Heat

I wake up dreaming of you and cannot get back to sleep. My hands are sweating. The noise of the television is coming up through the floor like steam. Someone is winning a football game. Someone else is losing.

A slight breeze grazes the tips of my nipples. It’s sometime in the afternoon and the heat beats like global warming has been accelerated. The sky is the colour of streetlamps. It makes the ceiling look like skin.

I pad downstairs and watch the back of you. You are wearing a jumper I have only seen before on your father and it grazes thighs that I like best around my neck.

“Sit outside,” you say. “Heat’s pelting.” You don’t turn around.

I sit on the patio in my underwear. The graze of stone against my skin is a welcome erosion. The moon is out already, hanging low and nearly pink beside the sun.

“She feels nice, yeah? That sun?” I can’t see you inside. I wait for your hands on my shoulders but they don’t come.

“It’s just water but it’s cold. You’ll feel it. I never knew how cold water going through your body could feel until this. Like a snake.”

Now your hands come and they stick to my shoulders like plastic. I shrug them away. You’re right about the water though - the way it slips through me, I’ve never felt anything like it.

The air between us feels thick like one of us could choke on it. I imagine you choking. I imagine saving you. Then I imagine watching it happen and doing nothing except continuing to sip the snake water.

“We could fuck if you want,” you say, biting yellow nail varnish off your fingers.

“Do you want to?”

“It passes the time. It’s dragging, isn’t it. Isn’t it? You feel it too.”

I hold the glass to my forehead. “Yeah why not. Let’s fuck.”

We fuck on the rug in the living room until our thighs burn. Afterwards you take a shower and I wash myself from the kitchen sink. Out of the window I can see the world melting.

You come downstairs and you kiss my elbow and you say, “That was hot.”

“Do you still love me?”

You walk over to the patio doors and lean your head against the glass. “The world’s melting,” you say. “Did you notice?”

“Yes.”

“No.” You don’t look at me as you say this which is how I know what the no refers to.

“Water?” I ask. I turn the tap until the water is pouring out as wide as my wrist and the sound of it is pounding like falling trees. Through the window I watch the sky begin to bend towards us like it is finally giving in to an illicit love affair with our roof tiles.

“No,” you say again.

“I heard you.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

It’s an awful situation, isn’t it. To know that your lover doesn’t love you and also that the world is ending. The ground is beginning to fizz. That’s something I’m certain I can hear. No, the ground is beginning to rumble. That’s something I’m certain I can feel in my toes.

“You ought to say something,” you say, like you are spitting the words out of your mouth.

Then the windows go orange.

“What’s happened?” you scream, and I feel your body running to mine.

“The sun probably exploded,” I say, trying not to cry because your hands are clinging to my shoulder blades.

Gradually the light clears. Everything we own, or have owned up until this moment, is covered in pieces of the sky. You don’t let go of my hand.

“Look,” you say, and point upwards. Through a tear in the atmosphere, we can see this seething blackness. “Is that the universe?”

I am thinking about your hand. I am thinking that your palms are softer than the lips of God. I am thinking that maybe another explosion will fuse our hands together. Or maybe I will refuse to let go.

“Come on,” you say. And because you are holding my hand I follow. We climb through the roof, over the sky and onto the atmosphere which feels like the skin of a balloon stretched over a burning core.

We sit on the edge of the atmosphere and dangle our feet over Earth.

“When this is over, will you leave me?” I ask.

“Will it ever be over?”

“That isn’t the question.”

You lean my head into your neck like I am a child.

“Everytime I look at the stars I’ll think of you. Everytime I see the sky I’ll think of you. Everytime it is warm. Everytime I drink water. Even if I didn’t leave, I wouldn’t be able to love you.”

The next morning I wake up in a bed and you aren’t there and the sky is white and the air is cold as the Arctic. The moon is still lingering, hanging low outside my window.

“At least it’s over,” Moon says, and winks at me. I curl back into a caterpillar sleep and wait for my cocoon to form.

First published Bridge House Publishing in their 2019 anthology 'Transforming Being'