rectangle glasses and hair that never stayed out of his eyes; it was like some kind of joke.
He was too good for me.
Pushing my frames off, laughing, you’re so cute. Every imperfection I had been dying to hide, and he thought it was fucking cute.
When the second cop reaches me, I’m already delirious, disgusting, tears and piss and blood; I’m numb and I can’t feel it as he threads the cord tied to his carbine through my belt loop, pulls a blanket around my shoulders.
I’m mumbling I-don’t-know-what, apparently Quinn’s name, because that’s what the cop says through his walkie-talkie, “Jumper’s name is Quinn.”
He didn’t jump. I’m hysterical. HE DIDN’T FUCKING JUMP.
The asshole won’t listen, doesn’t care about why my dead boyfriend is dead, and soon, I don’t argue anymore. Already, I stop trying to take care of Quinn.
A hotel room by the motherfucking ocean.
I’d never been more than twenty-five fucking miles from my hometown before, and there I was in a hotel room next to the ocean, this gorgeous boy, like something out of a Hollywood production, with his hands planted on the mattress, on either side of my head.
That smile, instantly liquefying my insides, cutting my lungs out of my chest with beautiful precision, I don’t know why you’re so fucking shy, Frankiero.
His weight over my hips; his breath, his kiss, his tongue, can I still taste it?
I’d only had one girlfriend, never kissed her. Wouldn’t let her touch me; bolted when she tried.
I was fucking terrified.
Agonizingly slow, as if he’d done this so many times he wanted to teach me how; lips brushing lips, scary chills shooting through my bones like cold electricity, then gradually harder, harder… hot French kissing, my chest so tight that I thought blood vessels might rupture deep inside, splatter a telltale love letter in Braille across the sheets.
Then his hands on my bare skin, lips curving back into a smile as I trembled even harder beneath him. I’m not gonna bite you, baby. Head spinning, his expert hands touching my neck, my chest, my God; his hot breath ghosting seductively over my ribs as he slowly untied the waistband of my swim shorts.
I’m not gonna bite you, baby; how fucking long had I been aching to be someone’s baby?
God, oh, he was just too good for me; I know this.
I know why he’s gone.
The helicopter can’t get low enough to airlift us past the intricate overhead lattice of the bridge, so the walkie-talkie says, Take them down old-school style.
Down.
Hand over hand over hand over hand.
My teeth almost jarring loose, rattling around inside my skull like beads from a broken charm bracelet.
Hand over hand over hand.
Head lolling side to side. The frozen cartilage in my joints creaking ominously.
No pain.
Hand over hand over hand, the cop’s feet touch ground and I’m lowered to the cold pavement like a little child, like a corpse. My head spins, artificial sunspots dancing before my eyes: everything finally illuminated by the flares, the ambulance headlights, like the hazy yellow-orange glow of a forest-fire.
The cops are two young guys, barely any older than me; they look like kids in my demented state, the fucking Hardy boys, and what’s worse is for some reason, I swear they want to jump each other’s bones.
I want to yell, FUCKING STOP THAT. I want to tell them how sick they are, horny at a time like this, but my mouth’s not working right. HI, MY BOYFRIEND’S DEAD.
“They’re looking for Quinn,” one starts to say, head titled condescendingly. He’s got his fingers on the other’s arm. Maybe.
Quinn.
Tune out tune out tune out. Gone baby gone.
Her hands are sliding down my chest but all I can think of are his hands, his lips, my bathing suit crumpled on the carpet beside the bed as he took me into his mouth, making my fingers instinctively clench the sheets up into sweaty carnations.
Oh.
Oh my God.
A ragged gasp spilling past my lips, panic flaring deep inside my mind; I didn’t know what to do: sit up, arch my back, moan out loud, anything?
His soft laughter. So fucking cute. His mouth back on mine, the taste making me shiver uncontrollably. Cautiously, his fingers inside me, forcing me to squirm, nervous nervous nervous. He skipped the clichés, the this will hurt; I fucking knew it would hurt and f-fuck; hot tears filled my eyes at the raw sting, pain made worse by the fact that I craved his approval so desperately, that I was trying so fucking hard not to show any horrible weakness in my eyes.
