To My Crap Mistress

by Peter Wild

Sometimes I look at my hands and think these are the hands that held your face. I still miss you, you see. I look at my hands and I wonder if I was to place my palms over my nose and my mouth would I, if only for a second, be able to smell you again, the smell of your skin and your neck. That's all it takes to open the flood gates: there I am, in your kitchen, holding you in my arms, my hands on your face, your hungry mouth on my hungry mouth, the two of us wrestling with love and sex and betrayal, the entire world balanced... just so. Remembering you, though, has a narrative arc as sure as the path of any arrow. The archer removes the arrow from an almost empty quiver and - ping! - said arrow flies, taking in missing you and remembering you and the memory of your smell and your skin and the two of us fucking every which way in your house but the tree that arrow hits is pain and the pain is gouged into the bark so deep you can bet our children's children will be able to see it from space four hundred years from now.

6S

Peter Wild, author of They Were Actors, is the editor of The Flash & Perverted by Language: Fiction inspired by The Fall. You can read more here.