Ladylove

• Sonya Frossine, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2016

I was reminded of you after I saw your name, hastily scratched in black ink into the wall of a bathroom stall. It was lost among lopsided, foreign love letters and crude depictions of Nazi death camps.

It was one of those cafes, you know?

Where the walls aren’t black or white because they’ve been pasted over with silvery, alien faces which glow against ocean-washed concert lights. Everything moves with a cloud of dust or smoke, from the untouched, oddly extravagant bottles dancing at the top shelf of the polished, wooden bar to the tired bodies strewn over the velvet couches. The only glimpse of life among them are the glimmers of light strangling their wrists and lining their dewy eyes.

In there, it can easily feel like I’m at someone’s house, but it’s somehow impossible to determine whether it’s one of a close friend or briefly met stranger.

The stinging stains of lemon juice, acidic against smooth, unspoilt skin, remind me of your dripping, sour candy lips, and how you would draw me in with that glinting, green apple grin. The broken glass, scattered on the floor, make me think of your see-through nails, and how I used to let you drag them down from my raw, red shoulder to my hips, curling over to claw through my thighs.

The low-hanging lights screech purple and blue slivers of light, tangling into each other like cheap chains of jewellery until I can’t pull one apart from another. It reminds me of your nude lipstick spilling into my nervous pink one, hastily plastered onto my face days earlier in an attempt to impress you.

The disgustingly sugary cakes they serve are inedible to me, because all I can see when I watch a stylish waitress bring one over to another unsuspecting girl is the way you used to feed me, leaning over to push a dented spoon into my mouth, and how you’d smile so knowingly afterwards.

You’re the one that took me there, purposely tangling your ring-wrapped hand into mine, dragging me over to that loveseat with fabric stretched so thinly that it would rip to expose the white, fluffy flesh underneath. We were there – together, remember? - soaked through with water and wine, hair thrown back in languid stretches as you would strum your shiny, chrome fingers in your lap.

All I could see during the hours spread between dusk and dawn were your eyes, baby blue, framed between two white teeth. They would press into me, leaking through my skin, filling my head with ribbons of you until I couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, couldn’t write anything but your name, no matter where I went.