3
She pushes me down by the shoulders and kisses my chest, pulling my tunic farther apart and unbuckling my pants.
Amm sits upright and pulls her shirt off over her head and then presses her breasts against me.
She’s more feral when she turns to pleasing herself.
When I fall asleep it’s filled with baseless thoughts I will never remember and she snores softly, her flesh bare and pale blue in the moonlight.
..9.45a.m.
Her features are softer in the day, her skin a soft bronze and the muscles of her stomach twitch every so often as she breathes. The beautiful arch of her nose is pressed against a pillow and she lays on her stomach, her left leg, which is jackknifed beside her, and the rest of her left side is naked to me as I warm tea at the stove I keep burning low because of the already natural heat of the day.
I sit and write the passage you see now on a small wooden table polished to a generic shine, I couldn’t even come close to naming the grain of the wood. The sunlight makes her hair a healthy gold and it ripples like water when she yawns and stretches in bed.
Amm raises and sits with her legs folded beneath her, the sheet folded forgotten around her ass. She moves with subconscious grace and her nudity is an afterthought but she looks at me mid-yawn and smiles, her hands in fists above her head.
Her head cocked to one side and her teeth flashing white my vision tilts and skews, doubles and reels and in my unusual vertigo her 3a.m. counterpart overlays her daytime persona then the sunlight catches my eye. When I look back to her she is the beautiful, naked daytime Amm, her eye brows furrowed in concern.
“Hey,” she says simply, stepping off the bed and sidling to me. “You okay? Were you injured last night?”
I wonder for the thousandth time how much she remembers of the night life and the jobs we pull but we never talk about the death and violence of the darker hours. The time I tried, the haunted look in her eyes was enough to make me regret the words.
“Yeah, no, the sun got in my eyes for a second, that’s all.” For her own good I’ve learned to lie to her. I shrug and put my arm around her, squeezing her hip in my hand and rest my head on her stomach. I feel the urge to hide my writing but she has never looked at my writing nor do I believe she feels the urge to break confidence now.
Her hands feel so good combing through what little hair I haven’t shaved off. “Can we go to Freeman’s today?” The market, somehow I would rather face the brutal gangs of the night life than go shopping but I nod my head and kiss her firm stomach and move my hands down around her legs and pull her to straddle me over my lap.
She kisses me and her hands run over my head again but her touch contains a hint of lust and possession that her night time persona always lacks. Amm thrusts her hips against me and I fight my pants down with her cooing into my ear and her nipples hard, rubbing my chest through my shirt.
Reaching down she takes me in her hand and…
..11.17a.m.
There’s a dead bird marring the perfect horticulture median in the center of the Freeman market. It’s some sort of red bird, like a cardinal but the black stripes over its back make it unrecognizable to me in my ignorance. I look away and scan the closest merchant stalls finding Amm happily talking to a lady who weaves beads into paintings. Somehow I know one of these awful works of art is going to end up on my wall.
She winks at me slyly as she ends her conversation with the bead lady and visits the neighboring stall to look at gracefully plain silver and gold rings that I can barely see in their displays at this distance. Two younger girls cut off my view as they step up to view the same wares and I look through the crowd, enjoying the odd peace of the crowd.
It may sound odd but in my work crowds tend to be filled with brass knuckles and snarled words – but these are day time citizens.
I was deciding to join Amm to see what she found so interesting about these stalls though I knew it had to be something ingrained in a woman when the hair on my neck stood on end and I thought I could feel the air rushing past me.
Colors blend and blur and I turn to find the jewelry stand leaning haphazardly toward the next stall over. Amm stands, her hair held in a breeze that I don’t feel and one of the young girls that had recently joined her in shopping is pinned her Amm’s athletic body.
The young girl struggles to no avail and my entire body goes cold because I’m looking at Amm’s back and the tips of her hair have suddenly gone a liquid, creeping black that has already begun the climb to her head.
I gulp down a painful mouthful of bile and sprint for the jeweler’s stall but Amm speaks and her words are terror embodied and she raises her hand like a scythe above the young girl.
I can hear my heartbeat and in my ears and my lips are dry, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.
And time seems to stand still…..