Читать книгу Feebleminded - Ariana Harwicz - Страница 6

My mum and the guy grab each other by the neck and rub against the slippery concrete floor. The guy comes inside my mum looking skyward and so it all begins. Let’s put a microscope to my shapeless body on this afternoon thick with slow flies. People could hang it in the living room like an abstract painting. This is when the hot trees appear with their clammy leaves, and I hide from her. I hear her cry out. I’m tramping around on the hill, but where am I going. For now there’s just the noise of the wind at the top and snatches of song. For now the mysticism lasts and there are ants on my arm. If you like living in a dream so much why don’t you stay there, she grumbles, and shuts herself away. Without her, everything is smoke. This feverish childhood memory in a burnt-out car always comes back to me. My mother staring straight ahead, my mother on the back of my neck like a hard-shelled insect. My mother’s gaze while she smokes on the train’s torn fake-leather seat. Me, wide awake in the locked car, unable to speak, the neighbours calling the police. I move around tamely, where is he now. I crouch to kiss the ground. How is this possible: a relentless, niggling desire, the idiot cousin who comes to interrupt our al-fresco breakfasts of cream croissants and ends up throwing himself off the balcony. The idiot cousin who touches his nose and says nose. This epileptic desire, this deformed desire, a drooling lustful crip who needs two people to lift him and carry him like a cart so he can fuck on the soft mattress. And yet he’s got nothing else to do but fuck me, but want me from his chair. And yet the clear viscous halo on the mattress is proof that I’m alive. I get my finger ready but I overthink and faint. The thought of desire on top of desire itself leaves me unhinged, a parasite with eye bags down to my neck. Where are you, Mum, I’m sick of this. I’ve been on my feet working for the past nine hours, the staff need a break, you know. My mum, warm, very warm, hot and now she’s burnt. If she saw me like this she’d get a fright, the hatred I give off is something else. If you want to live in your dreams, suit yourself. She pokes her head out of her mousehole to insult me.