As with all lovers’s positions in the 90s and above, this is a meta position, a modifier, a way of altering any of the existing positions of lovers. The meta positions, together with the multitudinous positions of lovers combine to form every conceivable expression of Love known to man, and the skilled practitioner can play Love like a glorious instrument of the heart.

The position of lovers, number 97, occurs just out of sight, around a corner, behind a wall, when an acquaintance has temporarily moved away, the one lover grabs the other by the face and kisses them urgently.

“I will always love you,” they might say. “I’m not sure why I said that. It’s confusing. It’s always confusing with you, but it’s confusing with others, and I guess I’m just looking for new experiences. I just wanted you to know that. I will always love you.”

Following these vows, the lovers should part as urgently as their secret embrace and continue about their separate ways.

The smell of death isn’t decay. It’s silence, a pungent silence. When I came to, blood was rushing to my head. The car had flipped and the seat belt had pinned me upside down. The dust was clearing. The sound of the desert breeze was punctuated by an intermittent scrape I took to to be a still-spinning wheel. To my left, that pungent silence.

I’d heard that sound many times in my life. I’ve come to recognise it. I gently tilted my head to see Carrie. It looked like her face had smashed into the steering column. There wasn’t anything beautiful left on her face. Just a curtian of blood.

And then I heard the weeping, a disdainful sobbing, repressed moan. It grew closer to the car, but I didn’t hear the gravel crunching. It approached from the drivers side so I turned to look back toward Carrie. A woman had knelt to lean into the car, and she was crying mournful tears. Her hands were white like ivory, and opulescent, and her tearful eyes were as black and sorrowed as I have ever seen eyes. She gently pushed back Carrie’s hair, caressed her face. Her lips moved as if she mumbled under her breath. She kissed her fingertips and then placed them to Carries lips. She turned to look at me, and her face saddened, but it was the most beautiful face I have ever seen. In an instant the sound of her weeping receded. I did not hear the gravel crunching beneath her feet as she left.

p>“I fishhooked this guy.” She was boisterous. Had exotic eyes. She formed her index finger into a fishhook and made an exaggerated gesture to the right.

“I totally fishhooked this guy. He hit my friend Nettie. Was making her cry. Hit this other friend of mine who’s a lesbian. And he hit me.”

“What the fuck?”

It was her first fight and she was 20. She was telling me how she’d kicked some poor guys ass.

She was sitting across from me. We were sitting indian style, facing eachother. We were totally in eachother’s space.

“He called my friend Nettie a ‘dirty nigger’. He called her a ‘dirty nigger’” She leaned all the way in towards me. Our noses brushed.

Enacting what she screamed at him: “What did you say, fucker!?!”

“And then he pushed me back and called me a bitch. And he was wearing a button-up dress shirt, so I grabbed him.”

With both hands she grabbed my t-shirt just beneath the collar and pulled me close towards her. “WHAT’D YOU SAY FUCKER!!!”

“Then he tried to push me away again and his palm hit my chin. He hit my fucking chin!” She gestured wildly, shaking her head back and forth. “So I just grabbed him.”

She forced her index finger in my mouth and fishhooked my cheek. “I didn’t know what I was doing!”

She holds her hands up like claws. “I just grabbed him and fishooked him.” She fishhooked my cheek again. “And I just pulled.” And my head followed her pull halfway to the floor.

She pulled her finger out and kept gesturing with her hands. “He called her a ‘dirty nigger’ and he made my friend, the other girl, the lesbian cry. And we were pushing him back against his car cause he kept pushing us and he finally got in his car but his window was down and he reached out and hit Nettie.”

“When I saw that I just punched him.”

She rears back and socks me between the chin and mouth almost busting my lip. “…and I kept hitting him.”

She swung at me twice more. The second one barely glanced, and I leaned back out of the way of the third.

“We were all sitting there hitting him. Kicking the shit out of him and our friend Eddie was beating the shit out of his car with his hands! And he broke the fuckin tail light! Eddie broke the tail light!”

She was holding my hands in between us now. “I’ve never been in a fight before two weeks ago. And I’m 20!”

She fishhooked me in the mouth again. “I totally fishhooked him!”

Only the weak use true love as an excuse; only the weak would use true love.

David:

She called again. You’re not surprised. Of course she wanted something. Does the devil never wag temptuous bits without deviance in hand?

That’s an unfair accusation.

We all want something, but I have less tolerance – and more hate – for her, and for any sense of want surrounding her.

So odd to hate so much one so close.

She invited me to a mutual acquaintance’s party. I’d make an appearance regardless, but I asked why me, as opposed to her boyfriend (or whatever the fuck he is). He may not be such a bad guy. He just happens to be fucking someone whose skull I’d enjoy beating with a hammer.

I’m sure they’re fucking because our dance goes like this: I spend time with someone, anyone, and she accuses me of fucking them (truth is irrelevant), so that she will not feel guilty of fucking whoever she’s fucking.

I do not care, and have spent many hate-filled moments not caring, and managed to go several weeks not knowing who it was I did not care about.

She’d rather I go, than him, because I’ve been her artistic backbone, I can talk for her if she gets confused, I give her confidence. But I bristle that she expects any service when I’d as soon as not talk to her, ever, again.

So odd to hate so much one so close.

I am tired of being used.

She would say the same, and certainly, just as we all want many things from many, I have used her. Perhaps, though, it’s my indination, a self-inflated sense of quality, an elitist misconception, but I do not think I have ever used anyone in the ways I have been used.

My kindness has been plundered.

I am planning to go so I can express my cruelty, make her feel the sad, pitiful, little girl I have always known she is. Instead of wishing my love might save her, I desire to damn her to a lifetime of tears.

I have such bile in me now!