Shimmer
PG-13. 12/22/2006.

Sometimes she shines and I know...

Another place.

Another world/time/way of seeing. Maybe another self. Hell is heaven is purgatory is that-place-you-went-when-you-died, which you can never quite perceive properly, always slippery around the edges like Vaseline on an old camera lens. Always not-quite-real, just like you. Never solid, never steady, never the same twice.

Today (this exact moment of your perception, maybe night or century or millisecond) it's a bar. Sort of like a speakeasy, only with smooth dreamy electronica piped over speakers, or maybe sung somehow straight from the lungs of the girl on the stage--girl with no face, just song-mouth, maybe not a girl at all. Could be anything, in this place. "Place" for lack of a better word.

You're swaying in the music, looking down at the drink in your hand (something borrowed, something blue), past it, and at this time you're wearing something you almost would have worn in life, if you'd had just a little more courage. Courage that could have kept you alive, maybe. Long skirt like you were so fond, but pure white like driven snow. Red silk blouse buttoned up all the way. Big elegant lace-up boots that would hurt your feet if you could feel them.

This time you can't feel pain. That is good.

Your blonde hair extra-long--you can feel a coil of it weighing down your back, tail-like. No tail, which is almost a disappointment.

Then someone/thing takes your drink, and you look up and see her. Her, capital H, because somehow she's not fuzzy like the others, somehow she shimmers instead of blurs, somehow you see her and she's really seeing you, and this feels paramount. Monumental. Two no-person girls in a place that's no-place and you're with each other like there's no one else.

She downs the glowing stuff in your glass like it was nothing. A drop rolls down her pointed chin and you want to lick it, almost do, but pull back. Her brown hair is pulled into a severe chignon and you want to pull it free, too, and don't do that either. She has hungry eyes like a tiger and you worry your desire pales before hers.

You take your glass back from her, not touching her skin once, and let it drop to the floor, where it shatters with a sound like water falling.

Your body is water falling as her long elegant hands wrap slow-motion around your shoulders and pull you in to kiss your mouth like it was Paradise. Her skin is soft and smooth over panther-like muscles, so much of it to touch in her little black dress. She's tall but she folds into you with your heels and your need and your relief to find something more real than this place.

Something more like you expected death to be.

You're against a wall now, a warm wall like it's alive, and the bar is dim and maybe it's closed or maybe you're in another room or maybe you're just invisible to the rest of them now, and vice-versa, or maybe it just doesn't fucking matter in the first place. Maybe all that matters is her hand rubbing your breast through the silk shirt, silk bra beneath, your nipple throbbing little jolts of pleasure through you with every pass. Maybe all that matters is her breath on your hair as she asks you your name and you have to pause and hum and try to remember it.

You're Tara, and you already know her name before she says it's Lilah. You remember now: this has happened before, same but different, in other places in this other place, always her and never who you expect it to be--who you can't remember at all any more. Always you and her finding yourselves, each other, same difference in the end in this not-place, as if you are the same, as if there's something right on the edge of your memory that ties you to one another. Something that isn't really there, or might as well not be, because wherever there is it's not here with you.

But she is. She's here and her hand's flattened out and curved into you, so there's doubtless a wet spot on your pristine skirt, and you are licking a smooth trail up her neck as she gasps into your hair, as she breathes and jerks against you. You are both dead in a dead place but this is beyond that, or maybe instead the epitome of that; this is perfect and real and maybe even, dare you say it...alive.

End.

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