Porcelain Girl: A Dream

I forgot exactly how it happened?

My apartment was sided in white and the Midwestern sunshine was young and clean and ready.

I went across the street and a few houses down, to a white townhouse with half of a white-picket fence.

I was there to buy drugs.

At least I think I was but I’m not exactly sure… A bombed-out dude in his thirties with a three-day shadow and a Jansport backpack waited for me on a gray-striped couch.

No one spoke.

A white staircase corkscrewed above and behind me, flashing the sun from a five-storey window that ran the length… There were no decorations, but blank huge walls, but nevertheless, it looked lived in. The place felt very empty—but only since recently. The whole thing had the feel of an unfinished basement.

The transaction took place wordlessly, I think. Nodding. Hand manipulating.

A dark-haired girl peered down from the floor at the very top of the corkscrew and I caught her eyes as I opened the screen door to leave. She wore a tank top with two spaghetti straps that exposed gentle, unformed shoulders. She must have been in her early twenties, but in her eyes there was a sadness, a vulnerable beauty, that aged her beyond her years.

When she didn’t smile, I left.

When I returned another morning, my burned out, bearded friend was absent, but for some reason I was not surprised and I was not disappointed. I wasn’t scared. Still, though.

I had planned this, hadn’t I?

She found me on the couch and we connected in a perfect, blameless, wordless moment before I kissed her and parted the straps. In the bedroom we did, and afterwards we spoke.

Her chest was tattooed blue and white like a porcelain bowl. It was carefully lined with portraits wherever previous works would accommodate the new ones, each one of a perfect, but unique hand. They were photorealistic in detail of human faces, human bodies, some complete, some abbreviated, some merely alluded to… Blue pools in the cheeks of an Indian chief. A man leaning with one hand on the butt end of an axe while he smoked a pipe with the other. A woman wearing a bonnet curved in an L-shape on a loveseat with a string of pearls around her neck, looking at me over her shoulder. In the blue whorls near her upper thigh a thousand unnamed faces lurked, exposed in all their exquisite detail only when then sun hit her thigh and caught their features at the proper angle.

With bated breath she allowed me to examine her. Was she humiliated? She was not…

I went to the bathroom in a room down the hall, questions gathering in my head, when a large black man arrived and said she had to go. The door remained ajar. There was a mirror at the foot of the bed. Through it I watched him fuck her hard on the floor. She emitted no sounds of pleasure, nor did he. Exchanges took place. He left. I returned. She cried. The sheets were rumpled and twisted from months of neglect.

“This is how I decided my life would be after I died the last time.”

“Oh. You believe in reincarnation?”

“I actually already have been reincarnated.”

She looked down at herself while I played with her nipple.

I let it drop.

Sun streamed in. She was still crying, now hysterically. Our legs tangled. Semen came out of her nose in clotted strings. It was coming apart. How I wondered but did not judge, anxiety growing inside of me. Her face changed. A bulging purple vein split down the middle of her forehead and her eyes bulged.

She was in pain from inside.

I looked away.

I fucked her quickly, yet lovingly…

When I looked up, I found in place of her eyes and her nose one giant, orange eye with a reptilian pupil surrounded by red-hot veins that popped and hissed.

I screamed, just as you would, wishing myself elsewhere, and awoke in a clean white room in a Spartan apartment, where I slept alone amid clean white sheets.