TV Lullaby: Alternative Ending

When you spoke about her, I didn't realize you were speaking about you. Her brown curls were falling onto the shoulders of her Chanel suit, and you were sitting in a robe, watching TV, munching on peanuts. Abe once told me you have the memory of an elephant, and I imagined the peanuts sending energy that enhanced the connections in your brain, synapses filling with electricity and chemicals; I wondered if maybe behind the elephants' memory, there was a love of peanuts, tasty and salty, like your tears that I licked in the dark. My tongue was pink; your tears watered the roses of my lips, but salt kills flowers. You told me that yourself, one night, but I could not hear you over the TV, the music to which we had begun to live our lives, empty dinner-plates cleared of the leftover crumbs of conversation, scent of lasagna on your body, and an endless amount of robes - silk robes, chiffon robes, terrycloth robes covered in rainbows.

Her brown curls were falling onto her Chanel suit - white, with slight green at the fringes. "She loves someone else", you said. "How can you tell?" I asked. "The kiss was too long.", you said, and you looked like an elephant.

Abe was eating peanuts, holding my hand. "I don't know how you put up with her; she has the memory of an elephant", he said. "So?" I asked. He shrugged. "Sometimes love is about forgetting." "No, that's not love - that's just happiness". He laughed, and his lips tasted like wine. "You've been drinking again", I said. "So have you", he replied.

Amid the smell of lasagna and robes, silks robes, chiffon robes that you left that night, I wait for your body to fill the synapses.

The TV croons a static-filled lullaby, formed by electric connections I can not understand. I play with the remote, and the black box is filled with naked bodies. We stumbled across porn once. I was enthralled by the glistening thighs. "Change the channel", you said. So I did. But now I allow myself to watch the bodies wrestling each other, looking like scenes from a Greek amphora, painstakingly glazed onto the side by a kiln that burnt the potter’s hand. His wife did not hear him when he cried. She was too busy fucking the blacksmith.

The bodies on-screen are swift and graceful – but the kisses are too long.