Movie Night

In the garden, we saw a cat flex its body to take a shit. It watched us watching it. The awkwardness dissolved when there came the notorious sound of early morning traffic from its anus. In the cab back home, with the kind of self-assured poise we had seen the cat demonstrate, you opened two of my shirt buttons, unbuckled my belt. The night shifted moods. Saliva came running unabashed towards every milestone on that long tryst of a road. You said you wanted a mirror on the bedroom ceiling for a top-view of us making love. When the doorbell rang, I couldn’t find my clothes. Wrapped up in a blanket to hide my erection, I opened the door. A feather. A newspaper. An eviction notice. Things had a velocity I was struggling to keep up with. My coping mechanism was watching movies and going to the beach. On full-moon night to my surprise, the waves didn’t dare touch the rocks. The rare hare on the surface of the moon waned into extinction when you decided to leave the city. Who was I going to suffer for now? The river in the town dried up after I set my tongue to its water. It became in the day a graveyard of leaves, moonlighting seasonally as a bonfire alley. To blame for these disasters was the cursed heat of my mouth. When the leaves were burnt, their mint green veins melted into a rare iridescent ink by virtue of which most of the graffiti in the town was painted. There were anecdotes scribbled on the walls. One episode elucidated the time I waited for coffee, freezing under the rapid blades of the colossal ceiling fans at Goa airport’s boarding gates, when you called to wish: Happy Birthday. I was hearing your voice for the first time in years. Shivering, I mumbled—thank you. My birthday came three days later. Of course, we celebrated again.