Ana Maria Celeste

XII

She sat tossing popcorn on to empty beer bottles. Beer drunk, beer to be drank over volcanic rock, the Santo Domingo Bay and the sea in sight, her troubled hands tossing popcorn. She dreamt and balanced out her options. So many other gusanitos, little worms had made it across the other island.

When I met her she had glasses that were so thick it made her eyes seem as though they were looking from the other side of the room. Her face when she laughed made me feel something in between awe and nausea, a melancholy so toy-like I thought I could mend her. I should have jumped out of kitchen at that moment paid the waiter and walked the other direction. Unaware that in an unperceived way her boxer mulatto nose and curves had got me going again, knowing well that from that moment she would siphon and hinder my money and plans. Love is a violent thing, a restricting act of violence from where the forces in the cosmos spiral off to a kettle boiling towards a sink.

She appeared older than she was, though she was just nineteen. She would say excessive thinking brings the end of things. She thought sometimes of blood, of cuts, the thought of it converted her in to a playtime murderer while cadavers would come out of the earth with boiling meat on their lips. Strange having a mind so open to blood with such ill machinations, and yet when I turned the television on she would immediately turn it off.

“The crevice of all damnation,” she would say, “nothing like stasis to rot the nog.” A slap to the pancreas is how she called it.

“Please I must fuck you,” she said, “I haven’t had sex in months.” I let her. First time I didn’t get in though. We went on with the session stroking each other’s bodies, kissing necks, kissing tits, running the finger over every part. After a long while I fucked her. Right in this time. I went for a piss and she tossed me off, the rest of the day resumed in the same way.

“In heaven there are also cockroaches, slugs and maggots,” she said reading Zoe Valdez and Laura Restrepo. I bought her contacts. I would try to write, she spent time on messenger. She wanted me to tell her about the Islamic gardens of Seville. One day she would meet a famous interpreter she met online from Morocco. She missed the places she had been to and the places she had not.