II.

I dreamt I met her for the first time and that she cut me across the throat with a piece of burnt apple core. The blood dripped like molasses in slow-motion gore against a high fashion background: her apartment in red and blue hues surrounded by people holding champagne glasses and sniffling through runny cocaine nostrils. Mario Bava directing a mod film destined for obscurity in the cobwebbed archives of my skull.

You’d think that I would have put a hand to my throat to hold in the blood like what they do in most movies but no. Instead, I grabbed the nearest glass of bubbly and splashed her face. Golden champagne soaking the almighty queen; it looked like a golden shower gone awry. She bared her teeth like a mad chimpanzee and I felt the blood go back into my neck as if someone was pulling up a violent crimson window shade.

If I lower my chin to my chest I can still smell the apple-scar.

Bava would zoom in quickly: extreme close-up on the disappointed lover’s face.

Then: a woman’s gaping mouth.