Elissa's House

They key is hung on a long piece of string and slipped up on top of the door frame. Her house is brushing shoulders with the street. The steps up to the door are recessed. You step up from the footpath and then there is a little climb to the door. You can tell that they are all out of the house when the bathroom window is shut. It is like a secret signal. Nobody home.

I find a stick and stretch up with it till it hooks on the string. They key tumbles and I slip it easily into the lock before easing it back onto the stick and tucking it onto the ledge. I have picked a tuft of wild jasmine. A calling card, and I feed the snakey stem of it into the key hole.They will know that I have visited. They will know that I am alive and well and the news of this will travel down the line and they will call off the search, if there ever was a search.

I step into the darkness of the corridoor and my skin is bathed in the dark green of a deep sea dive. The mahogany panels have been lifted from an old steam train. The green stained glass if from a church. The pressed metal ceiling is original, and the rust is sweeping across it like a fungal infection. The house smells like Chris, like linseed oil and turps. The shouse smells like my childhood and I pause for a moment to breathe in the memory and find that I am teary for the first time since I ran away from my life. I drop my clothes in the hallway out of habit. This is what we do, when we enter this house. Clothes in the hallway and then i walk straight out tot he little walled garden and the 8 foot fy 8 foot swimming pool that was once used to wash bodies. The morgue is a home. I know this as I slip over the edge of the pool and feel the brush of fallen frangipani flowers against my shoulders. I am welcomed by the water. I bob at the surface and when I reach out my fingers I brush the place where that one girl was sitting when I bobbed in front of her and eased her legs apart and tasted chlorine and the mushroomy lick of her vulva. My toes tip the place where I was held with my head balanced on the concrete as the man pulled my hips down and strugled to push his penis inside me through the scrape of acid water.

Sex in the kitchen on the table and struggled through on canvass deck chairs. When I drag myself from the pool there is sex under every wet step.