Puddles by George Sparling

For the first time I see a blank, her face disappears. Nothing exists, and that’s a positive development.

“What happened to your head and torso?” Clara asks.

“I don’t know, probably where yours went. We’re not invisible, we’re non-existent.”

“Are you religious? I’m not,” she says. Changing subjects are clear indications of a vanishing act. With no face, no mouth, no torso, I look down at her legs. I’m a leg man and hers were great. It’s too late for voyeurism. We could melt out here and no one would find the remains of our lives.

“I’m a voyeur when it comes to religion and God. It’s better to pretend than actually believe,” I say. The flaw lies not with the stars but with our emptiness.

“I don’t believe in anything,” she says. “But where are you, lost in the sunlight?

Where’s the rest of you?”

I don’t see her pupils. I shade my head with my hand and her body diminishes to a puddle.

I can’t tell whether I speak to myself, the abyss, or to her.

“I loathed your bodily form,” I lie.

I’m another puddle on the grass beneath the bench.

“I bet you wonder why I agreed to this non-date,” she says. It ain’t because she’s a easy lay, sexism has been purged completely. “Sex is useless.”

Our insubstantial selves wouldn’t hold the glands, organs and fluids needed.

“How did you contract herpes?” I say. Gagging, I refrain from barfing. “My girlfriend tricked on the side.”

“And your herpes from her,” she says. She begins to annoy me. “Once I visited a bisexual and she gave it to me.”

“Yes. My girlfriend was bisexual.”

“Did she have a ‘Touch Me’ green tattoo on her belly?” she asks. We’ve touched bases, so to speak. I assent.

We’re past being ethereal; terra incognita more apt.

We’re blanks shot from a gun.

© 2013 George Sparling

George Sparling likes slow baseball games, red beans and quinoa, nightmares, fast flowing rivers, Ravi Shankar, death metal, Tom Waits, wet mornings, nostalgia, rooming houses, cold nights, docks, The Moby Dick Cosmic Ocean, mania, unwarranted lofty thoughts, death metal, Dennis Cooper, depressing novels, art brut, and the odor of eucalyptus trees.

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