Revelation Kiss / Sheldon Lee Compton

I heard about the kiss. The longest kiss recorded. I heard about this, and I told Mitsy. 

And anyways we went to city park shooting for sixty hours. That's sixty hours of closeness, of love, and distortion. That's what I know now, distortion. But then, that day in city park, the idea of kissing Mitsy for sixty hours seemed not enough. We could stretch the record beyond that with the willingness to take closeness to religious levels that religion had yet to enjoy. We could make the whole thing something supernatural.

Hour 10

At about the tenth hour is the first time I remember something changing, her face, her lips. Mitsy started to wane. First her eyes and then her nose. I was the closest I could ever be to these features and they were becoming smaller. And not only smaller but almost like she was melting from her forehead to the edge of her top lip. Her eyes were the worst of all, so this is when I closed mine and decided to keep them closed.

Hour 25

Seeing Mitsy or not seeing her didn't matter. I could feel that she was no longer there. Not really. More than once I had felt her lips simply slide away. When this happened I kept my lips set for kissing and waited and she always returned. But it wasn't Mitsy. Even now I can't understand how everyone there didn't notice that Mitsy had been replaced. Each of the witnesses kept up occasional cheering and then would fall back into general chatter. Not one of them seemed to notice or care that Mitsy had left and something terrible had come in her place.

Hour 27

After two more hours I opened my eyes. What I saw was a mottled slur of features, a Rorschach instead of a person. The park was dark and no one was left. An old couple on a bench at the far end seemed to have no knowledge of us. They seemed happy. I could barely see them along the outer edge of the offending eye. Long ago two eyes had become one, the centerpiece of a watery circle still connected to my lips. It was in this hour I realized I could no longer hear.

Hour 28

At the very beginning here, at the very first second of this twenty-eighth hour, I would say, there was a slow return of my hearing - birds, shoes scuffing pavement - and there was Mitsy again, smile-kissing me, her eyes glazed but happy. I could smell her salt. Oddly, she backed away from me, broke the kiss, and, with her hands gripping the sides of her head, screamed long and hard. I thought I might fall into the cavity of her terrified mouth.

The record was set by Ekkachai Tiranarat and Laksana Tiranarat of Thailand. It seems a few years ago I asked if they would please show me a picture of the two embraced in that kiss. Finally it came. I looked at it for a long time. If you ever see it, look for something for me. Do you see Laksana's bottom lip? Can you see how it looks? There was something happening to her. There was something wrong there, too.

\

SHELDON LEE COMPTON is the author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The Independent Fiction Alliance named his novel, Alice, a best book of the year and his work has been nominated for the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award and the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, as well as included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and Best Small Fictions 2022. He is the editor here at Poverty House.