written years ago, shortly after the Challenger accident:
Crash Kiss
Imagine a kiss. First there's the animal awareness of another person's heat and breath near your face. Then the collision of lips. What do they feel like? Are they rough? Soft? Chapped from the sun? Noses brush against each and cheeks collide. Tongues move into aliens mouths, wanting to explore this new terrain of desire. Hands are useful, too. They can stroke or grab a lover's hair during the kiss. Hands can caress hips, ass or crotch. Teeth bite at a lover's lips while tongues glide and hands explore the geography of other bodies.
Imagine the Challenger accident. Seven astronauts. Seven tongues in seven mouths. Seven sets of lips. Two hundred and twenty four teeth. Seventy fingers formed from one hundred and ninety six phalanges. Imagine the explosion from the aft of the spacecraft, at the booster's fuel tanks. The force of the explosion propels the astronauts' bodies up toward the sky as the force of gravity pulls them toward the Atlantic Ocean. For an instant, the explosion wins this tug-of-war. Think of those teeth and tongues--caressed by how many lovers?-- dislodged and in free-fall, exploded from their jaws. Imagine the skin of their hands, which had left their traces on lovers' skin and slid seductively between how many lips, flensed by the heat and shockwave as liquid oxygen ignites beneath them.
There's no last kiss or touching goodbye. Seven lovers' mouths blasted into fragments like the Hindenburg or Hiroshima blasts. The astronauts' bodies are artifacts now, remnants of superheated vapor, chemical traces scattered in the jet stream and carried into the lungs of old loves and loves they'll never know (in this life). A final molecular fuck. The Tibetan Buddhists call scattering human remains to the birds a Sky Burial. We don't have a name for it in America.
Goodbye.
Crash kiss.
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
Crash Kiss
Imagine a kiss. First there's the animal awareness of another person's heat and breath near your face. Then the collision of lips. What do they feel like? Are they rough? Soft? Chapped from the sun? Noses brush against each and cheeks collide. Tongues move into aliens mouths, wanting to explore this new terrain of desire. Hands are useful, too. They can stroke or grab a lover's hair during the kiss. Hands can caress hips, ass or crotch. Teeth bite at a lover's lips while tongues glide and hands explore the geography of other bodies.
Imagine the Challenger accident. Seven astronauts. Seven tongues in seven mouths. Seven sets of lips. Two hundred and twenty four teeth. Seventy fingers formed from one hundred and ninety six phalanges. Imagine the explosion from the aft of the spacecraft, at the booster's fuel tanks. The force of the explosion propels the astronauts' bodies up toward the sky as the force of gravity pulls them toward the Atlantic Ocean. For an instant, the explosion wins this tug-of-war. Think of those teeth and tongues--caressed by how many lovers?-- dislodged and in free-fall, exploded from their jaws. Imagine the skin of their hands, which had left their traces on lovers' skin and slid seductively between how many lips, flensed by the heat and shockwave as liquid oxygen ignites beneath them.
There's no last kiss or touching goodbye. Seven lovers' mouths blasted into fragments like the Hindenburg or Hiroshima blasts. The astronauts' bodies are artifacts now, remnants of superheated vapor, chemical traces scattered in the jet stream and carried into the lungs of old loves and loves they'll never know (in this life). A final molecular fuck. The Tibetan Buddhists call scattering human remains to the birds a Sky Burial. We don't have a name for it in America.
Goodbye.
Crash kiss.
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net