Temperature+and+Tension

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He was quiet as he pulled things from his pockets. “Your arm.” he might have murmured. “Your knee.” he might have said softly. “Pass me your nose.” Just to make sure she was listening. She watched lazily as he pulled red plastic tightly over limbs, wrapped cloth snugly over elbows, wound ribbon over knuckles and painted stars in her hair. Covered her in fantastic things and lost things, things like a quilt patch, slowly sewing it all up together. Cocooned her in tissue-paper and was very gentle with his shaking hands, as he daubed her with paint and glue and vinegar.

 “Watch…dripping.” she would croak, because the heat was too much for her delicate fluttering chest, and the nervousness overruled sentences.

 “Yeah.” That was shaky. Slick sweat ran in rivulets down a waterproof face. She blinked the salt from her eyes.

 “Don’t smudge…”

 “Yeah.” That was shaky too. Silence, as the heat was heavy on them both. She watched as he pulled trinkets from his pockets, measured his handiwork, like the space between her jaw line and her ear lobe and the angle her breastbone made with her neck.

 “If I tug your shoulders back,” followed by a little wobbling adjustment, “length of your neck appears twice as favourable, jut of the collarbone by fifty percent…”

 He shifted from one foot to the other, the sound loud and foreign and bristly as his bare heel crunched against something underneath the tent floor. His clothes stuck to him in wrinkles, pulled like burned, disfigured latex across his shoulders (she thought) because it was so hot (she thought). His hair was plastered in little spider-webbing cracks across his forehead because it was so warm. There was a scorch mark on the latex at his wrist, which she regarded sluggishly, breathing in as deeply as she dared.

 She heard the curtains rustle. A murmur snatched at her ear. A snicker pricked her attention.

 “Shh.” Which was to warn her she shouldn’t move much.

 “Yeah, yeah.” His eyes flicked towards her wearily. “But hey, it’s usually unspoken with Jin, when I go on.”

 He nodded; a half-nod. A small breath escaped his lips, which were soft like melting clay, which were chilled with the unbearable numbness that comes when the heat kills all feeling. “I know. You’re done.”

 “Really?”

 “Yeah.” He taped a paper flower behind her ear. It didn’t stick. It was damp from his fingertips, carrying an odor like salt and heat. “Good luck eh? Break a leg.” A crescent smile as he straightened her spine for her, lethargically, as he quirked her hands onto her hips like a doll with wiry limbs. He was careful not to gouge her make-up, caked on so thickly like the heat was caked on too, which stuck to each knob in her spine snugly, which hugged her body tightly, and oozed.

 “Sure.” She shrugged her shoulders, tried to loosen her shoulder blades, which were sticking to one another like cake to a plate. “Alright.” She took a few revolutions around the room, taking breaths in-between peering from behind the thick curtain, which caught at her fingertips like velvet. Slipping through the yards of fabric, she sized up her opponents, a shimmering eye dragged back and forth. It was so warm, and she could feel waterfalls running down her spine. She shivered.

 “Don’t look back.” she heard, and she guessed the voice was lilting. She guessed that he was smiling, that his fists were clenching, unclenching. She smiled back, but not to him, and it was crooked, and as she took one last half-breath to steel her chest she cart-wheeling out onto shiny silver platforms, ignoring that he had been watching her the entire time with a lazy flickering eye and a lazy flickering heartbeat.

 The audience smelled like cinnamon buns and candle wax.