And now comes the worst part of the memory; Quinn’s pretty face flooding with sympathy that could have been lye or hydrochloric acid for how much it burns all this time later— this boy, who’d probably had every kid in my grade on their back begging… for some reason feeling fucking sorry for me.
Inside my chest, my sewage heart is splintering; picturing him as he gently kissed my salty eyes, all fucking concern and tenderness, why the hell should he have cared?
Too good for me, too good for me; I want to scream and bash out my own teeth, QUINN WAS TOO FUCKING GOOD FOR ME.
Everybody might as well know the fucking truth now.
All this time I’ve spent hating him for trying to save her, for not realizing I was scared… I’m the one in the wrong.
After the pain I was just so high, viciously juked on something I’d never known, selfish thrills of delirious aching ecstasy; his lips on my lips, his dick inside me, his hands on my skin… the distant roar of the ocean tide mimicking the rush of blood through my thudding heart. I was high and I was never ever coming down, lost in waves of pleasure like nothing I could ever have imagined.
Tantalizingly slow sex, I felt every single move he made.
Ohh…
My breath choked up in my throat, head still swimming in vague disbelief, how could he want me?
Those hands, that dick, that flawless body… His smile, his laugh, the way that every time he was around, I was still that innocent kid with the thick-rimmed glasses, no matter how fucked up things got.
This is what I will never find again.
The edge was getting so close so fast; you would laugh yourself sick if you knew how scared I was that it might have been too fast, how utterly terrified I was to make the wrong fucking sounds.
Then, that first dynamite tremor ripping through my insides, no control, climax, sh-shit—
Nothing like it.
Quinn’s face contorting too, just before I involuntarily squeezed my eyelids shut, that beautiful face. Unh, fuck, Frankie—
I couldn’t believe it, afterwards, that somehow I had made him moan, choke my name, made those fireworks of ecstasy burst inside his irises.
Breathing heavily, trying to get oxygen back to the brain; holy shit holy shit, he’d fucking said my name. My eyes wider than saucers.
His fluid smile again, trailing his fingers lazily down my jaw, Shit, I wish there was a picture of you like this.
I wish he had taken that fucking picture.
I wish…
God, I’m choked up, so close to sobbing, right here on the balcony with her clinging to me, and I’m not sure if she’s oblivious, still trying to fuck me, or if maybe she knows, maybe she’s trying to keep me from falling apart, maybe she thinks I’ll throw myself over the railing, hurtle like a bottle rocket down to the dusty pavement fourteen stories below.
I want the photograph that could have been, so fucking bad.
I want some fucking proof that he loved me, that somehow he hadn’t realized how far below him I was, how much better he could have had it.
I want to see myself frozen in that one singular moment, where he thought I was so beautiful, as if maybe through the eye of a camera, I could – impossibly – see whatever it is that he saw in me. Was I beautiful, once? Cheeks and lips flushed with sex and pleasure, star-fucked bright eyes…
Never and never and never again.
On the bridge, I’m still tuning out the police; he’s gone baby gone and ain’t nothing gonna bring him back.
Not now, not ever.
Not the fucking blankets they’re piling over me, not the pseudo-hopeful commentary of the officers.
Somebody killed Quinn, and she’s there too alright, crumpled like a discarded doll on the ground as someone gets a stretcher. All I can see is her mouth, big and wide and black in a blur of pale fish-skin, like she can’t believe what’s happened.
Can’t believe she’s a murderer now.
Can’t believe he won’t be coming back.
Fucking nevermore.
The minute he was gone, I wanted to be someone’s baby again.
Someone pours antiseptic over the palms of my hands, and the venemous sting – like a hot switchblade hacking through layers of black to flesh that can still feel – is enough to make me pass out, short-circuiting and falling away into pools of fog, ink, mechanical stars.
If anything happened after, if there was a hospital, a court appearance, a cold metal box on a morgue plinth; if there was the blanched, disfigured death mask of a gargoyle, a sick stiff body with a Y sliced into its chest, a funeral drenched in lilies and the heavy scent of shit… These things mean nothing.
