Noah

I remember the nights when you held me in the darkness. Now I lie alone, the straw smelling of sweat and semen. But I know that you have not lost it with me, this life-force, and then you complain of feeling depleted. Wash your hands, you pervert, and take a shower! Your skin smells of horse-shit, and you no longer let me run my fingers through you hair. Thunder peels down the sky, but I can not see the lightning, stuck here in the wooden box that floats. I turn over, praying the straw will smell better on your side of the mattress. It doesn't. I lay awake listening to the chatter of monkeys and the lonely cries of the nightingales, wishing you could hear my silence.

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"Camels are so not sexy", you said to me, when I came to your house for the first time. All the other suitors had horses. But over time, our lives became steady like the camel, you and I, long and drawn, safe and not needing much water. I always feared the day you would long for the swiftness of camels, and when the flood came, I was releived - we were the only ones left now, you and I, in this wooden floating tomb.

But I have seen the way that your eyes turn down when I walk into our cabin, so I have chosen only to return once your eyes are closed. Are you lying there tonight, dreaming? Or are you thinking of the many men you could have chosen, and the freshness of their cold corpses? I rub my hand against the camels fur, feel the knobs of his humps, hard and comforting. My palm slowly crawls into the spot where you hands once dwelt, and when it is over, the white stain on the wood is small. I will clean it up tomorrow, with the camel droppings. I will drop both into the waters that have learned to drown our silence, and it is only the rustling of the straw between us that reminds me that you are real, that once your body proved to me the reality of my body. I have replaced your kisses with a bucket of camel droppings.

Couldn't it at least have been horse-shit? Camels are so not sexy.