Riverweed
There’s a story in this series of vomit stains on the pavement. The first attack must have been strong and short, leaving long radial streaks on the flagstones. The second splash is smaller. Whoever left it, they must have thought the worst was behind them. The last one is an unrestrained cacophony of colours and textures. As if its painter held on to the corner while a jet of sick erupted from their body, hit the pavement and cascaded over the curb onto the asphalt.
You picture a river. Similar to the one E and you used to go to before she moved to another city, before you moved to another city – but wilder, louder and more beckoning. Its banks flanked by weeping willows and bristling with reeds, its heart the blackest maelstrom. The swoosh reminds you of the patter of his urine against the floorboards in the middle of the living room, in the middle of the night. The smell is of river sludge and frail waterweeds and empty snail shells. You wonder if a person retains their sense of smell underwater.
The bruises on the thirty-year-old man’s skin tell a story of their own. The oldest have wilted into soft yellows, the newer ones bloom with purples and blues. Some are mere seeds awaiting their time to blossom: the faint knuckle-shaped stains under the collarbone, the ghost-like powder pink mark around the forearm. Loud snoring and the stench of vodka come from the adjacent room. A burly fortyish man lies half-buried under a duvet, his underwear damp with urine, bits of vomit glistening in his beard.
The rippling surface hypnotises you. You don’t even notice the fluffy Pomerania-shaped clouds above your head, feel the vibrations of ringed worms and insects under your bare feet. If E were here, she would drag you to safety as she has tried to do with Silesian stubbornness in her many annoying phone calls. Once you dip your toe in the cold bottle green, you remember the psychobabble she threw at you, her hair full of swirls and eddies, in that blue café overlooking the river. The machine-gun series of “codependencies” and “over‑responsibilities” bounced off your skin as you calmly watched the waters roll.
All the fingerprints on the mirror won’t shut up either. The medicine cabinet filled with prescription vials (take the pills, take the pills) reflects the empty white bathroom, superimposed with greasy impressions of papillary lines. Each print makes one think of a small lake, brought to life by the hesitant touch of a finger (take the pills, take the pills), the oily isobaths stepping down to the bottom.
Waist deep in the water, you imagine you’ll feel like a blood cell pushed by the turbulent plasma, a joyride up the aorta, if blood cells felt anything at all. Part of you, larger with each second, longs for this not feeling, this not having to lie in bed pretending you’re asleep and wait until the click of the lock betrays the level of his drunkenness. Another part recalls that June night when he and you sneaked onto the roof of your tower block and kissed for all of the galaxy to witness.
Words turned into electricity and back into words again don’t leave much room for interpretation. The bruised man sits in seaweed-patterned briefs on a kitchen chair and whispers into a phone. When he listens, words seem to fall out from the speaker and stick to the stuffy air, forming a constellation: “you” is just lightyears away from “have to”, but “escape” lies at the edge of the universe.
Your head and the rest of your body now belong to two different worlds, cut at the neck by the aqueous boundary. Paralysed, you wait for the viscous current to help you off the slippery stones.
The exuberant kelp of a vomit stain is now sliced through by two wobbly lines, as if left by small wheels. Could it have been the bruised thirty-year-old’s suitcase? The wheel trails vanish in the middle of the street. It cannot be ruled out that the battered man, if indeed it was him, became a Slavic god by the name of Diazepamir (his many arms forever toasting shots of rye vodka, lungs choked with catkins), then soared into the night sky (countless hands plucking tenements, tearing off asphalt) and disappeared in a flash (take the streets, take the streets) where there is no fear and there is no death and everything is light.
Originally published in BULL #9: The LGBTQ Issue (2020)