A mortician with a fucking hard-on, gleefully telling you what happens to a body submerged in fresh water—
Nihilo ex nihilo.
Lust, bloodlust, her rotten lips tattooing the back of my neck, an erection in my fucking pants, this is reality now.
Hold my bones, hold my bones; jump my fucking bones, pound me into the mattress, I want it. I want to shatter and bleed squid ink from stemming fractures deep inside; I want to crumble into dust and finally forget the scent of the ocean, that distorted white face from the morgue table.
She’s got her legs wrapped around my waist, and I’m still thinking about drowning, hypoxia, acidosis, cardiac arrest. This is pillow talk. This is sex.
Fuck me, Frank.
Submersion in cold water causes bradycardia, peripheral vasoconstriction, blood shift as the human body panics, heart rate slowed by 50%, blood rerouted from fingers and toes straight to the brain and the thoracic cavity.
She’s moaning into my skin; I can feel the heat between her thighs burning a messy hole through my spinal cord.
Victim breathes in, water splashing into the mouth, the stomach, finally, the lungs, where the alveoli draw it into pulmonary circulation.
Bedroom whispers.
Hemolysis, salty red blood cells splattering carmine and scarlet against the walls of every constricting vein. Lub dub, the heart falters, sparks out of rhythm.
Mayday, m’aidez.
Fuck me, Franky.
Drowning is Russian roulette where the house always wins.
Drowning is suicide.
The victim struggles. Tries to reach the surface, fights for that last warped glimmer of light swimming in front of their blurry eyes, depleting the last reserves of oxygen in their bloodstream and rendering them unconscious in the inky waves. Or, choose apnea: victim holds their breath; thirty, sixty, ninety seconds and counting… Arterial partial pressure of CO2 reaches 55 mm Hg, the breath-hold breakpoint; victim squeezes the trigger and inhales purely by killing instinct, lungs instantly filled with icy water.
Her teeth on my throat; moan, oh, unh, yes, I’m fucking turning myself on.
Unconsciousness. The house has cheated its players out of every card.
This is the heart ceasing to beat; this is hypoxia, a critical lack of oxygen to the brain.
First damage, then total cell death.
Six minutes.
“Come on, Frank!” she gasps breathlessly, lips moving against my ear, making me a little crazy.
Rigor mortis.
I could just fuck myself right now.
He’s gone. He’s gone, gonegoneGoneGONEgoneGone.
He’s.
Gone.
I want to say I saw his face as he fell, chalk-white and terrified, mouth jarred open with shock, “Frankie—”
But it’s a lie. I know this, have always known this.
There was no time. Nothing but one stifled scream, and then he was gone so fast that it seemed impossible that he could have ever been here in the first place.
And I know this too; I know it so deeply that I can feel it in the nucleus of every cell, like a microscopic chemical burn: he’s never coming back. They can drag the river for weeks and maybe they’ll find his body, vacant and worn as a moon shell, but Quinn – the boy I kissed for the first time on the rumpled sheets of a hotel room double-bed, lips that tasted like saltwater taffy, the boy I let touch me like nobody had ever touched me – that boy is fucking gone.
Now Kay’s gone too.
“You miss her?” I echo that stupid question from earlier; I’m sneering, I’m a deprecating circus clown with painted lips; a break-up, so fucking sad, oh you poor darling.
She bares her teeth in a jagged smile next to my jaw, the kind that rips your cartilage; “Yes, Frank. I fucking miss her.”
A couple of police officers are standing down on the bridge below me, trading a cigarette like this is entertainment, passing it back and forth between two pairs of lips – I think, anyway; all I can see is the orange ember glittering like a disembodied soul in the darkness below, floating side to side.
My heart is contracting spasmodically, trying to squeeze every last drop of blood from its swollen chambers, throbbing a new staccato rhythm:
Quinn.
Is.
Gone.
