untitled (not given to kissing)
Boyle’s mother wouldn’t let Bill into the house because she thought he was sinister. Something about his lips and their thinness. Something about the dark sparkle of his eyes. Something about the way those eyes would rake over her son, pausing briefly just south of his middle, and she knew what that meant, had watched countless men look similarly at her in her youth, but also even now, because men don’t care, some men don’t care, it’s not about sex at all, is it? It’s a gaze that pierces.
There’s a precision, a needle slipping through skin and fat into muscle or vein, and there’s an imprecision as well, the flesh torn, the vein blown . . .
They say atoms cannot touch each other, but everything is made of . . .
I think of an axe splitting a skull—no different than the needle, really, and no less precise—and one could easily think of it as flesh and bone simply moving out of the metal wedges’ way.
He had forced her atoms to rearrange themselves to accommodate his atoms. This forcible rearrangement gave the impression of touch. Enough so that she was bruised and bloody after. She suddenly felt her hand on the doorknob, and Bill’s dark gaze moving behind her into the house. She cleared her throat and repeated that he was not welcome, that young Boyle was free to do as he wished outside of her home, etc. And then she closed the door.
Bill was a very formal man, not given to kissing people, but he was vulnerable in death.