Amelia

That boy was dilapidation. He wasn’t born; he just collected himself on a spoiled beach from mangled shipwrecks and rusted submarines and arbitrarily pieced himself together. He fashioned organs out of woodworm dug out of the soft rotting wood with whalebone fingernails. He stitched hair out of rope saturated with seawater. He didn’t know his name, but he knew if he dug deep enough in the sand he could find a different sun that fit into the palm of his hands but didn’t burn, only softly buzzed like a hive of bees.

In the seaside town, he met Amelia and her swollen cheeks. She couldn’t stop chewing on the drowsy jellyfish tentacles that splayed out from her evicted wisdom teeth. She had a bumper sticker than said “Girls can be Megaman too, So Fox Party” but she didn’t own a car.

He loses his hands in her hair, touches his nose to hers. He says, “My sails are ripped and torn and the wind hasn’t blown for days. I’m so tired of wandering. I can’t wander anymore.”

He could taste blood in every other kiss. They spent their mornings picking each other out of themselves. He, removing fragments of stitching from his teeth and tongue and Her, the water logged splinters from her thighs and fingertips.

“Your body is an open cinema and I’m a director of lazy shorts tripping over broken armrests,” he says, his tongue fishing stitching from inside his lip.

He listens to the soft steps of her flats on the cold concrete, catches crosses in the dull buzzing of streetlights, and holds smoke in his lungs until his vision wobbles. “Yesterday morning I had to solve the most intricate fever dream puzzle,” he says. “and when I sweat that illness away, you sang me something soft and sweet and lulled me back to sleep.”

She falls back on the mattress, stretching her skinny legs across floral print, her hair spreads and blooms and reaches, wrapping live ivy vines around the wooden pillars of the headboard. Her nature overtakes the bed, and he returns himself to her.