In Their Palms

His wife in her palm held a gathering of pills long and slim and brightly colored. Her hand sweat around them and they drank themselves into her skin. And she held them up to him as he walked through the halls. And he looked away. Disgusted. And he grew tired and sick and sank into the floor and dreamt.

She was there.

The girl in the black sweater.

Because she was always there.

And she was lounging and long. And she was smiling again. And her hand was palm up too and in it was paint bright and blue and deep.

She turned to him and winked and he stirred and the air was unmoving again. The air was upturned again. And she couldn’t wink because she couldn’t control herself that way. She was apart from herself. She was a mind in a skin that couldn’t come to terms with itself. And so she winked and sighed and beckoned him to the floor.

And he went.

She held her palm to the sky and the ceiling and smiled and slept and pierced him with her lashes. And she smiled. And his sun shifted in its sky. And she laughed and raised her chin. And her eyes turned up and closed. And he broke. He was broken and unfixable. He was shattered and disproved. He was lank and lean and swept. And her laugh was a song. And the tune was melodic and bright. It rose and mixed with clouds. It swam and became an ocean. It burned and became the world on fire. It pushed and gutted the universe.

She wanted him to dip his finger in. She asked him to dip his finger into the blue that was cradled and lithe in her palm.

And he did.

The color stretched and pooled as his finger went down and down and down. And he should have stopped but he couldn’t. He couldn’t stop himself. And she laughed again as his finger pressed on her swimming palm and brought her hand lower by millimeters. And he laughed back and smiled at her with his eyes as best he could. Because he was in love and loving this and cursed by this kind of deep and sordid blue that was in a girl’s palm and sun-spent and tortured and resting on the edge of his life.

A bead and a string and a yarn of color trickled from his finger down her hand. Down the meat of her thumb. Draining down her wrist. Hiding itself up her sleeve. Inside the sleeve of that curved and perfect black sweater. And he tried to catch the spill as it led him down her body but he couldn’t. He was slow. He was late. He was old and she was young. He was a man and she was a girl. He was a bag of time and confusion and she was bright and beautiful and boundless. He was too something something something and she was more. She was much more. She was something something something too.

But he took his finger anyway and laughed anyway and traced the blue on a wall of white and meaningless bold living. And he went back and back and back taking fingers and thumbs and handfuls of blue and deepening treachery and painted the walls in his head.

It was a long and liquid white hall bellowing wooden feet footfalls and smelling of gentle green and the seams of perfectly loose denim hugging back and forth across swaying hips walking away and smiling as they did.

Then he was finished. And she was laying there and looking at him and smiling through him. And the wall was sheer blue and distinct. Nothing like the white it had been. And the hole in his insides was sharpening and bright but he was lacing fingers and brimming with some new type of boyhood longing and she was just lying there. Her palms blue and senseless.

So he painted her.

He started with her nose dabbing one single dot there. A placed and fit mark. And then it was her cheeks and her jaw line and her neck. And she retaliated with handfuls of streaking playfulness that traced his sandpaper cheeks and pudding eyes and receding and lined forehead. They bundled and tumbled and tore at each other with tickles and hands on wrists and blue painting them handfuls by inches.

They were a love story and an affair and an impossibility and an invisibility. They were.

He was a kite and she was a tree stretching branches that caught him and tore him and broke him and brought him down when he should be flying.

But she was the wind too dragging him and pushing him and lifting him when he couldn’t make it from the ground below.

And they ended up in blue shambles laughing like lilting. Shelled and debunked.

And he woke to the light of a still white wall and an up-tilted palm holding stains of pills begging water and tears. And his daughter coughed a dry shrill of a cough and sputtered words out to him and then fell asleep again.

And the TV blared and honed in.

He wanted to paint her out but he couldn’t. And he wished that this palm upturned with pills ready to spill would cut itself at the wrist and be done with it.

But that was an imagination.

An invisibility.

An affair.

And he had to render them. Together. And make the girl in the black sweater a trick to the slitting wrists and the tight corners of white hallways and wooden floors.

Because he could close his eyes and see her again and feel her laughing beneath him and trembling with his own breath and staring green eyes into his brown ones and killing him a smile and a breath and a touch of fingers on fingers one at a time.

And he loved it.