The injection site, livid and blushing under gym fluorescents. The knob on his nightstand worn like rhinoplastied clown-nose where he pushes it down, opens a compartment, takes what he needs. Dave’s guilt throbbed red and subcutaneous, a barb expanding outward for spring inside him. A body had come up that day, naturally. He pictured himself what the autopsy would later reveal, trails upon femur and vertebra like those paths etched by boring beetles between trunk and bark. The ribcage would be as a broken loom, the bones soft and whittled and hexagonal and he couldn’t help but think what a blow to his chest might do to him now. There were sardines neatly fit into the contours of his brain.
Sun is down, freezin’ cold
Dave rocked back and forth on the pocked rubber floor, clutching at wrists that seemed to thin by 4 inches when they entered his field of vision. Effeminate.
That’s how we already know winter’s here
A god rattled behind his eyes like a bluetooth speaker of mycorrhizal sinew.
My dog would prolly do it for a Louis belt
David, David, David. Looking big af, king. @Dave_Contour_ 12:22 pm “Natty gains 💪💯”
That’s just all he know, he don’t know nothin’ else
MISTER D. Contour, such brazen prelest. On the bench adjacent sat a man ornamented in a Legate’s armor—or a layman’s idea of such—pauldrons cleaving to distended shoulders, the base of his greaves fit into flesh deep enough to scratch talus. A yellow-oxidized wound at his knee from when the joint once stood upright. His ribcage at least 2 feet across lengthwise. His face scrawled with rouge, fake lashes curling around and upward like so many exposed nerves, lipstick precise and sanguine and killer.
I tried to show ’em
The bronze armet was complete anachronism, David thought. He remembered his castle playset, how he would sequester the generic “medieval” little men by era, reference in his Great Book of Arms and Armor, cast aside those deemed ahistorical. Is it even possible to cast an armet in bronze?
I tried to show ’em
It had begun when his hair started to fade back into a professorial stripe across his scalp. His skin became rough, too rough. He would cake foundation around his exposed biceps until an oiled fetish.
Gone on you with the pick and roll
He had needed to fuck, more than ever in his life. She’d left 6 days later.
Young LaFlame, he in sicko mode
The space between his legs burst into a thousand red tree branches, seeking outward at pores and nostrils and wounds and burrowing satisfied. “I never knew David, but he had done more for others at 16 than many could hope to in a lifetime,” priest cackles.
Mike hits his vape.
— Alice O’Brea is a waitress in Connecticut, @anestheticwife on twitter; Elwy Malin is an artist and archivist based in London, @threeecrowns on twitter.