Preservation Project

Michael Dwayne Smith

So, we take a cab.  Lights tickle backseat blue and silver and pink.

“Menopause on holiday, libido back in town for anniversary big three-five,” you giggle, snuffling into my neck, slurping the stupid Cosmo you grabbed from those elegant white lady fingers at the bar as we ran out the restaurant.  That long ago feeling: teen punks stealing just-bought candy from kids at 7-Eleven.

We crashed out the oak doors screeching into the street, and you whistled with two fingers.  Smell of salty air and piss rushed in, and we buckled under stars a moment, fell into this squealing cab.

“The fuck you go to?” the driver yips over chirping tires.

Our increased asses slide left-to-right-to-left-again on duct-taped leather, your hands on the case, tracking thigh to fly, and we’re sucking all the familiar lips and necks and tongues, Syrian cabbie spying the rear-view, jabbering about whatever, but he sounds seriously fucking unhappy.

His babble slaps comic effect up a notch—to jerky fits.  We’re laced on ecstasy, and trying to make out in a bumper car.  Painful horny, spastic laughy attacks.  I flip the trusty bird with my bum arm at the cabbie, eyes closed, laying back, you pulling at my shirt, rip-rip-scritch, and there’s those Arabic-thick shouts, “Out!  The fuck out!” as a door wags open.

You fall tailbone on the curb, us a tumbly tangle of stupid grins, loud limbs, and tiny bruising bites.  Pushed into a wet cement kiss.

It’s over the moon, and up the skirt.

You let me in. Oh, yes you do, on a Union Street sidewalk, facing the crumbly old Metro Cinema.  You’re not doing anything.  I’m not asking.  Inside, flicks of light frame enchanted little worlds all two-dimensional.  Out here, shivers of streetlight hover your half-lit face—still life in a nest of crow-black hair.

I shudder through three dimensions of you.

So, we stumble backward, childless, unfolding into one washed out image.  Halfwit actors, caught empty in their bit parts—scene contrived from some buried memory, some cheap gift shop set of Liz and James Dean we never quite became.