Read Online Kissing Carrion by Gemma Files - Free Book Online

undergraduate days), the key elements of any good Gothic. Your life’s gone rotten, it literally stinks—so much so you spend all your off-time washing
clothes
, for Christ’s sake—so you want to trade up, identity-wise. Maybe even trade down. To see just how far you can get away from you, from your stupor of loss and hatred, your multi-foliated ache of thwarted desire.
    But needs must, when the penis drives. So you snag your laundry and get up, unsteadily, cross towards her, brush by her. Open the door, hold it a half-breath longer than you need to. Waiting.
    And she gets up—smile finally blooming, white-ripe; a fleshy desert flower—and follows.
    * * *
    Toronto, the fliptop city—grey and gelatinous as a mad scientist’s exposed brain, overlaid with a distant hum of thought. Faint memory fog erasing the horizon’s skyscrapers from Floor 13 up. And the two of you, drifting through.
    More Ann Radcliffe influences: The rain has accentuated Chinatown’s usual crab season reek and moved it steadily northward; all up and down the road, the pavement is bracketed by crates of exposed underbellies and weakly waving claws. Her place turns out to be a shutter-heavy house just off of Nassau Street, incongruously squatting in the shadow of a hospital smokestack, its roof wreathed in a cannibal fog of incinerated body parts. You pause, glance up. The moon hangs caught between tree-branches—a lost balloon, half-wilted.
    Then you’re inside, upstairs, in a room up under the eaves, barely bigger than your bachelor apartment’s closet, with a naked mattress on the floor, and a dusty, shrink-wrapped poster of a rose hanging on the far wall, a string of light bleeding from underneath to frame it with a square halo; placed over a small window, maybe, to block the room off from exterior distraction. Water-stains darken the ceiling. It smells stale, with a sickly hint of floral-scented moisturizer. Not exactly enticing.
    When you turn around, however, you see she’s already unbuttoned the top of her dress and let it slip down around her hips, loosing a pair of snub-nosed breasts with areola-like cataracts. The light-thread slips along her side, taking the rest of her dress with it, writing hieroglyphs over her emergent stretch-marked hips. Old bruises gild her thighs.
    â€œI found you,” she says, the first thing you’ve heard out of her so far. Her voice is scratchy. A twitch of guilt raises goosesweat; yeah, I guess you did. But it doesn’t seem to reach your face—not enough to stop her talking, at least.
    â€œWant me,” she tells you.
    And then she sucks your lips inside of hers and bites down, knocking you back as your clothes peel apart. On the poster above you, the rose yawns, faded and labial, like a cheesy Grade Twelve creative writing exercise metaphor. But your groin—which jumps and pulses against the smooth weight of her inner thighs, the loose and shaven flesh of her pubis—is no literary critic.
    â€œI found you,” she repeats, coming up for air. Then again, with a weird little crack in the words’ sandpaper surface: “Want me?”
    Yes, yes, yes.
    Her blue-rimmed talons, her blue-toned mouth. Her hands scrabble down, points out—the date-rape rosary, reversed: Nipples, navel, pelvis, sac. Incongruous, the contrast; how selected parts of her strike you with such an exaggerated force of detail, while other aspects slide away on contact, impossible to describe. The nape of her bent neck, small-pored and finely furred with a blush of colorless hair—as she glides down along your torso, tongue out—versus the blur of her profile. Halogen skin, almost grotesquely lambent; a stained white radiance, like the kind that spills from lanterns made of human skin. You can count every link of her spine. One hand shelling you with a single twist, a grate of zipper teeth, and slipping to cup your testicles as the other grips you