photo by David Naylor
Alicja Madloch’s fiction and poetry have been published in Almost 5Q, The Apprentice Writer, Black Fox Literary Magazine, BRICKrhetoric Literary & Visual Arts Journal, Canvas Literary Magazine, Cuckoo Quarterly, Pomona Valley Review, Teen Ink Online and Vademecum Magazine. She participated in National Novel Writing Month in 2013 and 2014 and is co-editor-in-chief of Prisms.
Happy Valentine’s Day
He likes to eat me up with his eyes and place his hands on my body. He likes to feed me with his fingers, the hair on his knuckles tickling my upper lip. He’s undeniably infatuated and clings to me when we’re together with a hidden urgency; a musty scent seems perpetually stretched out across my bed sheet, a reminder of him.
I can smell him there even after he leaves in the early hours. Sometimes I just pretend to be asleep as he dresses in the dark. He’s gotten into the habit of tracing a hand down the landscape of my body. Up and down and into the crevices. He now does this always before walking out the door. The morning means cologne as he leans down, pressed and gelled and ready, me still tender and unprepared for the day. I think he likes that.
He comes by without the comfort of a routine, but every day without fail he arrives at my doorstep. Rapunzel let down your hair. His voice in my intercom. Every night I invite him inside and sit across the table from him. Some days I hear the call by noon, other nights my breath quickens—from what I could not tell you. Maybe he’s done with me? Maybe— the word ‘release’ comes to mind: like I’m a handfed bird, like independence is an illusion with him. But then he’s always there.
Tonight he brought me flowers. Roses. I hate flowers. Flowers are my dead grandmother. Lying rotting parallel to her. Lying rotting on my grandfather’s glass table, the water filthy. Disgustingly sweet air. They were wrapped in translucent and pink paper that crunched when I took them from him. He watched me scurry to find a home for them.
“They need water.” I nodded.
“The reservation is for eight.”
Twenty minutes. Timing is everything. He showed me my bedroom.
7 minutes. He’s fixing his tie with those hair-covered knuckles, a gold ring glinting. Something else in my hand is also glinting behind him.
Then just Egyptian cotton. And a new pattern. And one girl, alone in her apartment. Free for the time being.