Myriad Reflections. Shastri Akella

The Kiss


She cradles the tube roses in her arm. The white petals of the flowers are smudged brown. But didn't Neil say that wilting flowers release the most intoxicating fragrance?

She wears her gray fur coat. It has acquired the musty odor of neglect that belongs to her room. She doesn't notice. She is in a hurry to hold the flowers again. Once they are perched on her forearms, she looks for her house keys. On the dressing table: amidst talcum powder, jujube lipstick, eye liner, foundation, and a dried-up kohl. In the washroom: on the windowsill above the commode, between a four-week old
newspaper and dog-eared paperbacks.

A fleck of spittle smears her lips. Her eyebrows crowd her forehead. She looks on her bed: under pillows, damp and smelling of the room.

Oh what will one find in her room anyway? Expired make-up and tangled sheets? She smirks at her need to secure her possessions, steps out onto the cobbled street, and draws the door shut, recklessly deciding to leave it unbolted.

She walks with a forward stoop, the posture her body assumes when she is at ease. Irish winters are inhospitable. The frigid caress of the winds leaves even the sturdy birch with brittle branches. But at least tourist season is over. No more Asians and Brits scampering on the streets in clutters of brown and white skins, clutching Celtic crosses or porcelain dolls and glossy tickets to Aran islands. It is once
again the Galway of the townspeople.

She takes the shortcut through Prospect Cemetery. She likes the squeal that accompanies the opening of the cemetery gate; a song for the living, she fancies, a compensation for the dirges sung in their honor, that they will never savor. The tombstones seem like hands wanting to wave, but frozen, partly by the weather, mostly by the cold corpse below. A lone willow rises amidst the graves, stripped of
flower and leaf. Was it under this tree that he kissed her? She stops beneath its gnarled branches. Yes. It was here. He shoved her against the bark and pressed his mouth against hers. When he withdrew, he found her eyes were glassy, cold as the coldness she cursed his lips to. He wiped his cherry lips, as though to rid them of a stain.

He arrived at her doorstep that night. Tormented by the aborted kiss. He felt the familiar privacy of her room would coax her into responding. She lay below him, stoic as the naked cadavers that eceived a ritualistic bath of rosemary and mint in the days of the Gaelic.

His body ached with a passion whetted but not satiated. He left, crimson with humiliation. How was she to tell him? That she was tormented by the hallucination of a serpent entering the mouth of a canary and watering down its sweet song to a wispy caveat? Did you know Neil, she says bitterly to the tree, this chimera haunted me from the time I turned six, from the time Uncle, mother's brother, began living with us, doing more than helping mother accept her widowhood? A tear froze on its way down her cheek. Her eyes trembled. She placed a tentative finger on the tree.

The scar was still there. Left on her wrist by the ropes that bound her to the iron bed. A bed that hundreds slept on, schizophrenics, manic depressives, people called mad for lack of a fancy phrase to attach to their lunacy. What was the nomenclature attached to her act of consuming forty sleeping pills after Neil dumped her? Without
racking her brain she summons the name. Suicidal extreme.

The nurse who injected tranquilizers into her veins, cast sympathetic looks at
the red spots that cropped up on her face. It was a reaction to the strong dosage, administered to banish her callow acts of heroism. She had dragged the iron cot with her wrists, hoping to raise the shutters and jump into her liberty. They found her kicking at iron flanges, rusted, refusing to budge.

But they managed to cow her masochistic pining. As a bonus for spending ten numb months in a deserted, whitewashed room, her delusion was cured. She may not be as free as Uncle who lay in one of the graves behind. Still. She can offer Neil a
body that is willing to take him in, lubricate him, satisfy his biological hunger.

She walks past the revolving gates, crosses the garage Neil owns. There it is. His house of adobe bricks and slate roof. Surrounded by acacias. With a feel of the woods.

The main door is left ajar. Was Neil too a man of few possessions, so that anyone trespassing his house will walk out, robbed of their spirit to thieve? She turns scrutinizing eyes on his garage. Brown jeeps, used to lug tourists around Aran Islands, stood in a row; their owners parked them and left for their hometowns to celebrate Christmas. They pay him a handsome parking rent. He's also kept their
jeeps in smooth condition, inhibiting possibilities of breakdown during peak season. They're Craig now.

She walks in. The house carries the smell of beacon. He is away, perhaps to shop for groceries? She starts stripping. She leave her corset intact, so his fingers can relish opening it. She lies on his bed, waiting for her prey, waiting to become his prey.

And then she sees him. First she is amused. She thinks he is standing with his head on the ceiling.

Then, tube roses in her arms, she rises and kisses his lips.

The blue lips of death.