Veins

Earlier that night, we cut the electricity like the Khmer Rouge did in Phnom Pehn. We smashed our television, shredded electrical cords and removed the big hands and little hands from alarm clock faces. Outside, millions of fireflies were popping their light fuses before crashing into our lawn. The two of us took a seat on the porch swing and watched the unburied mass grave of fireflies grow into a small mountain untouched with quicklime. Fishing boats began flowing from our eyes downstream the Mekong River towards the aftermath of a typhoon ripping through the South China Sea. A few firefight reports echoed in between murmurs we meant to scream but couldn’t even whisper. The tips of your fingers touched. The veins in the palms of your hands connected to a tiny heart I buried years ago somewhere in a clearing near the border of Cambodia and South Vietnam. I didn’t even notice the headlights distant down the street. I concentrated on the shadow cast by your wet jaw line swallowing the swing chain. I didn’t want to remind myself of the black out you had after the doctor wouldn’t let us see the remains. We tried to turn off the wounds, to turn off the sex, to tune out the prayer help line phone number mom stuck on the refrigerator before she left but the headlights came closer. A fire truck arrived but couldn’t find a hydrant. Pol Pot crawled out from the burnt pages of a biography. We began to undress. Then the porch swing went up in flames.

Is a Senior History Major and English Minor at the University of Houston. He grew up in Stafford, Texas, a suburb of Houston and spent one year in McAllen, TX with his father.