I can taste algae, Elodea Canadensis, underwater weeds. I can see searchlights; hear the steady whirring of helicopter blades getting closer in the slick darkness. So cold that I’ve stopped shivering, everything around me blurs like the Gaussian edges of a bruise, the indefinite line where watercolors run together.
A Signac dreamscape.
She’s still up here too, motionless now, frozen against the lightening sky; a cop is climbing the metal to where she’s huddled, hand over hand over hand, his belt tied to a carbine, carbine clipped to the bridge guide-wires to keep him from falling too far.
Slip, fuck, accident, never and never again.
He’s wrapping a flannel blanket around her shoulders; I can hear the faint pitchy lilt of her sobs reaching me as if through a sick inversed ocean, flowing water buried beneath layers and layers and layers of dead salty sediment and sand.
I’m terrified, can’t picture Quinn’s face, can’t feel the blaze of his body against my body, his bones on my bones— His touch, his voice, laugh, smell; these things are lost to the numbing cold, the roar of the helicopter engine, the sharp smell of death, blood from my cut hands, fresh urine.
I can’t feel it, but I’m peeing down my fucking leg.
Ohh…
My lips are emitting moans that I didn’t know I had in me; I’m an automaton, a clapping monkey; I’ll never stop begging for more. She’s biting my ear now, everything and nothing like Quinn was.
Spring break, in a vacant hotel room with windows open to the ocean; the first time he fucked me. Salty breeze blowing in through the thin white drapes, can I still feel it? The late afternoon sunlight, tanning lotion, tequila and sand and beach-kissed blonde hair… His hands on my wrists, his lips on my lips, his easy smile; never and never again.
Her words now were my silent words then, why the hell would you ever want to fuck me? Frank Iero, the dorky faggot kid with thick black rectangle glasses and hair that never stayed out of his eyes; it was like some kind of joke.
He was too good for me.
Pushing my frames off, laughing, you’re so cute. Every imperfection I had been dying to hide, and he thought it was fucking cute.
When the second cop reaches me, I’m already delirious, disgusting, tears and piss and blood; I’m numb and I can’t feel it as he threads the cord tied to his carbine through my belt loop, pulls a blanket around my shoulders.
I’m mumbling I-don’t-know-what, apparently Quinn’s name, because that’s what the cop says through his walkie-talkie, “Jumper’s name is Quinn.”
He didn’t jump. I’m hysterical. HE DIDN’T FUCKING JUMP.
The asshole won’t listen, doesn’t care about why my dead boyfriend is dead, and soon, I don’t argue anymore. Already, I stop trying to take care of Quinn.
A hotel room by the motherfucking ocean.
I’d never been more than twenty-five fucking miles from my hometown before, and there I was in a hotel room next to the ocean, this gorgeous boy, like something out of a Hollywood production, with his hands planted on the mattress, on either side of my head.
That smile, instantly liquefying my insides, cutting my lungs out of my chest with beautiful precision, I don’t know why you’re so fucking shy, Frankiero.
His weight over my hips; his breath, his kiss, his tongue, can I still taste it?
I’d only had one girlfriend, never kissed her. Wouldn’t let her touch me; bolted when she tried.
I was fucking terrified.
Agonizingly slow, as if he’d done this so many times he wanted to teach me how; lips brushing lips, scary chills shooting through my bones like cold electricity, then gradually harder, harder… hot French kissing, my chest so tight that I thought blood vessels might rupture deep inside, splatter a telltale love letter in Braille across the sheets.
Then his hands on my bare skin, lips curving back into a smile as I trembled even harder beneath him. I’m not gonna bite you, baby. Head spinning, his expert hands touching my neck, my chest, my God; his hot breath ghosting seductively over my ribs as he slowly untied the waistband of my swim shorts.
I’m not gonna bite you, baby; how fucking long had I been aching to be someone’s baby?
God, oh, he was just too good for me; I know this.
I know why he’s gone.
The helicopter can’t get low enough to airlift us past the intricate overhead lattice of the bridge, so the walkie-talkie says, Take them down old-school style.
Down.
Hand over hand over hand over hand.
My teeth almost jarring loose, rattling around inside my skull like beads from a broken charm bracelet.
