The point of an evening comes when the sun has slid below the horizon and leaves a slight burn in the air...the room is mostly shadow save for two tea-cup candles, votives really, flickering small flames against the interior of the room....it is quiet, church-like...until there is a murmur, the slide of a mouth against skin and dropping across her horizon like the recently departed sun...he leaves a slight burn across her flesh and in this twilight there is a singular shape of an embrace...still clothed but only barely so...like the day slowly slipping into the night.
She built him, almost brick by brick, his hard uneven bones were held in her sweet hands...like a master mason she slathered him and stacked him neatly...the mortar perfectly hewn, the appearance of structure coming into place. She had no blueprints, rather this being unprecedented...never before seen. She had a vision, an eye...she placed layers upon layers...sometimes removing pieces, sometimes leaving parts unfinished...
She wielded him like an unblown piece of molten glass...an orange hot shape that she could sing her sweet oxygen into, warping a shape, spinning him into place, delicately breathing him into something...
In the room her breathing intensified, a bit of urgency...the evening outside was blue and cold but inside it was skin on skin warm...clothes strewn in piles carelessly tossed aside...the alignment was like flint rock, sparking, combustible.
Her hands touched the clay of him...the plain grays of color that she could shape...christen...linger slightly against and craft...glaze him in her furnace, produce small objects of art. Not for display, but to put on the shelves in her mind, these pieces of him that she wrought...some larger, others small...but all hers.
Her watercolor eyes watched him...she licked the tip of the paintbrush and dipped it into colors...she used small strokes and tiny movements...her pastels were pinkish and poignant...her landscape soft and inviting, the canvas the color of bedsheets, the world outside growing darker and darker and her hands moved faster, her art becoming alive.
She was a tattoo on him...
An injection of ink, permanent and lasting. Sometimes hidden, other times in view. Unique, utterly and enviously unique. Never guessed...always inspiring a question. A curiosity. What is it? What does it mean?
The quiet in the room descended like a curtain, the colors becoming darker in the evening rolling outside...just hands now...finding the familiar...the braille of their clench, unspoken words and knowing meanings...a quiet vocabulary...hushed...
She the artist...
but also the muse.
To take my plain colors and stale shapes and make me beautiful.
Us, even more.
