more 'strange flesh'

each body she encountered was, inevitably, his. though she could not be sure in what way(s) she meant that. ‘meant that’; there is something to question: did she ever ‘mean’ it, or even state the thought? in the end the questions are fruitless before the fact. one way or another he possessed them as surely as she possessed them (they her?). whether it was her obsession that was medium, carrying him through her flesh to swallow each isolate body she pressed herself against, or whether it was in the most minute perception of details, the thought that this one’s nipples were neither pierced nor as small and prickling pink as his, or that this one’s hair was an oil spill of tentacles next to his field of windblown summer wheat, the fact remained, more solid than each body she rushed tidally against. in the end it was the former possibility which was the more terrifying: that in her flesh’s loneliness, it’s aching distance from him, his cells had somehow come to occupy the yawning space between her own, filling her up with the negation of him, which roared endlessly out to consume each new boy, each tender lass, till the grey light of dawn found their eyes all iris-night, their flesh repulsive as an ancient maid’s.
though he was the very potential of boy to become man, become murderer, though locked in hairless flesh through exile, he had never seemed so feral, so fearful, as the night Tink realized that – just as another pitiful joy pumped fitfully, a remote and thoughtless engine, into the fleshly ends of her thighs.

nighttime. we are never closer to the estate of beasts than when we are thirteen. hovering on the cusp of some cataclysmic change...tectonic siftings just beneath the sheaths of dead flesh that slick us – oil on ocean waves – pushed up and back and aside by corpuscular magma, up through the cracks in us, in the shell of ‘innocence’, newfound imperatives resculpting once genderless flesh into a named cast, the mold an alphabet of teeth have carved from the hull of flesh and bone. forever worrying the pink flesh that webs cheek to jaw, the web dissolved to ragged threads the tongue’s blind worm shoulders aside.

these the soiled intimacies we embrace. the glut that is their glory, their fetid musk a paean to things denied, the lightless grottoes we can’t abide, the humors they secrete. Tink thinks. watching Wendy watching Alice watching Pan, a Bermuda triangle of eyes in which countless dreams shuttle back and forth, into and out of lost regions, never to reach their charted shores. the naked writhing that hurtles from those eyes! they are all flying now, the world slipstreaming along torsos webbed in lace, an incessantly discarded lover, and all they all can think is Pan. Pan the man, the boy-man, the panic that shutters them to goose pimples.

all through the ceremony – Alice’s rite of passage – she nurses that throbbing, the exquisite brevity it enshrines and translates into memory, restorative storage. his mouth upon her breast, the angry, exquisite scarlet eye his mouth transubstantiated in its angry suckling. from nipple into gate, throbbing moment of intransient passage, portal to a pulsing, intransigent life. this is the one, the only, amelioration for this moment, watching Alice, in breathless waiting, throbbing off into the kiss that will, she thinks, poor girl, give her life, as the rabbi’s words quickened golem’s clay flesh, redacted genesis.