Caught Drowning

First I notice her hair: dark and longer than any girl I've met, pulled back in a high ponytail and still past her waist. Since I'm following the line of her hair, I see her hips next, round and smooth like a bright red apple, picked fresh and rubbed against t-shirts, ready for biting. Attached there and growing like slender trunks from her hemline are two long, smooth legs. She smells like green grass and old wood.

We exchange the normal pleasantries. She is subtle and graceful; demure and polite. She speaks like an orchestra, her tones long and smooth, but there's a hiss there, like steam from a radiator. It works for her, and I've never done this before.

She laughs at that, a sound like a sour note that tugs somewhere at my stomach. "Exotic," I say; and she laughs at that too.

I realize she's waiting for a sign, so I imagine a flare between my lips and blow it out, a slow exhale. I wobble in the breath, but she catches me with her eyes. Black eyes, I notice, all the way through, but somehow I can still see the dilation of her pupils. "We should go…" I offer.

She smiles, teeth stretching out like piano keys but with no spaces between, straight up and ready to be played. Something slow, perhaps; or something jazzy. I'm feeling a swing number pushing across my tongue.

Her apartment is simple. One window sandwiched between a brick wall and a broken window. No neighbors to hear us. I shift my weight as she unlocks the door. The inside is plain like the outside. Simple, like an unmolested bar of dark chocolate. Her carpet is black, and her bed is made.

I'm surprised when my phone vibrates in my pocket. I glance at it out of habit, and my wife's picture looks at me from the backlit screen. Her smile is more like an organ, yellowed with age and use. I look away and turn her off.

I lay with long-hair, apple-bottom, trunk-legs, and piano-teeth on a stage of lavender sheets and we play a movement together. When the striking notes of the finale fade, I sigh an ovation into her ear. I long to get up, but my legs are heavy and my head swims away from my body. City lights register somewhere far away. I don't mean to fall asleep, but she's there, playing an echo into my ear, and I drift away.

---

I wake up and I'm drowning, lungs quivering in my chest with their tiny fingers grasping at unreachable air, throat and mouth filled, around me nothing but impenetrable blackness. Instinct forces my hands to my chest first, then to my throat, then my face, but they are untouchable.

At last I grab the strings in which I'm bound. Not strings, I realize, but long, soft strands. They fill my mouth and taste like clover flowers, sweet and bitter all at once. They slide down my throat and spread into my lungs like ivy creeping over stone walls, wrapping each bronchial finger like yo-yos bound to their strings.

I'm slipping. I think I hear a lullaby, a soft echo close to my ear; my head rings with something familiar and dangerous. My instinct kicks in. I gain the last adrenaline rush before death, and it occurs to me that this mass I'm drowning in has piano teeth and trunk legs and long hair.

I take the last surge of energy and grip the strands surrounding me. I pull with my hands, my teeth, my chest. I thrash like an alligator in its murderous death roll. The lullaby stops, replaced by something akin to screaming, but darker, inhuman, like the last vibration of a cello string.

The strands break, snapping with multi-noted twangs that make me cringe, and I long for an organ hymn, low and spiritual, breathing and alive, but I'm lost to the orchestra.

We sleep for now, this beast and I, free of her ropes, encapsulated in our sorrow, and I hope I remember forgiveness in the organ's song.