Open Box

She fiddles with the white dress and it’s a bit too short and the scarf just falling around her shoulders to make it lest revealing gives her the feel that she might be young indeed, but then her hair would be short, but then she looks young, she looks like a child forced into life, just taken out of the insides with all the shells broken and all senses are given.

She eats a few raspberries and it’s early spring, but she wears that dress, even if it has a black outer layer, I still just see the white, maybe to see some irony with the awaiting wedding we all avoid and how she just wonders around the house, trying to get mascara right for the first time in years and I just watch the girl struggle, sometimes just looking up.

I feed her a raspberry, she opens her mouth to swallow.

“What do you want to do today?” I ask her, washing my hands off the raspberry with her tongue on my finger, I lure it out and her eyes just hold my gaze stronger.

“Nothing.” And her nothing hangs in the air as she washes more raspberries and the whole weight of groceries lately is just raspberries, maybe because it’s the only fruit she doesn’t see at the Hince’s.

“Why raspberry, Alison? Why did you stop the oranges for instance.” I don’t say anything else aloud, but then our conversations are held in silence as if every phrase we say is a Rubik’s cube solution away.

She just raises the hem of the dress a bit, maybe for all the raspberries to fall upon or maybe to trickle upon her feet as if they may be blood sometime soon or maybe she’ll hold the wounds until the wedding, but I could see Kate with her fourteen thousand nymphets and all the humans running around that force and myself sitting close to Alison and us just staring ahead, in time, waiting and guessing the flavor of the cake.

I got her cake for the morning, she still had the dress.

“I got you cake.” I say and I slice it.

“It’s not my birthday and there is no special occasion.” We barely speak our sentences dry and cutting the air so that it would bleed carbon dioxide and I open the milk.

She touches the cake and then she goes back to bed.

“What do you want to do at the wedding?” I ask her as she comes to the kitchen, the same dress maybe she wants a death on Kate as she wear will white and she is the black strangling the lower parts of the dress and Alison presses herself harder, cutting a cereal pack in half. “Look-”

There’s nothing I can do.

“What can I do?” And she shakes the remaining Corn Flakes onto the kitchen rugs and it feels like a road and a pavement with Alison standing, her arms spread out, waiting for a car and flynching until it knocks her out and Jamie would co-

And then I’d take the black fabric just to cover the groom in his grave.

I’d strangle him as he would wait and Alison would rub her hands against the jeans, the sweat too demanding to soak in rather than fall, as she is in a net and everyone knows, what happens once the cake Kate is eaten.

I open all the windows and Alison smokes.

“She’d fucking choke on herself.” Alison mumbles softly, not causing her death, but just showing a maybe one of two dresses more on herself and she’ll twirl like a fairy in a box which Jamie holds and all the fucking keys are his, even if I hold the box tight in my hands.

I stare at her.

I may kiss the box.

But I’ll never reach the fairy, which I may have in my hands.

I can just press my mouth to the keyhole and give her all the air, with her in the dark and without music, not knowing where the oxygen is coming from.

So I feed her grapes in the morning, something she and Jamie used to it.

I move the couch to the kitchen, you can see the sun from there, so she lies there for the next few days.

And the fairy ties my tie on the day of the wedding and the dress is gone but to be back in the evening, maybe I’ll ask Jamie for a key. But he’ll just smile and like vandalizing some wall on the street, he won’t do anything and Alison will just chain smoke with me wondering if I should just take a hammer and bang on the box.

The world will collapse, but the fairy might just get out without music, so I sit to chain smoke with her, as we watch the walks of the devil being held today and we are putting up the decorations as the devil has all the keys, that once either I smoked too much or a joint was passed, I recalled taking Jamie’s wallet out of some other things laying around.

I played the waller against my lips, as I saw all the little photo booth photos of him and Alison, all of them.

The wallet just had one credit card with all the photo booth photos they have ever taken together and that’s where all the weight was and where all the keys go, so after taking a few in my mouth and biting through their happy miserable faces, a few were gone and I was among a pile of some distorted Kills love life.

I think Jamie saw me and just sat besides me.

I didn’t know where Alison was.

But then we both don’t know what happens to an open box if the music and soul is taken away from it.

cover me in varnish from head to toe