corantuswriteblog

[corantuswriteblog]

Creek Bed

Summary: I started thinking what it would've been like if we had lived in the same town as kids and played together.

-Prose, 761 words

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We never lived in the same town or anything but if we were kids together I would have chased you over the low concrete wall behind my house and down into the creek bed. I know how you sound, I know your ecstatic scream-laugh. As a kid your voice might’ve been higher and more piercing, the endings of all your words softer. As a grown up you’re deep and sharp.

I see this offhand thing you said to me; your white tank top turned inside out to hide the pink butterfly on the front. Your hair cut as close to your ears as your dad would let you. I would’ve watched your bright white disappear in the extra black summer shadow under the sidewalk bridge, and I hope you’d have called after me. Or really ordered me to follow and I would have. 

A few minutes trudging then that flash transformation from wet heat to wet cold, the creek trickle echoing in the dark. Like your damp unwarmed thighs against my ears when you’ve just showered.

We would’ve called each other something different. Pretend names imitating characters from shitty science fiction books I know we both read. 

Now we call one another stuff from stories like lover and girlfriend. Pronouncing our made-real names in every way possible, even the ways that sound wrong and funny so every letter has had a turn on the tips of our tongues like learning to speak.

Walking out from the shadow I would’ve seen you stumble and get mud all over your knees. I’d get so excited because even now I know that’s when the game starts. Your clothes will be muddy no matter what we do and all amounts wash out the same. It’s something for parents to worry about. 

Your shirt and your underwear go from the floor to the hamper really just whenever I step on them and that will be hours from now. The bedsheets will go too in the morning, and we’ll be very grown up deciding who puts them in the washer.

I would have laughed and chased you, and laughed and chased you, all the way down the creek bed. 

I chase you down mouth and neck and chest and belly. Sometimes you let me catch up, sometimes you push me away and smile and snort. I’m sure if we were kids you would’ve been faster than me but you’d let me catch you like I’m in on it, I don’t want to get away, I want to keep playing with you, the way children’s games have unspoken rules instantly agreed upon.

Dried out creek grass starved in the concrete and preserved by the sun would scratch our legs all over like the world was biting us. Saying don't linger. And if we were kids I think we wouldn’t want to.

Now your skin is grown over in soft foliage, the sort of stuff that marks the year-boundaries where play becomes sex before some ephemeral stuff makes it play again. All you want to do when you’re grown up is to linger.

When I came up behind you I would’ve slapped my hand against your left shoulder blade harder than I needed to, trying to knock the touch free of fondness. Half on tank top half on skin, slick with sunscreen but turning red anyway. Hurting you a little and making you wince. When you’re a kid it’s funny but if this had actually happened and I remembered it now I’d say sorry to you out of nowhere.

My hand would’ve stayed there to make sure you’d felt it. Ludic magic. This is the part where you stand still. 

I still want you like that, a beautiful brown grasshopper cupped in my hands that I have to let go on the steps of my house. 

I would’ve said hi instead of I caught you cause I would’ve felt embarrassed exercising power over you. I always say hi over and over when I’m touching you and I make eye contact. Sometimes when your face is out of frame I’ll say stuff like is this okay not even to get an answer. I have nothing to say but can’t keep quiet. 

Making you come is almost deciding to go home when we’ve meandered all we want for the day, and gotten too hungry to keep playing.

Grown ups cook their own dinners. If we were kids I wouldn’t really want to go home because I could never be certain I’d see you the next day but I know I will now.

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[corantuswriteblog]

Buzz

Summary: It's raining outside, your lover is a witch, and you're helping her make soup.

-Short story, 2nd person, 3635 words

-CW: sexual content, drug use, death of a parent

--

The moments before the storm are loudest in a witch’s house. 

They are alive and loud with static. A buzz, a vibration. Breathing in the air is a shock to your lungs. White noise drones in the empty spaces of your skull. The little hairs on your knuckles stand up on the approach, ionized, a compass pointing towards the rumbling engine of a tempest.

Sweat beads on your brow. Condensation. You anticipate the coming rain.

