Caramel

A dark figure cut through the humid steam of the summer night, stealing across the wet street in pin-sharp stilettos.
Heat permeated the brick walls of the city and the cobbled stones of the alleyways.
The sky melted and dripped in inky drops down the surface of the smoking moon into pools in the gutters.
The air was thick with whispers of restless heartbeats, aching skin and notes bleeding malted whiskey sounds.

Her blue-black hair shimmered under the street lights, a glittery waist-coat that covered her shoulders in a silken charcoal sheath to her hipbones.
Her eyes downcast, she sashayed in her stilettos around stinking dumpsters, over steam grates in the sidewalk, under ladders that black cats rubbed their spines against for the burning comfort and pleasure.
Swollen clouds peeled away from the moon and spears of quartz light fell across her path, her eyes flashing violet under fringes of midnight lashes.
She faltered, stiletto’s silenced, her skin of snow shrinking from the sudden shafts of metallic light.
She tilted her ear to the sky studded with silver scars and waited to feel the sticky trendrils and sugary vines of musical tethers wind and bind again around her wrists and ankles.

She’d already been fed.
Five times over in fact.
Her thighs were still tingling.

Afterwards, exhausted, she had fallen into a slumber of lascivious dreams, of circling ravens and ripe storms when the treacle streams of caramel wrapped her limbs in honeyed notes from his pied pipe of toffee and seedy sweetness.
Prowling beasts stirred, lionesses circled and wolves howled at the moon.
The magnetism of her calves bent the moonlight out of shape as she cut through the damp shadows.
She threw her curtain of blackcurrant hair over her shoulder, snarled her grape-glossed lips and pierced each beckoning butterscotch note with the staccato rhythm of her sharp heels.

She was hungry.
She had been woken.
She had a renewed sweet tooth.

And then suddenly around a corner, there he was; candy on a crate under a street light.
Plumes of blue smoke spiralled from his lips in thick feathery ribbons.
The pipe glittered in the case by his feet, the last of his lingering honeyed notes binding her to his fingertips.

The veins in her wrists ached.
He wiped his sweat on his arm sleeve.
She licked her lips tasting sweetness and salt.
He sucked hard on his cigarette.
She bit her lip at the sight of his Adam’s apple, sliding under the pale milky skin of his throat like a sweet boiled candy.
She dug her nails into her thighs, breathing hard as she waited for the damp clouds to cover the sky.
Her eyes caught amethyst in the dying moonlight.
Her tongue swelled in anticipation.
He threw his cigarette butt into the gutter and reached for his pied pipe.
He shook with expectation, his spine prickling with pins and burrs.
He lifted the flute to his lips, closed his eyes and blew a web of honeyed caramel into the inky night.

copyright © 2008, Holly Ringland.

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Tags:

butterscotch, candy, caramel, cloud, damp, dark, heat, holly, honey, humid, hunger, moon, music, noir, note, pulp, ringland, sevensinscomp, smoke, storm, sweetness, toffee and treacle