Body Count

I could have sworn, on any other day, that his hair was the color of flames. But in this bed, it looked brown and dingy in the dark light, not quite any distinct color in particular. It made me think of dirt, and in a strange way, he smelled like that too, the color of dirt, what you imagine it should smell like. Crushed fireflies and just-mowed grass and summer fires. And he smelled like his wife, too; her perfume lingered around his neck where her hair had grazed him in bed. The one he laid in hours before he came to this hotel room and took off his clothes and tried to forget the curlers she wore and the crying he knew she did silently sometimes seconds and sometimes hours after she woke up, alone, with only a cold spot next to her. As he tried to forget the silver stud in her ear that matched mine.

I breathed into his back and wondered if he dreamed. Was it her lips, her pink lip gloss-- the one that sometimes stained his collar-- that he felt when he rolled over in the middle of the night and touched my mouth with his thumb? What smooth skin did he think of when his arm reached around to touch my back? Did his dreams include her long legs, her quiet laugh, her not-quite-silent snore?

Did he dream of the man before me, the one who had introduced us? Of the park bench we had sat at and pretended not to notice each other while he slid me cash and the name of a motel on the opposite side of town? I wondered if he knew the curl of hair on the back of his head that always seemed to stand on end, or if he remembered the neon signs of the Chinese restaurants we walked by.

I wondered if I reminded him more of the woman who slept in his bed, or the last man, all fiery eyes and unrequited passion. I knew that he hardly thought of ​me ​at all.

A woman, too, that paid with her credit card and laughed when I asked if she wanted me to unclip her bra; who smiled when I touched her shoulder but grimaced when I grazed the scar on her back. She was older, calm and warm, and after we both finished, she looked out the window and told me she wanted a cigarette even though she’d stopped smoking when she was twenty-three. Her apartment was quiet and clean; there was no art or photography on the walls. It smelled like Lysol disinfectant and I imagined that if the lights turned on, they’d be a hard sort of fluorescent, almost strong enough to bleach her skin. An ambulance passed and the sound reverberated through the house like radio waves through the cracks of the walls. Her breath wasn’t quite even, and I wondered if the silence made her upset; I tried to breathe a little louder, just in case.

I wondered if she had family. Maybe a son or daughter, who lived far away, and only visited once a year. Maybe I reminded her of a high school crush, or her ex-husband; or maybe I reminded her of no one in particular but filling the space at night was an affordable comfort. Did she wonder, I wondered, how long she could hold out? How long we could sit in silence in this bed and not say a word?

I watched as her fingers drummed against the purple bed sheets and wasn’t surprised when her hand reached out to the desk and picked up a pencil pockmarked with bites. She tapped the end against her lips while we sat, comfortably, on opposite sides of the bed.

When I pulled on my jeans, I grabbed the pack of Eagles from my back pocket. The pairing of the smell of the smoke and the look on her face after she took that first drag was almost more pleasing to me than the one she had made in bed earlier that night.

And then the couple, who walked with me in a park after we met in a downtown bar. All we did was talk. The man's voice sounded like sugar and honey, gritty but sweet. The woman was almost the same, but in a richer way, a molasses like sound. Their eyes were warm, and they smiled at each other while the walked, in tiny sideways glances. Sometimes, their hands would link together as they paced beside me. We talked about morals and the meaning of life and the stars in the sky, whatever came to mind. Otherwise, it was a mix of sounds and near silence. The world passed by in tiny bubbles of noise; cars from a nearby highway as their engines backfired like gunshot, creaking wood from man-made bridges, honking geese.

I watched them walk away later and tried not to smile too much when their voices meshed together to say goodnight, their sum that much sweeter.

How do you tell someone, in those moments, how you love? How you love the feeling of their skin, warm to the touch, as it bubbles to goosebumps? How you love the tiny marks their teeth leave in the pencils they hide behind their ears? How you love the sound of the sighs that escape their lips when birds take off from a lake and no words pass between you? Do you hold the cotton strings when you walk out and tie them around your memories of naked flesh, of pencil marks and words that mean more than you realize when they leave your mouth?