Half the sky is already black with it. The blue of the afternoon is being swallowed up fast. You finish bringing the laundry in.

She’s waiting in the kitchen, smoking a joint and considering the clouds. A window is left cracked open, because this heat would kill you both if it wasn’t. But with all that rain, it could be dangerous.

“Oh,” you say, “looks like rain, huh?”

“No shit. You feel that in your bones?” She asks. 

Smoke billows from her perfect nostrils and drifts around all the beautiful things in her kitchen; the cookie jars shaped like cowboys on horses and pumpkin carriages, ladles and spatulas with pastel flowers on their handles, a rusted old clock in the shape of a whale; the prussian blue of the counters, scarred to shit by all the vegetables that had ever been sliced on them. Everything in this kitchen has a face, a spirit. She has constructed her temple in this way. 

An inhale of fire, an exhale of smoke. She is a dragon and this is her hoard.

Her blonde hair (blonde, allegedly) is shaved down to the quick, and sometimes those short little hairs catch the light and sparkle like scales. Her nose is sharp, her brow curved. Her cheeks carved out by thin tan lines where her glasses should be, but she doesn’t wear them even though she should. You consider her eyebrows, dirty blonde and studded with silver, and everything they say to you that she never does. 

The smoke is dense.

“Do you have to do that?” You groan, “it’s too fucking hot. I can’t breathe.”

“Open a window. Here,” She says, as if the window wasn’t already open. She passes you the joint, even though your arms are still full of wet clothes.

“In a second--oh, I should’ve started the laundry earlier. Damn.” 

You pile her clothes on the wicker chair shaped like an elephant (the one where you always wait while she cooks and does her spells, observing the back of her legs). Hands now free, you take the joint from her. You put it to your lips and you inhale. In your peripheral vision you watch the paper gently burn away. 

You keep the smoke inside you for a minute, as the serenity of it blooms behind your eyes. You held it too long so you exhale with a cough, and she doesn’t laugh at you, but you can tell she’s just holding it back. 

She’s gotten up from the table to look out the window, an unused garlic press in her hand. A cast iron pan sits on an eye of the gas stove, un-lit. The vegetables haven’t been chopped; the broth hasn’t been boiled; the spices are still tucked into that nifty rotating rack that never stops creaking.

She’s waiting to start. You are waiting to start. 

Her silhouette refuses to blend in with the deep blue black of the sky outside. Her outline is strong, evocative. The broad set of her shoulders and belly. You think that perhaps, after the soup is done, you might ask if she’ll have sex with you.

Physically inscrutable.

“Oh, it’s starting. Thank fuck,” she says. 

The rain starts off with gentle, almost imperceptible taps that vibrate the tin roof of her house. As you extricate yourself from the elephant wicker chair, the sound of rain becomes rhythmic. Insistent. Loud. Meteoric. You make your way over to the counter, over to her, picking up a knife and a freshly damp parsnip, and the rain starts to sound angry.

And then, finally, the release of the humidity; you can breathe again. The whole world smells like washed vegetables and rain and good weed. 

She huffs, like she was holding in her fire breath and you didn’t even realize.

“Should we start now?” You ask.

“Yes. Oh--” She snaps her fingers, “The parsley is out in the yard. I didn’t grab any.” 

“Who cares? Parsley doesn’t taste like anything. It’s like the shittiest herb.”

The dragon laughs at you.

“It’s the symbol of plenty, my darling, before the Exodus. It’s a way of returning somewhere.”  

“Are you shitting me?” You say, though hearing her call you things like my darling always means you’ll do whatever she asks.

“Yes, I’m serious. Just get it,” she gestures towards the herb patch outside, which is currently clinging on for dear life against the onslaught of rain, “Or it won’t work.”

You don’t like parsley. Or, more accurately, you don’t care about parsley. 

She did a spell for you once where you both dipped a sprig of parsley in salt water, and she told you to eat it, as if there was a seder plate. The grassy-nothing flavor of the parsley meandered around your mouth, cut by salt and moisture. She didn’t really explain, but you felt something; restless, nostalgic, the suggestion of a path not taken. A bit of an aching in your heart. Your dead father, your high school girlfriend, perhaps. Knowledge of things you already understood.

