“this own-lee”

That coffee you drank, you’re sort of half-wondering whether it will go better with champagne than toothpaste and orange juice, but you can’t put too much thought into it now as there is a hungry demon on your windowsill doing business as a nut-obsessed squirrel you’d like to photograph. Besides, the meat of your proposal has barely reached this soft Sunday morning back in bed—“Katerina, my delicate, sexy, flower love, I’m moving to Fialta for work this summer and I want to know, I want to ask you if…”—when the easy post-coital whispers cast from your nibbled lips meet such a harsh hush, such cold, oceanic swells of silence perversely borne of your argument for peace, pleasure, truth and kindness, that shrivel your love, freeze the sheets, fill the pillows, mute even the color of the bright orange walls upon which your Mexican wrestlers are stuck poking each other in the eyes and the fire on Jimi’s guitar suffocates with time, time trapped pulsing in Katerina from Ukraine’s green eyes like wind in a hollow rock, the pause growing, looming before the deluge in your wake which soon enough will come tossing, crashing, shitting, piling, howling down upon your head with first the ache and guilt, then the wrath and venom, of this absolute beauty, this keeper, this ultra-literate Crimean sex and drink machine with the accent of your dreams and the ass off which your friends agreed it would be dreamy to eat ice-cream with hot fudge and a cherry, who roused senses invisible to science all night long, night after night for a fortnight hence to the strange, ecstatic rhythms of Sasha and Digweed—“this own-lee,” she insisted, handing you the CD—her rain washing all the soot and scum from this and every other room in your mind, drenching your body, impregnating your soul with thoughts of five-carat solitaire boulders, nestling her own shiny silver hook into your gut, where you know—you’ve known all along, you pretender, you depraved predator, you diseased criminal—that you should have told her before now, before you fell and didn’t bounce, before she made a cuckold of her boyfriend, before you blinked and that nappy squirrel winked back, before telling your roommate Jeremiah, her blabbermouth manager who has entered the bathroom beside your thin wall singing a flaming gay sounding Edith Piaf ballad, bursting into a long, loud piss, breaking the spell so that you might laugh, then flushing when there seemed nothing left to drown this thing, this insufficient lure, this hopeless invitation that you’re about eleven seconds into and three-quarters of the way through.