Honey

Dear Reader, Dear R,

Here is a bit of flash fiction I wrote. Don't judge me too harshly on it.

Oh, and try listening to this song while you read:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-xHtjngCeM

 --S

Honey

It began with the bird. As much as he’d wanted to believe that it started so many years later. In the deepest fissures of his mind he knew: It began with the bird. A pigeon, common, and dirty. Nothing special. He thought of it as he looked at the woman, laying sprawled on his mattress. He reached out, and placed one cool hand on her thigh. He remembered the way the bird had struggled, shivered beneath his perfect hands. He wondered if the woman would shiver.

His mother had said he had the hands of a pianist, an artist. Long, slender, and the perfect outline of blue veins just beneath his pale skin. She, his mother, would take one of his hands in hers, and kiss it. “Beautiful.” She’d whisper, with a voice dripping like honey.

Three days before the bird, he’d found his mother with slit wrists in the bathtub, and a note saying that she was sorry. His aunt had come to stay with him. His mother’s awful older sister, reeking of cigarettes and perfume. She was the one who had found the bird. It had flown down the chimney, and was trapped behind the doors of the cold, wood stove. She instructed him to catch it, take it outside, and set it free. He’d stood in the hallway, stroking one long finger over the brown corduroy of his pant leg, as she had repeated her request, demanded that he take the bird away. The women he picked were never demanding. They were plain, like the pigeon had been.

He’d knelt in the gravel and dust, near the train tracks behind the house. Just beyond a row of trees that blocked the view from the kitchen window. He’d delicately twisted the bird’s neck from side to side, and then just far enough in the wrong direction, until, with one delicate snap it’s distressed chirping had stopped, and it had gone still. He tore it’s wings off, ripped at them with raw fingernails, until the bird oozed red. It had laid limply then, on the gravel like a crippled toy, and as he’d stared, he had felt the honey word form in his mouth, had tasted it on his tongue.

The woman’s wrists were bound, but she was struggling now, like the bird had. His fingers itched for her throat. Her eyes bulged behind the thin blindfold. His knuckles were white. He tasted honey. “Beautiful.” He whispered.