She asked you what you’d seen, and you told her that. 

“Interesting. Do you know what I see, with that spell?” She asked.

“If I knew anything about what you think, I wouldn’t be here,” You said, with a bit of a smirk, like you thought it was a very smart thing to say. 

“I see--well, it’s not strong enough to see anything. I’m just there a little bit, you know? Like being a kid and recognizing that the adults around you lie to you sometimes. Maybe about God, or getting married, or something like that. And, I suppose, I always start wondering what I would do about it if I knew everything I know now.”

You stick your arm out the door, just to see, to test the waters. The rain is coming down in lukewarm needles against your skin. The herb patch may as well be in China or some shit.

“Damn,” you whisper. There’s no point in arguing, because she will not make the soup unless you do this; and if you don’t help her make the soup, she won’t do her magic, and you won’t have soup to eat, and she probably won’t have sex with you.

Considering the herb and how important she thinks it is, you realize you were so busy thinking about everything else that you hadn’t stopped to think what kind of spell she was trying to do. 

You’re her darling so you step off the porch.

The tall, wild grass of her yard is beaten down and slippery. You trip on a stray garden trowel. You think that leaving the laundry out in this weather would be as good as washing it all over again.

-

With a flourish of her filigreed ladle, she fills a bowl with soup for you. 

She places it on the table in front of you. She’ll only wait a moment, staring at you expectantly, before going to fill her own bowl.

She is very good at serving soup. The portions are perfect. Herbs swirl about between mushrooms and potatoes and carrots like models of planets in an orrery. You hold the lumpy, unglazed ceramic bowl in your hands; it is almost hot enough to burn you, but not quite.

(You remember her at the flea market, exclaiming how beautiful that bowl is, and how you went behind her back to buy it.)

The scents of garlic and pepper and herbs invite themselves into your nostrils, warm and steaming. The soup is really something beautiful, something raised out of the earth and watered by the very rain that still drums outside the kitchen. 

You notice it now, as the heat of the day has dissipated and your skin is still wet. The soup is a welcome comfort.

You bring it to your lips and sip the broth. This is how she has told you to eat this kind of soup, to drink the broth first. She says that the broth is the wellspring of the magic, its concentrated reduction.

After a moment, the savory richness of the broth shifts into a harsh, chemical citrus. 

The cleaner is meant to mask unpleasant things; but all it did was add to them. You didn’t like that smell. But you also didn’t want to feel the full reality of it, to smell the decomposition directly. 

You were with your father’s body in his absence. All your sisters had brought flowers, but had not stayed, at your insistence. Those flowers in their nameless grocery store yellow sat shiva with you.

There was a reflective steel cabinet in the room and you desperately wanted to cover it, like all the mirrors at home. Your father had taught you all the prayers and you only knew them in half-measure, your dry low voice stumbling through the kaddish.

You realized you were dwelling on every interaction with your father that you could remember. The things you had tried to talk about with him, the things you’d failed to say. Conversations that had not been finished. 

You’d never worked up the courage to tell him about that girl you were in love with in high school, and you’d broken up a few months later so it didn’t really matter. You’d been too embarrassed to say. But all those months you were together, it ate at your soul not to tell him, for whatever reason.

You looked down at the gray face of your father’s body and it wasn’t like they told you, he did not look like he was just sleeping. He looked dead. His nose was crumpled. The last thing he’d ever experienced was bludgeoning it on the floor.

The woman from the hospice service had found him in his apartment, the one you and your sisters had grown up in, though he’d sold all your furniture. She found him between the living room and the kitchen, half on the carpet and half on the tile. He was crumpled face first against a smashed mug of tea with milk and his elderly copy of Don Quixote. Typical dad shit. She found him already gone, nothing to be done about it, just a difficult phone call to make. 

You could see the cut on the body’s forehead where the autopsy had been performed; the incision gave a name to the thing, the aneurysm. You filled out the necessary paperwork. It was all so ordinary, so routine and frictionless, that you felt like you had to be doing something incorrectly. 

