Delilah

Cadence Chung

Seven minutes into midnight, and it was the first time in months that I didn’t have any open wounds. I was thinking about how cold it was in his house. How he always kept the bathroom window open, and how we’d have to catch the praying mantis that came in every night. I used to pile on every nightgown I had, and only ever took them off when I was sure I could touch his skin.

Not that he was ever particularly beautiful, my Sam. He was a lanky, lame thing — swayed posture, straight smile. But I loved the way he smelled when he sat me down and talked about the pop philosophers of our time, all that Zizek and Butler, and the sort of clean boy-smell that came from him in waves. When he lay against the curtains I couldn’t help but sniff them the next day.

Past midnight. I was in my room, the eyes of lights shining through the cracks in the Venetian blinds. Slated like soldiers’ shields. It was something ancient I felt, I was sure of it, but dulled by the salty lithium I’d taken that night like a good little thing. My mother, who’d married a pleasant but un-scholarly man, had just called and told me all about what she’d read in the New York Times, and asked me how I was in that tone of voice that only meant one thing. I didn’t lie, but I didn’t say it all: the Renaissance-yellow kitchen light alone knew what I’d done. I told her about my latest projects.

And Sam hadn’t liked his portrait. I’d painted him exactly as I saw him: ambered and anointed, hair flowing, his sweatshirt a rippling robe against his tight little body. Nothing was left untouched: his oversized teeth, waxy inner eyes, limp pale wrists all snaked with veins. I was honest, as I thought I should have been, about everything in our lovemaking. But he took one look at the portrait and turned an accusing face to mine. 

Why did you do that, he had asked. 

Do what? I didn’t know the answer. He was biblical to me, and that was the unashamed truth of it all. But he left that day for the barber’s and when he came back it was too short — it’s too short, they always do it too short, he said — and I touched the sharp valley of his head in quiet reverence. I knew then that I’d taken him, that pale-bodied boy, taken his bright eyes and head and lips and smeared them into a painting. And the barber had swept his hair from the floor.

All silent on the horizon. I went through the little mock-French barrier out onto the balcony, threw my dark head back to the stars. They ached like razor-sharp cuts. I thought that I must have looked beautiful, looking up with my long long hair down my back, looking back and back in time.

—

Cadence Chung is a poet and composer currently studying at the New Zealand School of Music. Her nationally bestselling chapbook anomalia was released in 2022 with Tender Press, and her anthology of young artists, ‘Mythos’, was released in 2024 with Wai-te-ata Press. She also performs as a classical soloist, presents on RNZ Concert, and co-edits Symposia Magazine, a literary magazine for emerging New Zealand writers.

Samson and Delilah by Gustav Dore, ca. 1860