Carnival

I don’t know why I feel so much for men who would kill me in a heartbeat.
Or why I fill my dreams with shaved heads and gray, shark eyes.
With the smell of his steel-toed leather boots. And the taste of his salty skin as he presses me against the wall, knife at my throat.
Looking directly in my eyes, cracking jokes at my skin color,

My ancient gypsy blood.

My caravan who has long since left me. 

Is it the charisma in their gray eyes? Leering faces? Is it the heated glance when the word “gypsy” flies out of someone’s mouth? Is it because I’m a woman?
But as I’m pinned against the wall, I dream of how our babies would look like (pink flesh with brown eyes or brown flesh with gray eyes) and then I remember to fight (tooth and nail).
That smell of leather turns into the smell of earthworms.
Underneath my tongue I taste cotton candy- sticky sweet and oh so very soft. Soft like this shark’s skin.
His forearm against my throat while he ever so lightly touches my breasts. Before he will kill me it ends with a touch.

Molestation?

But once my eyes lock with his- brown meets gray, (As I get older a ring of blue surrounds my iris. Does that make me Aryan? Pseudo-Aryan?) he tries to fight what he knows is inside us both.

Butterfly.

I wonder what it would be like if his hair grew long and turned gray. His hair would drown his eyes; it would drown my insomnia.
I should be quaking in my skirt.

But I’m not.

If he wants to kill me, so be it. He can dish it out but he can’t take it. If it was opposite, he would run for his life. But I’m pinned up against a wall.

Not him. He who smells of leather and earthworms. He who tastes like salt and cotton
C
A
N
D
Y.

His friends rustle through my bag. Their white pasty fingers picking up my money- my cigarettes- my lipstick.
The white fingers wrapped around my throat aren’t pasty, his are crème-colored; (M I L K Y  V A N I L L A. We could make our own ice cream flavors) he breathes his cotton candy breath on to my sweat-beaded face.

I’m smitten.

Is this Stockholm syndrome? No, they have to kidnap me; right now they are going to kill me.
Something flickers in his shark eyes. Recognition that I’ll die. But he’s not thinking that. He knows something that I don’t.

Candy, candy, candy- I want candy. The candy he has. The candy that was in his mouth, at the carnival moments, before his gang pulled me in to the brick corridor. I wish I was his candy.

He’s not thinking clearly as he lets me go.

Never fear.

He roughly pushes me. The rocks, the floor, it’s all hard, cutting in to my
S
K
I
N

I bleed.

His nostrils flare in disgust as my impure blood bubbles to the surface of my p(s)alms.
“Shark eyes,” I tremble, “Please don’t take my things.”
He tosses my purse at me. He keeps a few things and pulls his friends to follow him.

Cotton candy- it was blue. Maybe pink. I desperately want him near me. Cotton candy, shaved head- all of him.