Mad Libs

by Brianna McNish

X tastes like Y’s baby-doll and X isn’t afraid of me trying to finger out his variable. I try out this movie, the one with these dresses swallowing up the whole screen and a prince there who isn’t even a prince who likes pulling apart ballroom dresses like sugar­cotton to make his own. It’s a romantic montage with kissing, stringy music, the kind of movie someone strangles someone else on the couch over, but X doesn’t move. X cuts himself open with shibboleths of Hemingway. X presses cigarettes to his throat. In silence, I watch his lungs pour out from his soft sides, oozing puss, glass, these glittery gems of black dust, when I pick at the hole spewing lungs with my hair pin, he whispers tiredly, M m, baby, I think there’s a draft, you know, some sort of reckoning? I pick harder and he moves a little, stretches his arms behind his back and sinks into a melon soggy in late­winter heat. His insides gone, he looks a little thinner, a former shell of himself. X, he doesn’t say a word as I wipe away his blood. X doesn’t say anything as I rush to grab my beginner’s sewing kit from the old office, the kind with a set of measured needles. So I stitch him back together: a stringless puppet, a body that reminds me of a switchblade. I think of kissing him like it’s the movie again, and X will pick apart the cotton of my dress and say, B aby, it’s yours, take it—except he still doesn’t say a word. I wonder if I drive up north X’s spine it might incite a little action. If I crash in the middle of the intersection, on the span of X’s shoulder blades, he’d feel it. If I keep kissing on his shoulder, his neck, he’ll move.