(original fiction: 1038 words)
a young artist resents her boyfriend, who chooses to look at glow-in-the-dark stars over buying groceries.
I’d bought a black duvet to hide the stains. Adam was beautiful and enjoyed eating three-cheese nachos from 7-Eleven in bed. His aftercare. It left grease marks over my old duvet-cover like the trails of gas at the end of stars. It was pink with white stars and matched our bedroom. He used to point out constellations in our sheets with the tip of his index finger.
Everything was painted in baby pink. Murals of pink mountains under pink skies with pink flower fields covered the walls. They were accented with gold frames which held Polaroids and John Wayne Gacy prints. My favourite painter.
Patches of white filling slabbed over holes from old nails where I’d moved the frames. It was a weekly fight with Adam. I had to keep the Gacy’s closest to the ceiling lest Adam tried to switch the prints to Monet again. He’d tell me while chomping on taquitos: “Waterlilies are so in, babe.” Adam didn’t go to art school. Adam didn’t know much at all.
He liked when I painted him as he was in high school. Prom was the best night of our lives— his life. He’d bought me a corsage of pink tulips. I always painted them in the background of his portraits. They were too cool-toned for the pieces to be coherent, and never sold. I could use carmine red for his next one, paint him a bed of waterlilies sprouting from his skin. He would hate it. I smiled.
Adam was a costly creature. The black duvet had been an investment. Three commissions. My fingertips brushed the rough polyester edges. If I had talent, I could’ve bought silk; people wanted a story, not competence. My boyfriend was supportive, nonetheless, and picked up extra shifts. Uber Eats. Simple work for my simple boy. What I was doing was hard. And yet, his awareness did not stop his condemnation of my art supply spendings.
Now, he rested in the closet, wrapped in the pink duvet, looking at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. They were placed in constellation patterns– Ursa Major, Aquila, Pegasus, and Hydra. He liked their quiet, and I preferred him when he was looking at something other than my body. It was the closest I could give him to an observatory— the only privacy in our studio apartment. The duvet kept him warm.
I slumped back against the feather-stuffed pillows on the bed. He was too busy with his stars to buy groceries despite his insistence that he would pick-up dinner. Food was the worst purchase, it was all made of waste. We took turns, anyways, like good couples did.
In a way, it was a small blessing that Adam wouldn’t buy them this evening. He had a fondness for the hot-dogs at 7-11. A break from taquitos. He’d buy a dozen, come home, eat two-to-four in bed, and leave the rest to sog through the books on our nightstand.
They would stale. We had no other budget. I ate them. My skin would break out. His grime was my grime now, the oils leaking from his pores into mine when we kissed. Sometimes people never change, and matte concealer exists for a reason.
A weight rolled against my cheek on the pillow. A small dry tube. The apples of my cheeks lifted it as I cringed. There was no point in moving it. I sighed.
Flakes came off of the object as my face relaxed. I reached a hand to where it rested against my cheek, groping along its length. It was hard, but not impossibly stiff. Another stale hot-dog. I moved it to my lips.
My teeth dented the object: too tough, too rubbery. I crunched into a bone. Salt and rot danced on my tongue. I gagged, spitting it out.
There were bite marks dented along the edges. A small circle of white rested inside pale, dried up flesh. It had started to mold. The edges were bluish from days without being touched. His chipped black-glitter polish decorated the nail. Adam’s colour; his Milky Way.
The fingertip waited patiently on my duvet. I hesitated– shaky hands. My palms cupped around it. The ache stayed inside my teeth.
I tilted my hands up and down, letting it roll around the perimeter of my palm. He looked small like this. He was always smaller than expected. I brought his fingertip closer to my face, hovering just below my lips.
My mouth closed around the end of the fingertip. I sucked the bone, lapping my tongue against the flesh how he liked it. I pinched his nail, tilting it upright in my mouth. My lips suctioned around him tightly. Breath filled my lungs before I exhaled into him. Then again– enough to fill lungs. The pause between breathing and pressing dragged on and yet I waited. I knew better than to rush life. I tapped his fingernail in even counts up to thirty with a steady rhythm. Thirty— blow, blow.
After the third cycle, I waited for what was long gone. I blinked. The resuscitation failed; he flatlined inside my mouth.
I looked down at the fingertip. A sting of saliva connected my mouth to his tip. My eyes went wide. I froze, palms spread.
The fingertip fell onto the black duvet. Flakes of dried up blood tickled against my tongue, mixing with my vanilla lipgloss. My lips smacked together— cutting the saliva thread.
His finger laid flat on the duvet, fingernail pointing across the room. The polish had chipped into a heart. My eyes followed where it pointed. Over the edge of the bed, past the kitchen, to the closet.
He waited for me, wrapped in the pink duvet. I could see it now: Adam was looking up at Aquila with his milky whites behind the door. The black suited him better now, and I wanted my pink stars back. It would smell like him. He wouldn’t mind, he was a generous lover.
The door still had claw marks from where he’d sheared through the pink paint. Specks of silver glitter decorated the apartment. It’d spread against my wrists and palms and fingertips. Our black duvet didn’t hide the shine; nothing was left untouched.
