Salt Lick

I arrive at Cubbyhole a few minutes after midnight, like Cinderella in reverse. Your hair is just as red as your pictures and it makes me think of fevers, aching hands, nights spent sweating and shivering on hallucinogens. Your drink is red too, or pink anyway, architectural watermelon slivers arranged on a bed of crushed ice, sheepishly perfect. I want to lick the salt from the rim of your glass. You tell me how beautiful I am, but the compliments change on their way to my brain and become the kind of excessive praise from straight girls that doesn’t mean anything, the kind you get from girlfriends, not girlfriends. I want to tell you that my body is a dead garden. I want to tell you that I’m broken beyond recognition and to watch your smile stiffen into a scar. Somebody bribes the jukebox and some song I used to love, back when I could believe that it was possible for me to be desired, stutters into being. I want to lick the salt from your lips. With a shy smile you reach into your purse and hand me a flower that looks fake, but upon closer inspection it’s real. I realize that no one has ever given me flowers before, besides one dutiful boyfriend on Valentine’s Day, but never spontaneously like this, and suddenly I have the feeling that you will melt away like smoke into the darkened corners of the bar. I don’t kiss you. I think I am incapable of intimacy unless it’s reciprocal, a knee-jerk response to the pawings and proddings of some aggressive boorish guy. I don’t kiss you. My fever is muted and sullen and false. I ride the train back at 1 AM alone with a stupid flower in my hands.