Scarlet

The way she is suspended in the air and spiralling the pole is centrifugal.

The way she lies at the heel of your boot, with an ankle twisted around the metal, is languid.

The way she prowls, with you as her prey, is feline.

When Scarlet and Abbegail dance and when they move and when they breathe, they are ecliptic.

They sprawl in the same way that rain seeps into your clothes.

Scarlet is wet like rain when she dances. She performs in a constant trance of semi arousal. She is flushed pink like virgin lips, wet and silken in movement. She is feline and arching and prowling and gaping.

Scarlet is scuffed knees and blistered feet and bruised limbs and careless innocence.

Scarlet is real. She is fantasy. She is performing, she is unveiling. She is permanent, she is momentary. She is complete, she is fragmented. Projected, indefinite, autonomous.

As she tucks a note artfully into her boot, Scarlet moves like a panther. She steps over Abbegail's neck, and swings herself up onto the pole, winding her limbs around it like lantana, melting off it like syrup.

Untouchable, the girls dance. Apparitions, they move. Blurred, like an artwork, just colour and expression and a prism of the world, absorbing and reflecting it in different ways. Just creating exploring sinking and dissolving and

gently violent subtly violet.

They do this each night, until the sun comes up, dance until the sun comes up, pretend until the sun comes up, dissolve into a flurry of colour and lust, until the sun comes up, and then they are just themselves, young ordinary, sleepy like rustled leaves, studying at home in pyjamas, baking blueberry muffins in ugg boots beading necklaces in the backyard more beautiful and fascinating than the characters they embrace more intoxicating in the bare sunlight than in the silver moon.

Yet here, tonight, these girls are magnetic. They crawl down the catwalk slide down the platform French knickers and garters and all.

They slink up each other paw at each other spin round each other shimmer and perfume and all.

Scarlet left uni to join the circus. She left institutions formulas structures. She left to learn how to fall from a twenty-metre platform and catch herself with her feet hooked around someone's shins.

Scarlet left boys in suits for boys with trucks. Left boys with laptops for boys with tool belts. Left timetables for nurses gear, assignments for suspenders, all stars for seven inch steel reinforced platform thigh high PVC boots.

Scarlet left the sunlight, momentarily, for the underground for whips for leather for handcuffs for costumes to dress up. To make believe.

Scarlet was never cut out for domestication.

They stop for a second slow soft all beautiful solemnity and melancholy desire.

Abbegail puts her hand in the small of Scarlets' back. She arches like a cat and the movement makes her chin drop back her chest expand and her body undo. She coos like a baby owl. She purrs like a kitten.

A female Great Peacock moth attracts dozens of males from several miles away, even when flying against the wind even when her scent doesn't reach them.

In this manner they control you; Guttural, circular, heaving in the smoky haze.

They grab each others' hair like reigns and twist it in their fingers. And all you can do is listen, smell, watch, and try not to hold your breath, limp and open, like sweet plum wine. While pretty fingers and feline eyes and lips like pockets of breath, they dance.

Until the morning when they'll run barefoot on the beach with a friend and their bongo then sleep do pottery weed the garden and write essays on gypsies in Romania.

Abbegail is never quite sure why she has always been fascinated with bondage.

She ponders this as she has mirrors built on her bedroom ceiling and a pole erected in front of the bed.

Reason is and ought only be the slave of passions.

Her skin is pulled taught against the pole it digs into the bruise on the bone of her ankle bruises on the inside of her thighs as she wraps herself around it and upside down. There are bite marks on her neck and on her hands, some belong to her and some do not. She can't really feel it anymore with the numb of the champagne and the rush of the heat and the rush of the eyes around her oblivious to pain.

There are dozens of figures on the walls and the roof, mirrors of ecstasy, all pink and black and frills and backbends.

Tonight is their candle show. It doesn't hurt, really, as much as you'd think when the wax hits the skin and hardens.

Last night they did bondage before that, nurses tomorrow, kindergarten teachers after that, French maids.

It's dizzy in the spotlight. In the spotlight it's just them, centre stage, and their dozens of props; whipped cream chocolate handcuffs wax soapsuds beer theatrics

And the way they are suspended in the air and spiralling the pole is centrifugal.

You can have me if you take my hair down

The way they lie, all arches and twists, is languid.

The way they prowl, the way they smile, the way they laugh and the way they move is ecliptic.

They dominate you They eclipse you They hypnotise you They mesmerise you

Until they leave the moonlight, momentarily.

They wash off their face into a sink of colours and fake beauty spots.

They take of their costumes into a pile of frills on the change room floor.

They let down their hair and think of their loved ones.

They throw of their heels and put on their thongs strip off their lingerie change into Bonds discard their frocks and jump into jeans then onto a bus and into the dawn.

And as the sun wakes up Scarlet goes home just an ordinary girl.

As the sun wakes up they go back to making love and gardens.

As the sun wakes up The sky is mottled and burnt and fresh and dripping colour.

And Scarlet is just a girl who likes the flavour of vitamin c pills and riding on the handlebars of her boyfriends' bike.