Cool Frog Adventures #1
Cool Frog vs. Shine Cockatoo
SHINE COCKATOO is fair; she is fair. Soft and sweet and endless, a sonnet given shape. She blesses me with her last cigarette, and I light it with a tiny plastic Cool Frog, myself in miniature, whose tongue is made of fire. I take a long, sumptuous puff and revel in the sensation, the alchemical reaction of smoke and Shine Cockatoo and being. I experience myself differently when I am around her, as if suddenly I am perfectly smooth, perfectly round, a pebble in a turbid sea. Or maybe I am like a pad of butter melting in the sun, deliciously. Or maybe feathers caught in a summer whirlwind, a fluttering swirl of sweet air and lilac tingles, lost in confusion, unable to separate self from other from image from self.
And she says:
Mein Vöglein mit dem Ringlein rot singt
Leide, Leide, Leide
like blood dripping from a wound.
She is from Jupiter, but I imagine her emerging from the salt and foam fully formed, like a Venus from the brush of an Old Master, and I imagine her strutting onto a sunny beach, glittering seawater clinging to her iron wings, sinuating around the pitched beaks of her chest, down her stomach, falling, falling, falling, and I imagine brilliant roses growing where the droplets kiss the sand, and I imagine the roses rapidly growing into long, delicate vines, a miracle, tangling around themselves and creating a dense thicket of roses, and I imagine myself and Shine Cockatoo in pitch darkness beneath the roses, the warmth of her body next to mine juxtaposed against the cool breeze shaking the roses, dropping honey-sweet petals on our heads, and I imagine the petals like falling stars in the night sky, and on each one I make a wish, until I am all out of wishes, and I want for nothing, and I cannot imagine anything else.
But she says:
Es singt dem Täubelein seinen Tod,
singt Leide, Leide, leide
like the last time you ever asked your mother to pick you up.
We lie together on a dingy bed in a dingy bedroom of a dingy apartment, Shine Cockatoo’s apartment. A contingent of insects (beetles?) crawl out from a hole in the wall next to the bed, disgustingly, and catch the sunset’s refraction in their shells. I put my hand on the faded paisley wallpaper, imagine the beetles approaching it, climbing onto my skin, biting, burrowing, consuming, such that the aggregation of me called me would be dispersed evenly among them. Imagine a mirror shattering on the ground. Do you now have one broken mirror or many jagged mirrors? How do you separate the elements of a thing from the thing itself? How small can the fragments of a mirror get before they stop being mirrors?
“Please don’t do this,” I say. “Please.”
I relax my arm, give it up to gravity and inertia and let it dangle heavy over the edge of the bed. With my other arm, I reach out to her, and she pulls away.
And she says:
Leide, Leide, Leide
like all the stars in heaven whispering about you behind your back.
I stare out the window into the absolute twilight and pretend that I am lying on the edge of the world, and I imagine rolling over, off into the void, and I hold the image of the night in my mind as I fall through layers of imagination as if breaking through a spiderweb labyrinth, and I do not blink, even when my eyes became so full of sunset that my head begins to ache, and that pain commingles with imagined nothingness into an almost narcotic moment of self-abnegation, a velvet labyrinth of sensation and spectacle and and memory and agony.
But it isn’t enough. I need more.
The best way to overcome pain is to overload the system.
I think about everything that makes me feel bad, particularly those things that relate to her, and I make the thoughts as brutal and cruel and true as I can, and I begin to cry, and, mixing jagged memories with overwhelming anxiety, I begin to retch, and I quickly cover my mouth with my hand, and I pull my hand away from my mouth and look at it, and I see little tadpoles in my hand sticky with snot, and I crush them quickly, before she can see, and I stare at the mess of juice and crushed flesh and stomach snot for a while, as if staring at a mirror, and, knowing no other way to elegantly discard it, I lick it clean.
“I’m disgusting,” I say. “I’m not going to be okay.”
How pathetic. Utterly pathetic. Even more disgusting than the snotty mess preceding it. We all have phlegm and spittle inside us; we don’t all have such mucky words, such mucid sentiment. What the fuck is wrong with me? Can’t I save myself a little dignity, at least.
And Shine Cockatoo says:
Zicküth, zicküth, zicküth
like a chick snotfully chirping, too weak to break its shell, caught unsteadily between birth and death.
“One last time. Just one more, I promise.”
And so she touches me. Her wings are cold, her feathers sharp. She smells like cigarettes and perfume. I look at her face as my hands move across her body, reading her as if a piece of erotic fiction. I watch a glittering bead of sweat develop on her brow, a star in the night, and I watch its descent down her face, delicately tracing her features. I lap at it as it rests on her beak , trying to know it, trying to know her.
This is what I like about sex, the full engagement of all the senses. Very few other entertainments offer the same opportunity for sensory overload,
for ego erasure,
for a few minutes lost in the paradise,
scrambling in the labyrinth of the other,
the phenomenon of Shine Cockatoo,
the ocean of Shine Cockatoo,
the salt and sink of Shine Cockatoo,
the taste of oysters and ozone on her beak,
the smell of flowery shampoo,
the warm touch of skin on skin,
the quaver in her voice,
the sight of her,
the moment of her.
I can feel myself leave my body
And my mind wanders to a beautiful place
where I am
and am not
here and everywhere
not doing this thing
But I am unable to maintain myself,
and I might think about ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛, but I don’t
and coitus is ceased.
The whole business of being a human is absolutely disgusting. Every second, every moment, every aspect from birth to death. I hate this and I hate her and I hate you.
I love her.
And she says:
zicküth
zicküth
zicküth
like an ortalan in brandy, drunk on angel lust.
And after, Shine Cockatoo walks to the television on her dresser and turns it on, and I, laying still on the bed, press my stomach with my hand, testing it. It is soft. It is soft. It is probably the softest thing I have ever felt, and I wish I could share that softness with someone, anyone who could appreciate it. I imagine I am guiding someone else’s hand to my soft stomachskin, imagine them cackling with wonder. So soft! Like a bunny! they would shout, as though it were unusual for a frog to have a soft stomach, because they would be so amazed that I existed at all, so grateful that I had shared myself with them.
They probably wouldn’t even need to love me. It would just be nice if someone really knew me, or wanted to know me, even if they didn’t particularly like me.
But Shine Cockatoo is insensate and numinous. She sits on the edge, and we look at the television screen and watch a pterodactyl monster burn holes in the sky:
And she says:
And she says:
And she says:
She doesn’t say anything.
Why doesn’t she say anything?
Am I really that bad?
What do you think?