The bartender has the hollow eyes and faded lips of a recovering drug-addict, she’s playing absentmindedly with a plastic rosary, a disproportionate Christ on a tiny fluorescent cross. The woman seems to draw breath to speak but she says nothing and I pay and walk out inhaling ancient stone and melancholy shades of concrete, finding a vague comfort in the geometry of my lurid birthpalce. Ophelie has company but she’s so drunk she comes to open the door anyway. She’s naked. Vaginal secretions on her tongue when she kisses me on the threshold, I’m not sure she’s even recognized me. But a heartbeat later she whispers my name and leads me in the apartment’s heavy smell of pot melting with stale air, with sweat and the cheapest wax money can buy. Her arm is slick under my fingertips, unnaturaly hot but it could be just my imagination. I was sad and Sibella came to console me: she points to a black transparent shirt over an otherwise naked body, skinny beyond belief. I’ve never seen the other girl before, no reason to be surprised anyway. I take off my snow-covered coat, it falls on the floor in a humid heap of melting crystals. Sibella is giving a drunk blowjob to a bottle of wine, red fluid dripping from her chin, her erected nipples. Her eyes focus on me shortly but it’s obvious that what she sees is not of great interest for her. She smiles around the glass bottle’s neck and I sense her eyes on Ophelie’s naked body like disincarnate fingers. A moist whisper in my ear: wanna join us?, taking awkwardly my hand and placing it on her wet, warm cunt. My fingers, tempted to enter her already open flesh, remain on the surface, just rubbing her somewhat shyly. I don’t know why but I shake my head and answer: maybe later. Doesn’t matter, she says with a blurred laugh, shrugging. She staggers away from me, I lick her smell off my fingers and I watch her crawl on the dirty Oriental rug, laughing again, raising her hazed stare on Sibella and murmuring something about being her bitch, her slave. The other girl produces a coarse giggle, the bottle slips from her hand and falls on the floor without breaking. Scarlet stains on wood, a candle extinguishes sizzling in wine. She lets Ophelie lick her feet and suck her toes, swallows her small ringed tits and slips two skeletal fingers in her wet cunt, up her ass and laughter is slowly substituted by moans and low cries. And my cock throbs painfully in my pants and I watch them, fascinated by the strange, surreal grace of their drunken movements, drinking myself sick: Sibella astride Ophelie releases her bladder, an acrid spray of faded piss on her chest and belly and then she bends to kiss her, to whisper things in her mouth, spit dribbling from her lips mixed with words I cannot grasp. I count Sibella's ribs, the all too visible pattern of bones and junctures under the skin. The burning in my crotch is barely sufferable and when I look more closely I notice she’s wearing a grotesque wig. Later (Ophelie asleep on the floor, the neck of the bottle still stuck in her swollen cunt, an instrument whose use has been voluntarily forgotten) Sibella dresses in black and grayish rags. She caresses my cheek with a crust-covered hand and I stare at her thin figure as she walks out the door, strange meat out in the snow. Gently I remove the bottle from Ophelie’s flesh and when I hear its soft, moist smack I ejaculate in my underwear. Uncaring of the stink of piss and wine, I kiss her forehead and caress her damp hair and beside her face I place the tin box that jingles with razor-blades. A morbid suggestion, the first thing she will see when she’ll open her eyes. Before I leave, I steal one of her dolls laced with black lacquer and hide it in a pocket of my coat. Milan is an inhospitable landscape of cold embers. I light a cigarette and wonder how soon the snow will steal from me the smell I sense on myself, on my clothes, on my hair, in my mouth. The shack is empty, a sanctuary of neglect, and I caress the splintered wood with the back of my hand leaving traces of Ophelie’s taste like a votive offering. I walk out in the white steel glow of the street, sad thoughts of redemption swirling in my head along with piss and spit and red wine. A stray dog wandering on the sidewalk shoots me a suspicious glance, sniffs something in the air, disappears in an alley of icy dust and garbage. You smell strange, I whisper to myself, catching my darkening reflection in a closed shop’s window. And then I start walking, headed home. (© Matteo Curtoni 2008) ink.html

a ballad of

strange meat