Amory
Her friend persuaded her to try it, just for a laugh. So she snipped the last half-millimetre from her fringe and glued it sparingly to her upper lip. Then she pinioned her scalp with strict hairpins, until she could fit a beret on. She didn’t have big breasts in any case, so a sports bra and a generous shirt with ruffles disguised them effectively enough. To finish, she stuck a pair of socks down her trousers, sighed, took one last slurp of cheap merlot, and walked out.
*
The night blurred past in a tangle of limbs, lights and cocktails. She fooled a few people, which made her feel better. Someone she’d never met before dragged her into the blue-hued loo and scribbled sideburns onto her with eyeliner. A woman left a pink leech-suck of lipstick on her collar. She swam through dry ice and found a piece of taxi-flotsam to float home on.
As she staggered through her front door after stabbing ineffectually at the keyhole for five minutes, she caught a flicker in her peripheral vision. Fuzzy-brained, she thought it was a face at a window; then she realised that it was the mirror over her dressing table. She waded toward it. Arms resting on the edge of the table, she leaned down and pushed out her tongue.
In the glass, she saw a drink-ravaged young man raspberry back at her.
She wheeled around and fell into bed.
*
He was still there the next morning, scruffle-haired and bleary. She nodded to him as she pottered around the room, head bowed under the heavy hangover. Politely, he nodded back. By the time she went into the bathroom, stripped off and had a shower, he’d disappeared. With care, she inspected the blue sagging under her eyes and the pebble texture of her tongue.
*
Once the hangover left, she half-remembered him as a series of impressions; soft skin, wide eyes and fur. She couldn’t quite remember where she’d met him; was it at the bar or the club? A feeling of loss, like winter fog, whispered through her belly. As the week wore on, she daydreamed at the office, twiddling a pencil between finger and thumb. She wanted to remember his name. She searched her phone for new numbers, but there were none. She decided to re-create the night in order to jog her booze-saturated memory.
This is silly, she told herself, but she wouldn’t listen.
To see just how silly it was, she hid in her bathroom and reassembled her travesty.
There he was again, smiling faintly at her through the glass. The mist went away.
Hi, she said, all shy. His lips moved too, but she couldn’t hear him for the ice. Still, she had the feeling that he understood. She said: what is your name? He replied before she finished the sentence, and she lip-read: my name is Amory.
They talked silently for hours.
*
The next day she dressed up again and didn’t go in to work. Sometimes they talked, and she told him about her boyfriends (all hairy and sexually insensitive) and he nodded and smiled. Other times she just studied him. He looked sweet and young, and his oakbrown eyes understood. The phone rang a few times, but she ignored it.
*
The following morning she couldn’t stand the jag in her stomach when she saw herself in the mirror. She was dressed before she cleaned her teeth, kneeling before breakfast. The dressing table was shoved out of the way so she could reveal the full length of the glass. He smiled at her, joy shining from every pore. She unplugged the phone.
This is my life so far, she said.
*
When she leaned in to kiss him, (desire driven by swooping angles, the flash of carved flesh at the clavicle) her lips met cold. Still she pressed her tongue against it, pleased to see him reciprocate. His hand met hers, pawing ineffectually like a puzzled pet at the barrier between them.
*
She sat alongside so that she could study his quarter-profile, long bones, shapely nostrils and the fine brown filigree of his eyebrow hair. Fingers slid down her pants, pinching and rubbing at bits of moist flesh. She couldn’t see his hands beneath the wooden frame of the glass. She winked and he winked back, co-conspirators. He was as hungry for her as she was for him.
*
When she kissed him standing up, her bound breasts pushing against the glass (but really boring into his chest, press, press) she pulled away and was gratified to see the outline of an erection tenting his trousers.
*
Light flickered through the translucent blinds, thin dawn blue, midday yellow, the occasional thin white of a clouded day, then dusk and twilight and orange streetlamps and car headlamps. Fascinated, she studied the play of rays over his sculpted temples, the strands of hair that glimmered colour-change like wire, the shadow of his nose as it stretched, circling from eight to one o’clock.
*
Amory wasn’t eating. She worried about him savagely, fear stretching tight over her just as his skin stretched tight over his skeleton. He just sat and stared at her with mute, starving need. He was running grey and ragged.
*
Stay there, she said, and went over to the dressing table. Her knees cracked painfully and her muscles were agonising, but she didn’t notice the nothing in her stomach anymore. She could barely lift the flower pot, but the weight of soil and ceramic might be enough shatter the prison barrier and save him. The dead orchid wobbled, root-loose.
She hefted it overarm, but just before she released, she paused and thought: what if this destroys him? Cracks him with the glass? Her arm sagged and she let the pot fall. It scattered dirt.
No? she asked.
He shook his head in a movement that was barely perceptible.
No.
*
I love you, she said. He mouthed back: I love you.
Rhian Waller is a graduate of an English Literature and Creative Writing BA, and is about to begin a Postgrad doctorate in Creative and Critical writing. She has been producing stories of various quality since she was five, and has managed to publish a handful of poems. She would very much like to publish some more.