When I wrote these three vignettes in October of 2003, they made up the first piece of original fiction I'd written in a very long time.
It felt very good.
Caging
Helpless
She jumps, throwing her legs around my waist even before she is in my arms, knocking me against the kitchen table. One second, alone contemplating the possibilities for a salad; and the next, reeling backwards with an armful of girl.
Spinach, I think as an eager tongue infiltrates my mouth and her vine arms slither everywhere. Tomatoes and feta and spinach.
When I had been alone, the room had been bright and cold. Just about the way any kitchen in January should be: all flat planes and impersonal reflections. It had also been quiet. Now suddenly it was dark and hot, and out-of-place noises bounced off of the walls.
I am the only one of us who doesn't understand this: I am the one who always has to fight it. Who still holds the wooden spoon in her hand, clutching it as if it were what was important.
She is grinning against my lips, trying to spin me around, not caring that I can't kiss her properly while I am dizzy and about to fall over. If I can ever kiss her properly, this girl. If I am ever not so abysmally slow on the uptake. My lips begin moving too, and things start to almost make sense. My free hand moves without my willing it, shifting to firm my grip upon her. Her hand moves to where her ankles are. It slides over the curves and behind and under. Where her fingers touch there is a sudden wetness, like a miracle. I finally drop the spoon.
"Feel me," she says.
All I can think is, we are not like this.
Hopeless
She is in the shower.
I am outside on the bed, still unclean. I lie back and contemplate taking up smoking. Piercing my cheek. Starving myself.
She is singing a little tune to herself and I listen for awhile, content in a horribly simple way just at the sound of her and the knowledge that she is here. Then I listen and I am dissatisfied with her Otherness, her unknowableness. I wonder what it will be like when she leaves me.
I wonder what we are like for her; whether she thinks about us. Whether (if she does) she thinks and applies the word "love" to our two-ness. I wonder if she sometimes wonders whether I apply "love." I wonder whether that matters, decide that I suppose it probably does. At least to her. She does not know that I am all about me.
She has no idea how much I hate myself.
Fearless
She is heat.
She is everything I gravitate to. She tells me she wants to eat fish eggs and I know that even though it is the middle of the night and we cannot afford to go out, somehow I will find some. I will watch her hands holding them. The pads of her fingers will press into them slightly and they will leak juice. She will put them in her mouth, and I will watch her lips and wonder why I do the things I do.
Why she has to be the sun.
Why she can be the most important thing in my life, and simultaneously not touch me at all.
How I can have come to be this inhuman, how she can have found anything to draw her here, and how we do not deserve each other.
In the night I spoon behind her. My arms tighten and hold fast, as if to take her inside me and make me a better woman.
I'd dearly love to hear any comments. cutter_tekka@hotmail.com
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