sleepingfish 12


Elizabeth Mikesch : THE SLUMBER PARTIER

 

I let bathroom doors stay open to feign affection, hoping the host might listen, but I’m afraid to seem like this crazy Lisbon acquaintance. Touring others’ parlors, I try any noise my body won’t choke or pass judgment. I sit in the dark where he stays. Meaning I’m made to shunt my spine. His pillows are the ones tossed off. I’ve been set out the flat shit.

I tuck to the corner of the pouted pullout on my way hurricaned through someone else. What I do appoints a flop. And worse, parties keep you abreast of misgivings. Most of my hosts have their say. I heard the salacity of the wink, slept perhaps a word. Some soak their feet in salt to suck out stress while I sit outside, but I think of this little liar who told me she was allergic to salt when I tried to feed her a piece of homemade pizza. I can’t manage the hypochondria of my hosts squirting cummish purifications across their palms, making the same strained faces as I hand them obligations, gifts incessant, insistent. They fear matter may pollute their systems. They don’t delight in remnants. For instance, said parties have tip calculators. I have marveled, swatted their devices, doubled the ten percent math, trashed their keeping-track trapper keepers, the crackers.

I can’t stand for the way the public decides to sanitize. Those who gorge on corn syrup. Why am I always high-fived goodbye?

I habitually spilled honey on the stovetop of my then inamorato. He shouted and punished up a rag. He would excuse himself, huffy, shave his dome, scrape the razor scum, door secured. If you are still awake, I should confess to being grounded because the potty got stopped up with me. I never plunged. From the pile grew sleek tomatoes.

I did once per month mention the boxes: geography, hill countries, biomes of needless cords and deciduous forests from once-constructed papers for purposes he lost. No room to rest sans a chair. The conversation went as such: a collage of overlarge hypotheses of why mauve. There was little space for me to meddle, spread my usual façade. That is, play house. We were lessees. He finagled the paints. I mean we were typed as those who think splishy-splash matters, hueing as fuel for the opposite of intercourse. His floor stayed hard.

My on-deck lover’s powder room pounds my pounds equated about worth and idioms far worse. We indulged in cinematic banal anal, French girlfriends. He owns but one lamp, a sea fish attachment allowing phrases to be made in the pitch. He longs to make circles inside me so I snooze. This goo-goo eyed goon dry humps under the chemiluminescence. Never an aspiration among the upright. I trip over his barbells, piss the water he pours me, knees allowing his penlight. A terrible babysitter.

The evening makes everything its richer sophisticate. Please excuse me and I had hoped you would not have minded that I was feeling like I was having to get on going, I say. Blame dawning on for why. Better trek happier trails that would seem I was myself as I am wont to hide. Where I’d end up another stop.

Elizabeth Mikesch Niceties

 


Elizabeth Mikesch has appeared in Unsaid, The Collagist, The Literarian, Moonshot, and NOÖ. Her Niceties: Aural Ardor, Pardon Me is forthcoming from Calamari Press.

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