alittlepoison

There is the memory of someone else’s smile. The smile is the face of a girl from two summers ago. The body is clutching at straws though, throwing anything at the soul it thinks will get a reaction.

-I’m not going to break your heart.

The fingers start to tap the carpet. It’s spasm. In the groin, the heart, the arteries deep in the wrists, the soul has coiled the invisible roots for many decades. Decades of healthy creeping ivy growing on salt-dry plaster. The soul levers itself on the chest. The heart swells with the separating force. The fingers swish and the legs convulse. Then the soul snaps from the body. An umbilical snap. The soul stands up and brushes crumbs of matter from its lapels.

-Don’t give me those dead puppy dog eyes.

The body of course gives no reply. But for a second the soul stares at the face, at those two wet open eyes. The body wants reconciliation.

-I’ll be back before too long.

And the soul leaps out of the single glazed windows, down past four stories of dilapidated living onto the dashed white line of the silent road. It glides along this line, away.

The body holds the drink, the impurities, it can’t move. There’s television noise, there’s the sodium yellow shapes of streetlights on the ceiling. Is there now a connection with the soul? Does it know that now the soul passes through walls, now it passes out of the city, now it moves over marshes, now over moonlit reservoirs, now through mounds of earth and stone? No, all the body is aware of is the fingertips resting on the carpet and what small circle of life the eyes can see.

The soul contemplates the distance between itself and the swirling magma below. Pressure, soil, fossil, bone, I’m a long way from home. It’s easy enough to return: the soul knows the address. The soul will spring up through the floorboards. Or, better, out of eyeshot, and, back through the window - and then lie down next to the body like a sheepish drunk.