Impotence

The glass makes no sense upside down. Hot glued to the ceiling, the wrong side has gathered all that dust. The bowl is still clean, incapable of holding wine, or anything. Below, the small awkward gathering drinks water from matching wine glasses; matching each other and matching the extra one on the ceiling. The bed, the couch, the kitchen, the bookcase, the bathroom. The five distinct messes have spread and swirled into each other. There are bed sheets in a pile with some encyclopedia volumes. There is a 10” skillet, crusted over from when the yolk split during a routine breakfast.

Crust has begun to creep up the walls, a few feet only, for now, the scouts, the advance guards, the first casualties, unofficial, that don’t even make it into the statistics, that won’t even be a footnote in the history books, or any books. A plunger, upside down, is leaning against the wall, dropping brown and yellow streaks to the floor, its handle being used as a bookmark between pages five and six of a novel, boring, outdated, and rancid, but on the crusty list of things that ought to be read by the educated class. Reading Proust is eating your vegetables, but nobody ever got big on Proust, except, obviously, for Proust.

Something falls from somewhere into something, releasing a cloud of some particles or something.

That’s not the only movement though, far from it. In the area that once would have been considered the couch, but now might be the bathroom, they are drinking water from two water glasses. He has no idea what she means when she calls it classy. When her clothes come off they will never be seen again, not never, but never when they are being looked for. A section of the apartment-organism is pulsing with hunger already.

There are disparate appetites in the room and they will find a way to work together. Gently, lovingly, he removes a steel knitting needle from where it has stuck four inches into her thigh, rips off a crusty strip of cheese cloth from under the coffee table to tourniquet the flow. It had been a curtain until it was needed to strain the greek yogurt until it had been needed for something else. You knit? The stabbing has relaxed her. I think those are from a previous tenant. A thick black lump buzzes against the Dukakis poster blocking the window, then flies off to bump into something else.

At once, the ceiling glass falls and crashes onto the old pile of broken ceiling glasses, adding to the delicate stalagmite.

There will be no cuddling in the morning. We can’t stay still too long or the mold will take us. Look, the small of your back is already crusting over.