Hand over hand over hand.
Head lolling side to side. The frozen cartilage in my joints creaking ominously.
No pain.
Hand over hand over hand, the cop’s feet touch ground and I’m lowered to the cold pavement like a little child, like a corpse. My head spins, artificial sunspots dancing before my eyes: everything finally illuminated by the flares, the ambulance headlights, like the hazy yellow-orange glow of a forest-fire.
The cops are two young guys, barely any older than me; they look like kids in my demented state, the fucking Hardy boys, and what’s worse is for some reason, I swear they want to jump each other’s bones.
I want to yell, FUCKING STOP THAT. I want to tell them how sick they are, horny at a time like this, but my mouth’s not working right. HI, MY BOYFRIEND’S DEAD.
“They’re looking for Quinn,” one starts to say, head titled condescendingly. He’s got his fingers on the other’s arm. Maybe.
Quinn.
Tune out tune out tune out. Gone baby gone.
Her hands are sliding down my chest but all I can think of are his hands, his lips, my bathing suit crumpled on the carpet beside the bed as he took me into his mouth, making my fingers instinctively clench the sheets up into sweaty carnations.
Oh.
Oh my God.
A ragged gasp spilling past my lips, panic flaring deep inside my mind; I didn’t know what to do: sit up, arch my back, moan out loud, anything?
His soft laughter. So fucking cute. His mouth back on mine, the taste making me shiver uncontrollably. Cautiously, his fingers inside me, forcing me to squirm, nervous nervous nervous. He skipped the clichés, the this will hurt; I fucking knew it would hurt and f-fuck; hot tears filled my eyes at the raw sting, pain made worse by the fact that I craved his approval so desperately, that I was trying so fucking hard not to show any horrible weakness in my eyes.
And now comes the worst part of the memory; Quinn’s pretty face flooding with sympathy that could have been lye or hydrochloric acid for how much it burns all this time later— this boy, who’d probably had every kid in my grade on their back begging… for some reason feeling fucking sorry for me.
Inside my chest, my sewage heart is splintering; picturing him as he gently kissed my salty eyes, all fucking concern and tenderness, why the hell should he have cared?
Too good for me, too good for me; I want to scream and bash out my own teeth, QUINN WAS TOO FUCKING GOOD FOR ME.
Everybody might as well know the fucking truth now.
All this time I’ve spent hating him for trying to save her, for not realizing I was scared… I’m the one in the wrong.
After the pain I was just so high, viciously juked on something I’d never known, selfish thrills of delirious aching ecstasy; his lips on my lips, his dick inside me, his hands on my skin… the distant roar of the ocean tide mimicking the rush of blood through my thudding heart. I was high and I was never ever coming down, lost in waves of pleasure like nothing I could ever have imagined.
Tantalizingly slow sex, I felt every single move he made.
Ohh…
My breath choked up in my throat, head still swimming in vague disbelief, how could he want me?
Those hands, that dick, that flawless body… His smile, his laugh, the way that every time he was around, I was still that innocent kid with the thick-rimmed glasses, no matter how fucked up things got.
This is what I will never find again.
The edge was getting so close so fast; you would laugh yourself sick if you knew how scared I was that it might have been too fast, how utterly terrified I was to make the wrong fucking sounds.
Then, that first dynamite tremor ripping through my insides, no control, climax, sh-shit—
Nothing like it.
Quinn’s face contorting too, just before I involuntarily squeezed my eyelids shut, that beautiful face. Unh, fuck, Frankie—
I couldn’t believe it, afterwards, that somehow I had made him moan, choke my name, made those fireworks of ecstasy burst inside his irises.
Breathing heavily, trying to get oxygen back to the brain; holy shit holy shit, he’d fucking said my name. My eyes wider than saucers.
His fluid smile again, trailing his fingers lazily down my jaw, Shit, I wish there was a picture of you like this.
I wish he had taken that fucking picture.
