For C hloe


︎︎︎ Madi Bean

︎ Nov 8, 2024

You were tired. I touched the stove because I wasn't thinking, and now my finger feels like lack. My mind is a prison cell used for practicing unsoiling rituals to counteract the soiling rituals I practiced to hide my scent. Any new scent will do. My mind is a sadness swelled in a furious search for the line, the one to get back into. The line where I cut off all my fingers just to touch you. I second guess this style and forget the line in exchange for a pile on your dorm key and sniff it off in the bathroom at the afters. You’re sitting on the toilet taking selfies. Women of your caliber aren't supposed to have parents.

I remember taking your hand, pushing my dirty nails in the already dirty cuts you had there. You said that cavemen didn’t need neosporin and that the Huntington Marina across the street had worms in the water that glowed in the dark. You said that death doesn’t make an effort to hide his name, we’re aware from start to finish. It’s all about taking away. Life or death, a hole is a HOLE. Some of the deepest, most wretched, disgusting, holes are along the bay in Long Island, and I'm laying in them waiting for the rain to come like Bin Laden.

Now that we’re together, I think it’s time to tell you that I'm sorry. I’m sorry if the things I did out of boredom are now a permanent blemish I bare in the prose. I’m sorry that I don't count the calories going into my soul. I just want them to slide down the surface of me, but i wasnt thinking and forgot that my surfaces are full of HOLES. But that’s just the way, if you give a hole anything it's going to kill it. And all that'll be left is the joie de vivre goop, like, like when I couldn't look into its event horizon without turning red and fading out of existence forever. And you looked for a memory following the snail trail left by a heavenly control room, the line that ends with a silly dream.

And I'm sorry I don't exist in the vacuum of time we’ve spent together. I wish I could be your vacuum but I'm just a beautiful woman, like yourself. I can want more of you in the world and be willing to use my body to facilitate that but it would never work. I'm all bad faith, bad credit, a pit, a trench of hasbeen present. I spent all that time looking for the sign from god that would tell me the gem of saint theresa had been returned to its throne so I could stop throwing things at it, hoping for something to stick. All to be revealed was faulty trebuchet and an aim untrue. It would never work, baby, you’re tired, and I'm too deep in the gravity well to do weird sex things for someone I love.



Madi Bean is a writer. She loves you. She has appeared in Expat Press, Hobart Pulp, Don't Submit, etc.