The Daily Rot of Smiling Faces
by Sean Kilpatrick

   I am rotting feet first. My stink awakens me afternoons. I work late and spray my shoes with Lysol every day. I can't afford a doctor. There is no cure for decay.

   Delilah doesn't sleep here anymore. She said she couldn't. We piled all my shoes in the closet. Body spray deodorant sits on the table next to her old side of the bed. We'd be talking - and she sprays me. In the middle of a conversation and I keep going. Or we're fucking and she has to grab the chemicals. Months of perfumed sting inoculating my mucus.

   Now, Delilah says, she sleeps at her friends'. I know at least on two occasions she has lied about which friend. When she visits me, she is distant, irate. She smells me under the antiseptic cloud and I can't tell if she's annoyed at the incurability of the stench or the fact that she still feels obligated to visit.

   The skin on my legs is raw. The peeling, red, pie-crust texture of my flaking, atrophied calves, down to my heels, both agape with lesions, cannot be gangrene. I think skin has to start out alive to become infected.

   No one says hello. Living is my new solitude. I am avoided every where. My boss is too embarrassed to plug his nose in front of me and stays in his office till I clock out. I am cynical enough to enjoy this, but I miss Delilah.

   "You should love someone for who they are, regardless of how they smell." She chuckled half-heartedly the first time I said that.

   Delilah is wearing her jean skirt. It tents the shadowed concaves of her knees. My feet are wrapped in a towel wet with chemicals. Tufts of incense curl up from every table in the room. She's holding a burning stick under her nose. The smoke parts, licking along the soft bangs of her dyed-red hair. It's been weeks since I've touched her. I turn away from my feet, extending an arm. She recedes into the chair like a frightened child. Her lip curls. I'm upset, but understand.
She gives me an over-dramatized, pitying glance and begins to undress. The arrangement is I jack off on her body. I will, glad my cock still works, telling myself I'm lucky, forcing yesterday elsewhere, when I found a black hair growing underneath my foreskin. Like an eyelash jutting underneath the purple cornea, if my glans could see. Touching the hair made my spleen quiver. When I yanked it, brown pus dotted out. I try not to imagine glass flecks messaging my urethra.

   I'm shaking as she takes her panties down. Feeling three sharp, bristle-thick hairs stabbing my palm, I tell her to stop.

   "What?" She kicks up her pin-striped underwear, catches it, doesn't want something that was on my floor brushing against her crotch. "You don't have all night. I got to work early."

   I'm close to tears. She notices, but says nothing. Naked, she looks at me like I need to pull myself together before she walks out. To her horror, I move to hug her, then stop myself, arms stupidly halfway outstretched.

   "Let's go swimming." I manage.

   Our faces congregate in slow realization. Maybe it’s safe for her to touch me submerged in chlorine. Neither of us had considered. We're horny enough to take the risk.

   Climbing the steel gate at midnight, panty-clad Delilah waiting behind me, the small, almost metallic, spikes pierce my foreskin, brushing against my swim trunks. I land, crouched in pain. Delilah says something and she's already over the gate, cradling me, her arms soft and warm. I needed this: love negating self-preservation.

   I say, "I love you." Then she drops me. She tip-toes into the pool, sticking her arms under. She looks over her shoulder at me, half-guilty. Her face is a pale reflection of what must be the moon or some streetlamp through the tree branches kiddy-corner.

   "You're a mermaid." I say, limping slowly toward the pool.

   Her silhouette wears the enviable darkness close as skin. Her floating body glimmers in the oil-colored water. She curls one finger. I lower myself, one hand in my trunks, picking desperately, rescuing my own impaled skin.

   "Just take them off." She says, grinning.

   I kick the trunks off and tug my foreskin. It rolls back easy because of the erection.

   Swimming to her, I am giddy. I am laughing and making pig sounds with my throat.

   Delilah says, "Retard."

   I grab her, under water. She presses tight against me, pinning my cock to my abdomen, little three-tonged pinch from the mohawk, but it feels so good I ignore the pain. I curl my hips against her, dry humping in weightless slow motion. I moan; she giggles and says my name.

   Delilah rolls her ballet-dancer hips up and down my swelling cock. Each time I'm poked and enjoying it. We're fused, the length and pressure of wet, sliding arms and elbows and tummies and legs, our feet curving around each others'. There is no smell under water. There is only orgasm, chlorine and her hair dye. She bites my neck, drums her teeth along my shoulders, bucking against me. I see her panties floating next to us and feel the smooth lips of her shaved vagina climbing my cock as she rises higher and higher above me, her wondrous upturned breasts cumshot of glinting moon.

   She comes down screaming. Delilah levels herself backward, throwing her shoulders for the edge of the pool, a small, dark circus-tent of blood folding upward from the water. The only thing between us. She screams again, hatefully, accusingly, and holds the wound between her thighs.

   I let myself sink to the bottom of the pool. Looking up at her through the blackened green of my pus, our blood, and the night, Delilah is not beautiful. My lungs inflate like two over-worked balloons, grappling for release, but I refuse to come back up. If this is some kind of revenge, I'm a –

   "I'm a prick." I say out loud to Delilah, though it sounds nothing like what I mean with huge bubbles shot-gunning from my mouth. Laughing, I begin to choke.

   "What about AIDS? Syphilis? Herpes?" I continue; arms outstretched defensively, blubbering more globs that trail vertically to the water's asymmetrical ceiling.

   The cacophony of small ticks rocketing in my ears has me feeling unstoppable.

   "I could have been unoriginal and played for keeps. I could have killed you slow, like a career."

©2004 Sean Kilpatrick

Sean Kilpatrick has been published online previously at HYPERLINK and printed in Mused Magazine.