I wish…
God, I’m choked up, so close to sobbing, right here on the balcony with her clinging to me, and I’m not sure if she’s oblivious, still trying to fuck me, or if maybe she knows, maybe she’s trying to keep me from falling apart, maybe she thinks I’ll throw myself over the railing, hurtle like a bottle rocket down to the dusty pavement fourteen stories below.
I want the photograph that could have been, so fucking bad.
I want some fucking proof that he loved me, that somehow he hadn’t realized how far below him I was, how much better he could have had it.
I want to see myself frozen in that one singular moment, where he thought I was so beautiful, as if maybe through the eye of a camera, I could – impossibly – see whatever it is that he saw in me. Was I beautiful, once? Cheeks and lips flushed with sex and pleasure, star-fucked bright eyes…
Never and never and never again.
On the bridge, I’m still tuning out the police; he’s gone baby gone and ain’t nothing gonna bring him back.
Not now, not ever.
Not the fucking blankets they’re piling over me, not the pseudo-hopeful commentary of the officers.
Somebody killed Quinn, and she’s there too alright, crumpled like a discarded doll on the ground as someone gets a stretcher. All I can see is her mouth, big and wide and black in a blur of pale fish-skin, like she can’t believe what’s happened.
Can’t believe she’s a murderer now.
Can’t believe he won’t be coming back.
Fucking nevermore.
The minute he was gone, I wanted to be someone’s baby again.
Someone pours antiseptic over the palms of my hands, and the venemous sting – like a hot switchblade hacking through layers of black to flesh that can still feel – is enough to make me pass out, short-circuiting and falling away into pools of fog, ink, mechanical stars.
If anything happened after, if there was a hospital, a court appearance, a cold metal box on a morgue plinth; if there was the blanched, disfigured death mask of a gargoyle, a sick stiff body with a Y sliced into its chest, a funeral drenched in lilies and the heavy scent of shit… These things mean nothing.
A mortician with a fucking hard-on, gleefully telling you what happens to a body submerged in fresh water—
Nihilo ex nihilo.
Lust, bloodlust, her rotten lips tattooing the back of my neck, an erection in my fucking pants, this is reality now.
Hold my bones, hold my bones; jump my fucking bones, pound me into the mattress, I want it. I want to shatter and bleed squid ink from stemming fractures deep inside; I want to crumble into dust and finally forget the scent of the ocean, that distorted white face from the morgue table.
She’s got her legs wrapped around my waist, and I’m still thinking about drowning, hypoxia, acidosis, cardiac arrest. This is pillow talk. This is sex.
Fuck me, Frank.
Submersion in cold water causes bradycardia, peripheral vasoconstriction, blood shift as the human body panics, heart rate slowed by 50%, blood rerouted from fingers and toes straight to the brain and the thoracic cavity.
She’s moaning into my skin; I can feel the heat between her thighs burning a messy hole through my spinal cord.
Victim breathes in, water splashing into the mouth, the stomach, finally, the lungs, where the alveoli draw it into pulmonary circulation.
Bedroom whispers.
Hemolysis, salty red blood cells splattering carmine and scarlet against the walls of every constricting vein. Lub dub, the heart falters, sparks out of rhythm.
Mayday, m’aidez.
Fuck me, Franky.
Drowning is Russian roulette where the house always wins.
Drowning is suicide.
The victim struggles. Tries to reach the surface, fights for that last warped glimmer of light swimming in front of their blurry eyes, depleting the last reserves of oxygen in their bloodstream and rendering them unconscious in the inky waves. Or, choose apnea: victim holds their breath; thirty, sixty, ninety seconds and counting… Arterial partial pressure of CO2 reaches 55 mm Hg, the breath-hold breakpoint; victim squeezes the trigger and inhales purely by killing instinct, lungs instantly filled with icy water.
Her teeth on my throat; moan, oh, unh, yes, I’m fucking turning myself on.
Unconsciousness. The house has cheated its players out of every card.
This is the heart ceasing to beat; this is hypoxia, a critical lack of oxygen to the brain.
First damage, then total cell death.
Six minutes.
“Come on, Frank!” she gasps breathlessly, lips moving against my ear, making me a little crazy.
Rigor mortis.
I could just fuck myself right now.