The perfumer sprays her scent on to her own wrist and then offers it to the man to incline towards her in order to inhale its bouquet. He only smells the aroma of the rest of her.
Leather straps had always rotted away in time, so he had opted for the segmented metal strips to cincture his modish watch. When he removed it at the end of the day, he liked the inhuman indentations left in his skin, like an insect’s thorax, or a barcode.
The man shot his cuffs with great deliberation. The aurora of his diamond encrusted cufflinks twinkled before their eclipse beneath the jacket’s sleeves. She was attracted to them as to the eye spots of a butterfly which draws down a predator into the miasma of confusion.
The man slammed against a wire mesh fence cutting off his escape. He beat it in despair before turning and offering his forearms for the cops to cuff. They whipped him round and bound him behind his back, spurning his supplication.
The man brought his wrists together perpendicularly, making the sign of the cross to ward off the invisible tormentors who were whispering in his ear. In his agitation, he rubbed them together like sticks, as if trying to ignite and purge himself.
The woman studied the veins in her pallid wrist. As her finger traced the filaments, she felt like she had been knitted together in yarns of blues and reds. Only somewhere along the journey she had misplaced the knit pattern.
Having scanned the room for the invigilator, the girl surreptitiously eased her blazer’s sleeve down and consulted the cheat notes she had inscribed on her wrist. Sweat had made the ink run.
The woman raised her arm to her mouth as if to wipe away some mote, or bite off some frayed strand on her cuff, but as her jaw muscles jagged behind her half-baked occlusion, she was fooling no-one. She was conversing with her unseen controllers.
She had nails and bloodied stigmata tattooed on to the underside of both wrists. She was still awaiting her Mary Magdalene to come tenderly bathe her wounds, though there seemed legionnaires aplenty ready to skewer her with their long-stemmed spears.
She inverted the knife so that the blunt edge was against her skin and moved it up and down the length of her wrists. The blade chafed harshly against the scarred levees of previous communions between the two.
Taken from "Extra-Curricular, Tales Told Out Of School" 45 flash fiction stories available in print and e-book from Amazon & I-Tunes
Taken from "Extra-Curricular, Tales Told Out Of School" 45 flash fiction stories available in print and e-book from Amazon & I-Tunes
