Cadburry Crème Eggs from Satan

by Matthew Dexter

You touched me and you know that you did, though you will never admit it I can see it in your eyes. When we were younger, behind the shed, you made me get naked and spread against the wood as if being arrested. You searched me and now I can see it in your left outer sclera where that bloodshot stain remains, broken veins connecting with unchained memories of cold sticky fingers. You still suck those lollypops, right? Those same ones we used to steal from the corner store when your father used to beat you senseless that summer? Do you know it drives me crazy to this day when doctors stick the stethoscope in my ears?

You lie naked on top of me in the boardroom after the Easter party and all I can think about are those chocolate Cadburry crème eggs and that fake grass everywhere. Can you remember the smell of fresh grass stains and those baskets of eggs, burns on my knees from dragging you around that afternoon behind the lawnmower before the hurricane? Your naked flesh erases the past like number two pencil erasers on the granite desk you rub yourself down, chew my fingers in an attempt to silence your latent desires.

Do you remember that fire when the storm passed and your father returned to the house with one hand? The other was severed in the shed. Your mother blames it on Jameson and his bad eye, but you knew it was something more.

“To keep me from touching again,” he said to the wife before he collapsed.

Your mother held the gaping wound with her apron, begging god for salvation. She was naked underneath that white cloak and you watched from behind as she cried over the arm and slapped his face. He fainted, but you knew the ambulance would never get there in time, there was too much blood and you knew he must have waited a while in the shed when you found that half-empty bottle of Budweiser and the half-eaten chicken sandwich with the bloodstains on the bread.

“Hold me tighter,” you say.

The room spins and the hollow coconut bunny breaks into a million pieces against my skull as you lick your fingers and stick them inside me, not my ears but someplace more sacred and then the matrix closes in and the secretary rings, a waitress walks in, disappears into the doorway of the private bathroom, returns with frozen margaritas with salt on the rims of the glasses as the walls close in and our eyelids flicker beneath the fluorescent lighting as we travel back forty years to that summer island mystery when the world would migrate in the direction of dead birds falling from the sky.