“Do you wanna fuck all day? Yes?!? Do you wanna fuck all day?”

“…Yeah….” – It’s a whispered surrender to him, Shannon, to his enigmatically voluptuous art, his tempting eyes and his dog smile.

The abortion clinic is right on the canals.
I’m waiting with Kaylan. Her grandfather owns the clinic.

We’re looking at the melancholic water out of the window.
I ask how this growth could happen. I’d already had my regular bleeding, after Shannon.
She calls it “the trick of the first week.”

I look at the grave sky of Venice, at the fading clouds of my evanescent obsession.
And I miss to death the bright light of that afternoon there, on the Hollywood Hills.

Shannon tells me his life was laying in a dark studio in Downtown, but he exited the obscurity of his alcohol dependence and, naturally, new colors painted it – “…and you’re one of them… you’re such a real and rare beauty….”

The sun, enlightening the two of us in the reflection of the market windows at the Grove. He puts his Rayban side to side to mine, and we smile to the camera. Together we look killer, indeed.

Our last kiss in my car, between the blinding trees of that Primerose Avenue whose name makes fun of our decaying passion.

Shannon walks away his fresh promise of introducing me to his daughter. But I stare at him still, to catch the last glimpse of his joker smile.

~ 

“… I’ve just died in your arms tonight….” *
I wake up and the song is still playing.

Over the phone, Kaylan and I were hysterically laughing at her new profession.
Her grandfather owns two clinics: one for births and one for abortions. The first was full, so now she picks up phone calls in the second one.
– “…you see what happens when you wait too much to look for a job in LA?!”

I stand up from the semidarkness of my nap. I feel dizzy. My right hand checks my belly. Thank God, it’s still flat.

Flat and hollow like the consuming desperation of an abandoned lover. Five days – Shannon is lost. I know he won’t call. I read it on the sweet surface of his violet smile.

Exhausted I walk to the bathroom, to wash away the dead leafs of that horrible mid-summer afternoon nightmare.

Through the garden lighted mirror, the shade of an overblown love looks back at me. My arms are the spectral reminiscence of my strength and my tummy is the crumbling shelter of the wasted, withered rose Shannon left behind. Black tears try to gather the petals falling from that murdered hope.

His illusory compliments, his insidious smile, his fake promises and his vicious lies are stuck down here. Not by shaping me into a mother, they’ll change this painful impression of myself as a woman.

I’ll kiss them to acceptance, waiting for the next two weeks to reveal their destiny.
Hopefully, it won’t be any of its “first week tricks.”

Story by Liliana Isella.

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*(I Just) Died In Your Arms by Cutting Crew