In this dream you rip me open and chew my ribs till your teeth screech. The light spilling out of your mouth with every bite, which we both know, is suspicious. The logic is tilted and there’s no hand on the clock but we play along. The oblong night and the wind beating. The snow gutting the boulevard to bone. My nerves a blur of dust and thaw. I knew you needed a place to stay in, so I kept my mouth open. Crooked Teeth and no definitives, nothing of conviction. Smudged language. Dew sipping on the ceiling and I squander my time looking for words. Then I remembered you crawl in only to crawl out. So, I pulled my bones off and let the insides freeze. You never asked for any of it so I don’t get to blame you. You’ll still beg for forgiveness but that is trivial. I’ll never love you enough to forgive you and that too, is trivial. For now, we hold each other’s hands and prod at the margins. You wipe the words off your mouth, play a trick and the walls shift. I pretend I wanted this, play my trick and the roof comes tumbling. Look, the moon is a puncture wound and the night a parenthesis clicking shut. This dream bleeding wide open in the debris is the only way it works, but we both already know that, and there is still time to kill. The fireplace flooding, our knees shivering with want. I want to get to the thing that lies on the other side of you. You want happiness and I am the roadblock— the knot in your throat. So, I invented this dream as a tabernacle, as a mouth that won’t claim us alive. The words are here, all of them, scattered along the linoleum. Take your pick and carve your apologies while I carve mine. We scathe each other out like a wound leaking, till the other side of it — a vein of light.
Written by Abhinav
Abhinav is from Kanpur, India. His work has appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Trampset, Chestnut Review, and The Deadlands Magazine among other forums. He is also a Best of the Net Nominee.