Devotion

SHIRO KURAMATA, GLASS CHAIR, 1976

'I'm just going to the loo' says Kylie. 
     She walks wobblily into the bathroom and sits down on the toilet, balloon in one hand, canister in the other. While taking a piss, she fixes up a double balloon and sucks the whole thing into her lungs. Her mind, sight and hearing all throb as she inhales, and she forgets where she is. It is ecstasy.

     Letting the flaccid and empty balloon slip through her fingers and fall to the floor, she tilts her back against the wall and puts a cigarette between her wet lips. She clicks open the lighter and her head blows up.

     Twenty minutes pass, and Jason is prostrated on top of the black satin sheets wondering where Kylie is. Wet trusses of bleached white hair dangle before his sunny blue eyes. He rises from the bed, slips on a pair of black jeans and picks up the silver revolver before stumbling to the bathroom. 

     He finds her limp, naked and headless body slumped over the toilet, but still sitting relatively upright against the wall. Blood and grey matter squish between his toes as he edges tentatively further into the room. He affords his eyes time to ruefully peruse the scene before offering his verbal assessment of the situation. 

     'Deep,' is the lengthily uttered conclusion.

     He looks about him surreptitiously. He really needs to go himself but cannot bear the thought of touching the body. No one is about, no would know, so why not? With this in mind, he unzips and starts to piss, and a golden rainbow of urine glitters as it cascades between Kylie's legs into the bowl, shattering the silence of death in the room like a bullet through a sheet of ice. 

     A wasp watches Jason voyeuristically from his perch on the window. This precious moment is their secret. It is their single, shared, fleeting snippet of irrevocable solace before the advent of a new dawn of pain for both of them. 

    Jason looks about again. Again, no one would know. Justifying his actions as a lover's gift, he points upwards slightly so that the last drops fall onto Kylie's stomach, before shaking, swatting the wasp, calling the ambulance, putting the nozzle of the gun into his mouth and firing. 

FOSCO FAVALLI