I used to make out with the household iron. I’d turn it on to Silks and, as it started up, start the fantasy. I’d close my eyes, stick out my tongue, write a wet S, mash it down close to the metal, kiss it hard, try to surprise it, until it got too hot. My lips and tongue, now, are tough, vinyl, and taste is a pale gray thing, a fuzzy tape that I struggle to transcribe. My eyelashes all too often, then, dropped on the homework papers as I tried to toil over what I didn’t care about.
The tip of my nose was red, in those years, a perpetual sore that the cold sent cutlery through. I was always cupping it. It was crazy in those days, how I was, and it had to do with the most obvious thing, a lack of supervision. And a serious lust that needed to be demonstrated. A love for games that test endurance.
What did you make out with as a child? I met a girl who lived in a factory town that had converted well before her birth into one of those fifties memorabilia villages with amenities, very well-heeled and all of that. The single thing still factory about the town was a train that went right across it, through Main Avenue with its face lift, its designer stores done down in a style of old-school shops circa soda jerks, Burberry and Coach trying their hand at awnings and aprons.
The train made no official stop but sometimes did anyway, just at the area’s edge, just where you could see the lawn mower’s last line. Steam hovered like a spell over the maintained grass. She ran to the old relic and soaked it up. She parted her knees around a part of the engine. She embraced it. She could feel it go soft in her arms, not melted, but flesh-filling. She grabbed different parts of it, opened her mouth and applied her tongue and moaned and meant it.
All of the food, all of the Au Bon Pain and shit like that, tasted like oil for years. A doctor magnified black crystals in her taste buds so she could view the damage—tiny spinning things, still kinetic after all these years, they gathered even sugar with centripetal force into the oily darkness. She marvels now, in bohemian cafes, that the train was her first big black boyfriend. Not that I’ve known her to have others. All I know is she powders her crotch with cardamom under the black light in the bathroom back there.
We all dated objects from time to time as children. What did you date? What object did you meet up with when your parents weren’t around? I knew a boy who would turn on the blender to Chop and kiss around the outside of it. He enjoyed those vibrations. He has a weak heart now because of the emergency of ingesting too much detergent residue. It tried to wash out his innermost self, like nuns, but chemical, an actual one. When his parents came home from the credit union they found him in a daze, on a kitchen chair, a Balthusian boy (as if that were possible), sprawled as though lounging, but off, exposure pocked, and then, a blood-pinkened foam that rushed from his mouth as though he were a machine for a small rave. He tells the story now in his green apron, making, of all things, those coffee smoothies we all love.
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