Spring. Clean.

“I heard you like the bad girls, honey.  Is that true?” – Video Games, Lana Del Rey.

It’s like a scene from a fifties’ film.  Beautiful boy, beautiful girl.  Health and life exuding from every pore. Outside the convenience store on Main Street, the western sky is sunset gold.  The birds chatter before their bedtime and the traffic drones sleepily.

Donny and Honeysuckle.  Looking into each other’s eyes.  She means it and her regard burns. Honeysuckle doesn’t notice, but Donny is looking slightly past her.  He’s got things on his mind.  Future jobs, shit to do.  She leans forward and rubs his nose with hers, it brings him back to now and he smiles.

They’d met by the creek; of course they had.  Donny had seen the girl in her polka dot sundress, her angel tattoos and he’d asked if he could take a picture of her on his phone.  She’d agreed eventually and he’d got her to pose, albeit shyly, by the big rock the kids called Tarantula.  She’d cradled her face with her hands and he’d noticed the thinness of her fingers.  He’d kept the picture, caught the girl.  He’d promised himself, promised his God, he’d not get involved with anyone again.  His life was too feral, too disconnected; but for Honeysuckle he’d made an exception.

Some boys drift by on their bikes, weaving up the sidewalk.  Shooting the breeze, caught in the middle of the endless banter that passes for conversation when you’re fourteen.  One of the boys catches sight of Donny and Honeysuckle.  “I’ll get me a slice of that, bro”, he says to Donny.  Donny flips him the bird and inclines his head for another kiss.

Honeysuckle’s hair is flame copper in the last of the sun and she brushes it away from her eyes. The early-spring evening means cold comes quickly and Donny imagines being wrapped in her hair.  He wonders what it tastes like.  He’s certain it will have a salty quality to it. Salt and the sweetness of icecream.

*

“Stand up straight at the foot of your love.  I’ll take my shirt off” – The National.

Donny’s dog-tired, but he’s nowhere near the end of the clean.  Looking round the room, he’s figuring another couple of hours.  Maybe three. 

The room is so hot and this is not helping things. It’s not helping things at all.  He’s got all the things he needs – mop, bucket, rags and dusters.  He’s had to open the windows, which he doesn’t like doing ideally, but the smell and the heat has made it a necessity.  He surveys the room again, wishing people would just be a little less rash, a little more careful.

He’s barely had time to change.  In fact, he’s left his shirt on under his overalls.  It’s one of his favourites – soft denim, many times laundered.  He makes up his own lyrics, singing them a little self-consciously as he mops the floor– “working that shirt, working that shit.”

Through the open window, insects from the woods fly into the cabin in a buzzy tornado.  They stick to the blood on the floorboards that he’s not gotten to yet.  The little, black specks futilely trying to escape its sticky flood make him feel kind of nauseous.

He decides he better take his shirt off after all and draping his overalls by the kitchen sink, he unbuttons it and hooks it on the knob of a cupboard door, intuitively avoiding the sea grey, spatter of brain.

He’s got to work quick now because he’s expected to be done by nightfall.  He’s an anti-ghost – in and out before dark, taking away what haunts a place.  Leaving nothing, but a faint smell of bleach.  He’s thinking about last night in Honeysuckle’s bed. Surrounded by her cushions and her cats, her pale skin, vulnerable behind her tattoos.  She’s so young, he’d thought.  About as bad as one of his ex-wife’s puppies.

From the plug-hole of the sink, Donny scrapes out a mass of bloodied hair.  He puts it in the bucket from which he continues to sluice off the gore from the floorboards.  Strands of the hair remain, trapped under the softened nails of his water-spongey hands, and he wonders whether he should continue seeing Honeysuckle – knowing this continuance is a selfish act only.  Maybe I’ll kiss her again, he thinks.  Maybe I won’t.  

*

“I’ll explain everything to the geeks” – The National.

Under cover of the chores, Honeysuckle thinks about Donny.  She’s got time to do this as she’s moving around from room to room of her mother’s house.  Anyone watching her (and no-one is as she’s home alone) would merely see purposeful, determined action as she sweeps rugs and dusts ornaments.  God, how Honeysuckle hates her mother’s collection of porcelain bells.  Displayed in various corner cabinets and tables throughout the house, their dust-free mass an indifferent substitute for a life well-lived.

Not that she entirely blames her mother.  Everybody has to have something and for Honeysuckle it’s her fifties’ shtick.  The ‘do, the dresses, wide hips and red, red lips.  Donny had said he’d loved her vibe, that it was classy.

She’s not heard from him for five days now.  No call, no text.  She knows she could get in touch with him, but she hasn’t dared. The grip of potential rejection holds her stomach rigid, and she almost thinks that knowing for certain what she suspects to be true, won’t make it any worse.

She’s going to clean the downstairs’ bathroom next, but first she goes down into the basement to pick up a scrubbing brush and the bleach.  In the bathroom, she sets about the shower cubicle and toilet pan with feigned gusto. 

There’s no natural light in the bathroom and the electric light shines sickly yellow through the cut-glass shade. She doesn’t want to look at herself in the mirror – she can only picture what her head looks like next to Donny’s – and he’s not here.

What Honeysuckle does instead is take the scrubbing brush and drag it over the skin of her arms and neck and face.  It gives her a kind of vicious relief and she smiles sadly.

Next, she takes the bottle of bleach and leaning over the shower cubicle, she pours it over her hair.  She feels it infiltrate her scalp with an uncompromising fizz.  Then the prickling starts as she shuts her eyes against the fumes.  Half opening them a minute or so later, she’s curious to see her hair hanging in lank, pale orange strands.  “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair”, she hums to herself. “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.”

*