I called on Love once and Love came to me out of the morning fog, limping, loping, lumbering, ungainly and out of proportion, shoulders like mesas balancing on a tapering trunk, dead serpent arms, knuckles grazing the ground, dragging along behind it a useless atrophied limb that grew out of Love’s slender side.
Love’s narrow torso was covered in a dying, grey sort of moss. Dark viscera oozed from various wounds ancient and recently opened, coagulating in matted patches. A string of fluid trailed from Love’s sharp spade of a mouth to the ground, hooked needle-teeth stained, slitted eyes swollen and rheumy, sleep caked in the corners and clumped on its wiry and wayward lashes like solid snowflakes. The hulking figure of Love stood in front of me, huffing, hunched, defeated, its stance necrotic, every angle: elbow, knee, knuckle, gnawed at and gnarled, back arched and head hung so low it seemed in supplication, its wounds pulsing—ready to start suppurating—breaths deep and eyes averted, whispered rumble of maunderings of a frustrating sort, unintelligible and to no one in particular.
It was standing there swaying for so long that it started to get awkward, so I said, ‘Love, what the fuck? You look a mess!’
‘What?! This is me!’ The tragic thing said, without looking up.
Not knowing how to placate Love, I waited. Perhaps too long.
Between protracted sighing breaths it said, ‘You called and I came.’
I looked Love in the face sadly. Then Love ambled away with plunging, staggered steps, wincing as a beaver’s tail of matted hair growing from the back of its head slapped at the near-exposed spine beneath. The useless limb Love dragged got caught on a tree root and came away easily with a wet tear. Love left it there for me.
I took the limb home and kept it on my dresser for a while until it withered further and broke down, fibers getting all over the place, then I threw it away. But I’m still finding those fibers on the carpet and in other odd places. Even after all this time.
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