Improv 1, Week 11

Improv of Ai's Salome:

Daisies to Brighten Up the Room

I pick at the stray strand on my blue shirt
watching it unravel between my fingers.
It frays, the way the edges of my mind would,
if I could forget.
But what if I did lose you,
those lazy afternoons,
mid-summer educated,
and like a childish scholar
devoured preteen pages on the trail.
Even the crisp sound slithering,
hissing into droopy lids
and folding in upon itself.
I felt as if the words were airy;
I was lifted.
You were young and distracted.
That she was my sister never mattered.
The fractions of our genes never matched anyway.
The three of us galvanized in a thick slosh
of confidence, weighed by intimacy. Friend secrets.
That strawberry and leather smell
out of the bulbous bottle I gave her
scraped against your wrinkled collar
and your tongues melted. How many seconds?
I was not there to count them
but the swift moments I glimpsed away from the pages
went forever, as if nothing could stop you
from collapsing into exclusivity,
then the book fell: Still air snapped,
Your eyes, the pulsed sapphires,
the shape of your hands on her shoulders,
so unlike intimacy, I thought.
And then my feet moved in accelerando
No, they flew notes beneath me
and abandoned my heart on the stones.
I could hear it, its final hacking coughs.
I could see your faces, fallen and fixed,
but my feet played on, abandoning you
and at the exact same moment,
the book cried and shivered in the summer heat,
the pages shaking with its breath,
spilling letters onto my fingertips
and typing flesh from hands to cheeks
until my skin, throbbing and awake,
so that when my feet slowed down,
I felt even my lashes stretch and yawn
spilling release smoother than gardenia petals
into the auburn sunshine.
I fingered the book in my hand,
soothing its emotional outbursts.
Of course I care, you said. My book whispered
fiction. I folded the corner down on its page
and set it down on the tabletop.
After a while, staring at the cover, I recalled
Japanese myths about the red string of fate
that tied lovers pinkies to one another
and watched our string, like a suicidal snake,
snip and hit the ground.