You sat with the body for a long time. Not quite the entire night, because you got up to go to the bathroom and felt bad every second. You had a paper cup of water in your hand and you never once drank from it. Half of the kaddish, half of it again.

“You should know, Dad, I meant to tell you--” You imagined yourself whispering into your dead father’s ear, “I’m a lesbian. She's my girlfriend. My fiance, actually. My wife, actually. All these years I meant to tell you. I thought you ought to know. I’m sorry. We’re getting married soon, or we got married, you see.”  

You spun that story in your head for a moment and it made you feel better. 

How would he have responded? Would he have responded much at all?

You felt that sensation of wanting very badly to blurt something out when the topic of conversation has already moved on, and no one is listening. Your father has left and he will never hear your final interjection.

The other you ten years from now eating soup in your lover’s kitchen knows that this inconclusiveness will never go away.

Your eyes are wet, and your pulse is quick. 

“What did you see?” She asks.

In her kitchen, at her table, there’s still most of a bowl of soup left. It must have been only a few seconds. Magic always feels out of time. 

“What was the point of all that?” You ask, wiping your face with a scratchy cloth napkin.

“It’s whatever you’re thinking about. You can go off on a tangent without realizing it,” She says.

You just laugh and sigh and groan all at once.

You often suspect that she keeps you around as a lab rat, and once again you wonder if your feelings are one sided. Like being in love with the moon. 

She doesn’t seem at all interested in whether you are alright, just the details of what you’ve experienced.

You are not alright.

“Fuck, I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking about anything--just you, really. But I saw my father. You know he had an aneurysm, like he died pretty young. He had all these health problems with his brain before that and needed a nurse at home. I think he was fifty four? Fifty five? I was nineteen, at least.”

“What’d you see, though? You know what I mean,” she says, leaning in across the table. She wants to know how well her spell worked. 

You used to always praise her unconditionally, but lately you’ve been more honest. 

“I mean, frankly, I don't know what the hell that was. I didn’t really learn anything. Just sort of reminded me that my dad died.”

“Do you want to eat more of it?” She asks.

You look at the bowl, mostly full. And then back at your lover’s expectant face.

“Maybe. Wanna fuck later?"

She taps her spoon on the side of her bowl and it reverberates. Then, she takes a spoonful of broth and a single chunk of potato and holds it towards you.

“Of course. Do you want to know about mine?” She asks.

You half-stand out of your seat, leaning over to eat out of her hand.

The soft potato crumbles between your teeth with little resistance, following the broth down your throat. The skin separates from the starch, becoming a green paper tab that she puts on her tongue.

Throbbing, loud music, headache-inducing. Dozens of people drunk and high as fuck squeezed together into this windowless tube of a venue.

She wasn’t there to dance. She was there because people who wanted to fuck her would often give her free drinks and weed, and sometimes (if she was lucky) something more expensive. The men who did this were especially delusional, and it was also quite easy to lose them in the crowd.

She’s not really there to dance, but if she must dance with someone as a prerequisite to get eaten out in the bathroom by a stranger, then she could be convinced. 

Her head spins and the music twists and snakes through her skull cavity from one ear to the next and back again. Colors lift off the walls and she can taste them. She licks her lips, dry from paper and ink. She will somehow make it to the bar to get water, or tequila, or something.

And then you see yourself through her eyes. She sees you and you see yourself standing alone next to the bar nursing a rum and coke. She thinks that you have a distinctly dive bar air about you, and you look wildly out of place at a drugged-up rave.

She likes your arms and your shoulders, your fingers fidgeting with your keys. Your downturned gaze. 

The you in your own body in the kitchen remembers this night and the particular quality of the fake wood grain on the bar.

She decides to talk to you.

“Hey,” she says to you, with affection in one voice new and the other familiar.

The skin of the potato does not go down your throat as easily as the broth and you cough a little as you swallow.

She grins at you over the rim of her glass (a novelty one, the faded image of Spiderman drowning in iced tea) and if you had been thinking about all of this for even a second longer you would burst into tears.

