Queen’s Journal Annual Short Fiction Contest, Second-place winner
She lets him kiss her if for no other reason than dulled, misplaced sensitivity. The carnal exchange is one of hurried ion and inequitable longing on his end, and drunken sympathy on hers. It’s half past two in the morning on a Thursday in July, and the boy she is in love with doesn’t love her back, but the boy she isn’t in love with looks at her like she has gold woven into her skin. She crawls closer to him between heated sheets, and opens up like a casket.
*
He whispers sweetened nothings into her. They’re desperate, eager, riddled with cliché. Hopelessly un-poetic. But they fail to suppress her capacity for pity, so she gives in to the advances of clumsy fingers that she doesn’t love and knows she never will. It’s moments like this when everything feels hot and hurried, that the gravity of her situation falls heavy on her.
*
He doesn’t imagine her staying the night, and probably never will. Before the thought of her curled into the nape of his neck develops, she’s gone. It’s not a lyrical disappearance, nor an unearthly vanishing. Somewhere between subpar sex and inescapable late night loneliness, she slips away, like droplets down glass. Traces remain, as they’re wont to do: wrinkled sheets, smudged lipstick tracks down temples, throat and torso, a persisting hollowness, forced unceremoniously to the surface upon seeing her careless imprint in his bed.
*
He’s tried to kiss the loneliness out of her mouth for months, but it’s a fruitless pursuit. He’s bruised his lips trying to inhale her emptiness, cut fingers to coax out sadness. And it’s in clandestine meetings between him and the nocturnal sky, in his more delusional moments (perhaps with a clichéd post-coital cigarette dangling from parenthesis lips) that sometimes, sometimes, he thinks it’s worked. Thinks he’s finally penetrated her armour, sunk his teeth in bone deep.
*
He looks at her not like she hung the moon and stars, but as though she is composed of them. She is a nebula, an interstellar cloud. Or else a great gas giant in his neatly composed world of dense, terrestrial planets. He knows some bits of her philosophies, but would die to find out more. She dismisses luck as inissible based on its intangibility. So he desperately wants to ask her: then what are your thoughts on love?
*
Before she reminds herself to leave, it’s always the same feeling. Not wanting to fall asleep but desperately hoping to be anything but awake. She’s tried to trick herself into believing that it’s okay to break his heart. He’s the one that looks at her like some cosmic galaxy, yet doesn’t expect the wreckage of celestial bodies to be catastrophic. One day, he’ll realize all stars are is death after all, and he’s been worshipping a girl named after frozen rock and rubble, blazing forth the death of princes. When that time comes, the moon will shut off for him. For her, it’s never been turned on.
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