Ananda's Elephantine: Chapter Nineteen

“You touch her, you die.”

Ananda has her head outside the window--her hair almost escaping her. Seventy five miles on a highway where the overpasses look like mammoths in distance. Miles of road where forests used to be. Now almost extinct. Avoiding checkpoints. Led Zeppelin on the radio. A bottle of Jack Daniels in the cup holder. Loathing the sound of how empty it is and how there is still fifteen miles until the next gas station appears. An eighth of Jack Herer is in the compartment—marijuana that is seventy five percent sativa, twenty five percent indica. Very cerebral high with trichomes that glisten like karats. Ananda does not know what any of this means, of course. The nature of trichomes. The genetics of a marijuana plant or its medicinal value. She does not smoke or die like I do. Drinks occasionally. Adores wine. Not an alcoholic. Has ridges in her lips whenever she is parched.

She is about as unprejudiced as a prostitute when it comes to literature. Can recite Nabokov verbatim now. By page and paragraph number. And will read until the sun sets like a cyst off the necks of the hillsides. Peculiar traits.

Eleven miles.

Finishing up telling her a story about when I was eight and how mother followed me as I disappeared into a cornfield. Crying and debating my safety. That I laughed, eluding her, as all children do, until she yanked me by my ear and told me,

stop running.

Held me like cotton.

Seven miles.

My eyes are a Cambodia red from exhaustion. Telling Ananda how my mother used to tell me a story about how my father was once lost in Siberia until some Turkic revolutionaries found him encapsulated in the remains of an ungulate that resembled an antelope. Kept warm by its rib cage.

Three miles.

I tell her how contagious loneliness is. How the wall listens when no one else does and how tall ceilings arouse creative inspiration. Telling her how the branches of the trees near the roadside resemble fallopian tubes. Detailing how long her laughter lasts. Indecisive on the reason why our romance is a broken one.

People talk humorously with a gun in their mouth. It is almost another language. Almost. I killed a man today. In front of Ananda. Brought a handkerchief drenched in chloroform and pushed it into his mandibles until he fell into an unconscious stupor. Woke up with duct tape around his orifice. Put a bullet into his head for not being able to recite to me the Oxford definition of rape and consensual. Splitting the cranial vault until the flesh looked like the cross-sections of fig. Ananda and I left the woman's lavatory with the man's wallet. Two hundred dollars in cash. Three credit cards. Petroleum that was courtesy of the cadaver. Fled like echoes toward the nearest town where we swapped cars.

Ananda surrendered her pelvis to me that night. Taking one and half minutes to wipe the cum from her mouth. Taking me thirty seconds to wipe her cum from mine.

Once again, I am left unsure of whether she offered herself to me because I saved her life

or an excuse to hold me.

Knowing very well I will

otherwise

push her away.