-

She does away with her clothes before you even get out of the shower, as a courtesy. Sitting on the bed, ankles crossed.

“Anyways,” you say, “if you’re up for it.”

You see all of her freckled skin, the tan lines left by her tank top and shorts. The way her breasts and the soft of her torso rest against her ribcage. The scruffy chevrons of hair on all her limbs and the bramble between her legs. 

You behold her with flippant selfishness. You want to please her for your own benefit.

“Alright,” she says, laying back onto all of her colorfully mismatched pillows.

Heartbeats on opposite sides. Lungs to mouths and back into lungs again. She parts your lips with her tongue.

She rides your left thigh and she hmms and ahs. Your leg is slick with her condensation. 

You pull back. You kiss her jugular, her sternum, to echo through the empty spaces of her lungs and bones; You kiss her belly and all of its spidery pink lines, her navel, the permanent indentation at her hips from years of wearing ill-fitting men’s trousers. Her fingers are in your hair as her blunt nails scrape along your skull.

“Is this what you were expecting when you came over today?” She asks, sounding of smoking breath-embers.

“I go along with all of that mystic shit, don’t I?” you smile at her.

“Well, you did my laundry. And the dishes.”

You forego silicone because you are accessing something primal and basic. Your hands and your mouth and your tongue are the inheritance of all the organisms that did magic and fucked each other, all the way from the deepest recesses of time. Or you just don’t feel like it.

She breathes out fire and spreads her thighs a little further. Your head slots into place, load bearing.

You kiss her labia just as you might kiss her mouth, upper lip dragging down the clitoral hood. You do this because it shows respect. You taste her, sour and strange and ripened.

Some days you might look at it for a minute first, with earnest fascination; today, you feel its contours with your tongue, its intersecting layers, its opened pages. You are unsure if you’re allowed to read it, or some shit like that.

The quaking of her legs and a bared tooth gripe serve as your permission to go forward. You slip your tongue into her, past the gate of her clitoris, dragging like a hand down a guard rail, descending her staircase.

“Fuck.” 

You enter her hungry, and you feast on her.

Sour-clean rainwater rolls off a leaf into your mouth, and your mouth is full of teeth that aren’t quite sharp enough to tear. It’s slow going, drop after drop, accumulating in your small belly. Your hands are four toed paws in the firmament, and you’re some forgotten thing that will never fossilize. Your little walnut brain is largely concerned with water, what shadows might move overhead, and the urge to mate; and not even for the fun of it, but for babies, your whole brain consumed with squirming continuation. Not like how in your body at home you are nose-deep and introducing a second finger.

You infer, because the spell is so everywhere and intentionless, it must just be part of her body. You would stop but you are overwhelmed with empathy for this little whatever-the-fuck creature. You’re scampering, shadow moving without rhythm, deciding that more water is not worth staying in the open.

You make it home to your own tree, one whose DNA in future years uncountable will light the fire of her stove. 

Your smart little nose twitches back and forth at the smell of dirt and things familiar. The burrow is just as inviting as your yonic present and it’s so obvious it’s stupid. Inside there are many others just like you, mothers and mates and children, fathers alive. And you can tell where they’ve all been today. You think of them in all the places of the forest and you are so, so glad they all made it back.

It’s like being welcomed and loved; maybe the first place on all the earth this kind of love ever existed. You are so loved and surrounded that the lights in the distant atmosphere don’t wake you up. Your tree is a thousand million miles from the impact. You don’t know that tomorrow you will inherit the world. The ground shakes and your lover convulses.

-

The sheets are cold around ten in the evening. How are they so cold? Did all that ash cover the sun? 

“Jesus. How did it get so cold? It was so hot earlier,” you say.

She curls her body tightly around your back, a leg across your calves, her face in your neck, defending her hoard. You rest a hand on her thigh. You're distantly irritated by a sprig of hair on your tongue.

“Don’t say that shit to me,” she laughs, “fuck Christ in this household.”

“Oy-vey-ez-mir, it's fucking cold,” you say instead, enunciating as if it were a prayer, rubbing her thigh.

“I can heat up some more of that soup for you, if you’d like,” she says.