Not for Sale
Short Fiction
So many people are trying to profit from his death. It makes me feel sick. I’m allowed two hours of Internet a day and I have to confess that I do spend most of it on EBay. I love to bid at the last second, to swoop in and win. You can’t beat that feeling, well at least not cleanly you can’t. Ever since they told me he died I’ve seen so much stuff on EBay that’s just worthless crap. Who would want to buy an old concert ticket stub from a show they didn’t ever see? Where’s the joy there? Who would want to buy a piece of someone else’s life? No real experience to speak of, just a paltry little slip of paper saying they did something they didn’t. It’s a tiny fraud and I hate it.
No one really knows the story of he and I. Of course, everyone in here thinks I’m crazy, but that’s just the medication. It stops me thinking clearly and I can’t remember the details like I used to. But I was there at those concerts, living those moments when those stubs meant something. Not like now, years later, when moronic, misguided bidders are trying to get a contact high from the past. Well they can have all that shit, but they can’t have my memories. They’ve tried to take them, but they can’t. They’ll always be just his and mine.
I met him outside a little club in London. I wish I could remember the name of it, but I can’t. They tell me he was in Russia then, so it isn’t possible, but fuck them. They’ll never understand what we had and I don’t care if they believe me or not.
I was waiting outside after a concert with some of my friends. It was bitterly cold and I was wearing the loveliest pink mac with a fake fur collar and cuffs. He just strolled up to me and said, through a cloud of cigarette smoke, “That’s some coat.” Then he smiled at me, all crooked, stained dominos bookended by funny little fangs and I swear the whole bottom of me dropped out, but I slipped my arm through his and walked with him to his car like it was the most natural thing in the world. That’s how we began.
I didn’t leave his bed for days, but we never slept. The following days turned into nights so quickly, and we sustained ourselves purely on lust and cocaine. In the most crowded of places and sailing on a sea of faces I was the magnet to his metal, and we always found each other at the end of the night and collapsed easily into each other.
I imagine it was hard not to be jealous of what we had. It was unusual and though neither of us were possessive, it was nice to sometimes have him to myself. Over time this happened less and less frequently, but I coped. On the day he left I went with him to the train station to wave him off. They try to tell me that I hurt him, but I never would. They said that I hid in the crowd and that he didn’t know me, but they don’t understand. I could draw his body for you perfectly even now. Not an inch of it wasn’t explored by my hands, my mouth and memorized.
They tell me that I’m delusional, that there’s something wrong with my mind and that it’s not true, but he’s been to see me. Of course he couldn’t come during visiting hours, the other crackpot residents in this fucking asylum would have mobbed him. The guy in the room across from me killed a young girl and kept her head in his refrigerator. You can’t have a rock star around people like that.
He did come, though. He came and he waited outside until it got dark. Once everyone else was tucked up in bed I saw him under the streetlight outside, smoking a cigarette and looking exactly like he did the night I escorted us to his car. I pounded on the window until it cracked. He finally looked up at me and I was so happy to see him I put my hand straight through the glass. From four floors up I saw him smile and I wanted to touch him so badly then. It was such a primal, visceral feeling that I had to keep going.
It hurt at first, but only a little as I reached my arm the whole way out toward him. The rough shards along the windowsill cut me from the heel of my hand to my armpit and it made me feel faint, but he was reaching up to me too. The blood pumped out of me at such a rate that my head swam. Blood rained down on him and he didn’t run away, but held his face up as if to shower in it. It was terribly erotic even though I could feel my heartbeat weakening in my ears as the life pumped out of me and baptized him.
They pulled me away from the window screaming his name. The fuckers sedated me for two days. When I woke up I had the most fantastic wound, all stitched up and throbbing and they told me he was dead. Impossible really. I know what I saw. My beautiful scar will always remind me that he came back for me. You can’t fucking buy that on EBay.
more by LEE ANNE HILL
photograph by Jonathan Denney
