Hiding Place.

“Darling let me touch your face, let your skin be my hiding place.
I promise I won’t take up too much room.”
~ Serena Ryder, Hiding Place

I dream of tigers. Majestic stripes, peaks and valleys of onyx and orange.

Methodically, I take tiger hide between sure hands, peel it slowly from still warm flesh, veins pulsing faintly, and rip sinewy muscle from bone, cutting flanks of meat as I pile it beside me, the raw smack-smack  of meat meeting floor a metronome marking my deft motions, accentuating my blank face. This is a performance, so well practiced.

The bones I burn, white ash piles blown away like the puff of a new dandilion, a wish for a new life, a silent prayer for old, no evidence in morning light.

The meat I feed to my own cat, watch him lick lips as he pulls taffy-like strips caught between kitty-teeth, red juices staining domesticated whiskers, paws slick with fat falling from his predecessor’s parts.

When he is full, he rubs his wet head against my calf, a smear of endangered blood against the pant leg of my faded jeans.

The hides I pile up and up – trophies of my midnight murders, one for each night of the week. One dream tiger for one dream coat, each cleaner, more precise than the last, my skill improving with each kill, with each good night’s sleep. The movement of the knife is a well-choreographed event, separating the air with glints of refracting light and reflections of life and death: my eyes – clear, loud – and the tiger’s eyes – dark, dull.

Each tiger, it has a name – the name of my grade school best friend, my high school professor, my employer, my first lover, my last.

These names, they trip over slicked lips again and again to the beat of the slicing knife, a soundtrack of fluid movement, the syllables of your name a beat keeping time to the arc of my dream, to the arc of my madness; the tap-tap-tap of consonants and vowels smack the red-stained floor soak up the independence, the sinewy strength, the primitive instinct, the growling aggression, the exotic sensuality of feline curves and erotica caught between broad shoulders.

Your name and the body of the tiger, they are simultaneously cut into pieces smaller and smaller until they are obsolete, until I am all of the things I dig out of the gut of the tiger and take for myself.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Thoughts, on fire.

Six thirty in the morning. That ringing, it’s not the alarm clock.

A groan: you’ve got to be kidding me. Covers back, feet on the floor, early morning sleep-crust sticking to my bones.

Fuck me.

Fire alarm wakeup call on the fourth floor.

Shuffle to the door, slide deadbolt – left, right, left, right – peek confirms no one else is in the hallway.

False. Alarm, false.

Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Feet still sleeping, no need to pick them up. Flop into bed, pillow over head.

Still ringing, getting louder and louder, my groan a yell: shut the fuck up!

I am so pleasant in the morning.

Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Deadbolt slide. Peek – left, right – neighbours in winter coats and boots hightailing for the stairwell.

Shit.

Socks. Need to find socks. It’s cold out there. Sweater. Check. Jacket. Okay. Mittens. Need mittens. Hello mittens? Aha! Under the couch cushion.

Pray: fire, please don’t spread quickly.

Shoes. Where’d I put my shoes? Right. By the patio door. Wore them outside to smoke last night.

Smokes! Should take those.

Logical. Very logical.

Records? No.

Computer? Possibly.

Cat.

Shit. The cat.

Here, kitty, kitty.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

Yes, I hear you!

Cat carrier case. Where did I leave the carrier case? Front hall.

Okay, cat. It’s just you, me and this damn plastic carrier case.

No.

No paws, no meows, definitely no hisses. Get your angry ass in the carrier!

I don’t want to go outside any more than you!

Pleading with a four-legged animal before dawn – get! in! the! case!

Success! No, aw, no! Get back here! Stop with the scratches. Get in the case!

Okay. Cat in carrier. Latches fastened.

This is good. We’re good.

Keys. Crap. Need keys to get back in building.

Smash!

Cat crashes through carrier door. Door on floor, cat under bed, carrier cracked.

You have got to be kidding me.

Fuck it, cat. Smoulder!

Can’t kill cat. Guilty conscience no way to start weekend.

Cat in coat.

Socks. Sweater. Jacket. Mittens. Shoes. Smokes. Cat. Keys.

What’d I forget?

Sanity.

I’ll come back for that.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Ramses.

You can feel it. Crawling through your veins. It tickles a little, like the moment you realize you’re not alone in an empty house, a shiver shocking the length of your spine. You can feel it sticking to your blood, clawing at your cells, poisoning your system, pocking your clear skin. Replicating itself one thousand times over, it’s in you, all through you. A venomous invisible toxin you didn’t even know you could catch.

The promise of an all-star-endorsed-detox-over-the-counter-remedy assured by the fit and healthy only makes it worse. You are scratching, dying to get out of your skin. The doctor, she tells you: it will go away with time. Though we don’t know much about this – your condition.

You laugh, a surprising uproar of belly chuckle that makes both you and the doctor uncomfortable. Sure, you say, no problem. I’ll let you know if it clears up.

And the doctor, she watches as you awkwardly fold into your winter coat and pull tired woollen mittens from pockets filled with faded bus transfers and used kleenexes and old movie stubs. She says nothing as you click open the examination room door and stomp past reception, down the stairs, out into the dark night.

And you, you don’t think about anything in particular on the walk home. You don’t think about how you’re contagious or how someone who said they loved you once might not love you as much – just in case – and how you are now both a warrior and a peace maker within the walls of your own skin.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art