Wolf

I remember her little coal dress, silk skin, sky high heels, heart-black curls. She skipped around the party, innocent, pitch seething in her eyes under the dance floor lights. She wanted a ride home, her house stood on Hunters Way next to the sycamore tree. They say witch graves lay beneath those boughs. She sat on my Chevy’s leather seats, her lavender perfume staining them purple. I remember brown eyes and cherry tomato lips smiling at me, a fishing lure. Closer, yet farther she pulled me. I knew better than that, a strange girl with strange eyes. Outside her log cabin, I spied through the four-square window pane an old woman sitting by a fire, gnawing meat from the bone. I remember the last four digits of her number: 6860, a kiss for luck on the ride home. Fireflies swarmed in the air and the life of my skin seeped from my toes. My life, a gold essence, drained from my mouth as her lips drifted. I remember nothing, she enslaved my eyes. I woke in hell, her kiss branded cherry blossoms on my lips, my bones dismantled.