Bed Of Clams

There is a parallel world of conversation that never ventures past our lips. The dialogue consists of taboos of interaction that would only clamber off our dry tongues with an awkward clang; confronting lumps in our throats that we swallow back for fear of breaching a social boundary line etched by formality. Some truths are better not dealt with frankly, and frankly, better left unsaid.

So he watches. Glances. Stares. His sensitive scalpel eyes gravitate to her with addicted appreciation, flick away again, slide back for more; detecting her barely evident subtleties with deft perception. The neglected fall of hair that begs to be brushed back. The sharp gasp under her breath as she bumps what must be an injured thigh against the corner of the desk. The customary lift of her shadowed eyes to the window. The yawns that look like silent screams.

Her spirit is cursed with the beauty of a black rose among thorns. He knows she is like him, a different shape than the others. Something in her makeup had perverted the standard form when she was cast. Or perhaps after she had set, parts of her had eroded and crumbled until she no longer resembled their peers. It doesn’t really matter how she is this way. Just that she is, and her imperfection is the perfect shape for his.  

He notices her decline over the months, and sees the despondence of death in her eyes first. Any light that had once sustained her has faded to faint embers. Now she haunts the halls like a ghost that seems to appear only to him; subsisting like a wisp of breath that separates a person and a cadaver. A comatose soul in a beating heart, dying inside a shell of functioning flesh. He wonders whether she is half-awake or half-asleep.

Her need grows graver by the day, and he is tortured by its magnetism. He craves sating her, and dreams impossible scenarios in which it is safe to force apart his lips and rasp his observations. He imagines the taste of her tears, their warmth on his fingertips; her clinging to him.  

It aches to think these thoughts; but he is powerless to stop the viral augmentation of such bittersweet tantalisations. They roam his mind at will, leaving him ill, restless and wretched. He despises her. Almost. He hates how she has wound her way into his system, infecting him, pervading his thoughts. He wishes he had never set eyes on her, or that she was just the standard shape. But she is not to blame. Someone has to love her.

As always, his jaw remains clamped shut, bolted with fear and rusted with disuse. Right up until her slit wrists are broadcast on the local news, where they mispronounce her surname when adding it to the casualty list of societal apathy.

“… Those of us who can do something, must do something …” He hears it on the television while he gazes blankly at the screen, struck numb and somehow more alone than he thought he had been. The line strikes out at him with sour resonance, and sinks like lead into the pit of his paralysed stomach.
Was he responsible for her solitude?
He let her be sick.
He killed her.

He is found on her grave, drained by the vermilion stain of his repentance.