A (very) short story by Paul D robertson.

Please feel free to print and read at your liesure.

Kisses
(Hallucinations for you, and oh, oh, for me.)

I am standing on a bridge in the middle of a railway station - there is rust all over the girders and the wind blows acrid in my face.

My hands are stretched out and clutching the splintered grey rails of the bridge and there is a feeling to them that will not pass. They are swollen and full of blood, but it is not the swelling that is placing sticky feet in the back of my mind and curling around my vision so that it is drawn to the. They feel that they are breaking apart - not breaking, but tearing. They have their tremor and their strength, but these things are real and matter to me as little as my hair soft around my face or the gulls crying pale and grey.

Each moment I feel them less and less though my mind is nowhere but inside their flesh.
There is the wood beneath my fingers, the detail of the dry skin paint and turpentine burned. There is the wood, there is its dryness and age, its count of human touches and memory. Stuttering and annulling its functions, my heart skips, breath rasps though the air is sea pure and good.

My hands. It is their coming apart that I feel. I have had this feeling before and my hands will still grab and touch and hold. I have used them since then to touch a woman's face and to raise their soft edges to the wet corners of my eyes.

They tear, they tear. It is what my touch tells me; my tactile sense. My vision lies, it LIES. I know in my twitching and unfaithful heart, I know, I know somewhere that my vision is right and my touch has betrayed me. It is the heart, bloody and old, that tells us secrets that we will believe.

Yes.

And my hands rip, silently, they come to pieces.

Pieces, oh pieces of my fingers have rebelled against their shape and form odd turning drops too large and red for rain that fall to the sand beneath the creaking bridge.
The fear blooms like blood in water in my heart. A gull cries, it wheels in the air. Its ignorance is staggering. I track its arc with my mind.

There is blood running from the wood beneath my fingers. It is thick. There is sand within its thickness, red now.

I have cut my skin on the rusted steel supporting the rail of the bridge. The pain is small, but it focuses my dark pulsing touch into something approaching something else that is right and extant. My hands no longer tear and fall in awful mimicry of  truth.
I hear the bones of my fingers click as I force them apart and away from their ugly desperate perch.

I lift my hand, tremor and unreality, before my eyes.

I move it, obeying me, to my mouth. I kiss the wound, with all the tender gentleness that I can find.

My lips feel the flesh and the wet return kiss of the blood.

This is real.

Accept this kiss as real.

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