this old place again

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife She’d been less a child and more a god: cupped in her hands, carved with her name. There had been a sense of worship, too, among them, the mantras, the words like a prayer. A reverence even as he was taken apart piece of piece. “I was not,” he says, but the words are weak. Still, he pretends he can lie, pretends he can convince her otherwise. Girl or god, whatever she’d been, in the end he thinks he fire had taken her, too. Still, he can deny this, to her and to himself. He hadn’t conceptualized her as a child, hadn’t had the words or knowledge for it. He can lie. He can pretend. There was no girl. But the other names – they drift from her lips, they drift from the purple. They were his names, his selves, made for the girl. The girls. (There had been two. One cruel and one kind and he had loved them both.) “They were…” he says, and the purple trembles, the memories clamoring to shout their name. Their names, his names. Whoever he was. Is. “They were names.” A pause, a moment to stare at her, a caged animal, eyes too-wide. “They were my names. I think.” sleaze cancer x garbage