The Lighter – Valparaiso University Literary Magazine
Spring 2008, Volume 53, Issue 2

There was Black Lipstick. Inches of it. And hands enough
to make anyone blush. I hated the way your hair slouches over
your eyebrows. But that didn’t stop me from pushing it away
with my black lips, there on the black pleather couch, with kids
in animal costumes hooting and screeching while they danced
around a lamp that was touching everything with eerie blue
tones, making everyone’s skin glow. They danced in front of us
and we hardly took notice.

“Excuse us while we leave this part of this place, to be in
a different place apart from you, alone together,” we said to
them, not in words but with our arms around each other. They
nodded or seemed to, but it could have been a dance move.
The floor was shaking and the bottles on the bar were shaking,
and their bodies too, so it also could have been us shaking and thinking
we had noticed a nod.

“Those parts in your eyes around the black parts; those aren’t green. I think, uh yes, they’re gold. And sprouting out like a flower. God, have you realized that you’ve got sunflowers inside your eyes?” An intake of breath raises your shoulders and the eyes squint to where I can’t see those beams glowing out at everything. But at least you’re smiling, which is good, because I am the one who said that. I am the one who lays my passion between the sheets and waits for you to finger it, maybe put it in a pocket in your windbreaker, take it out later, turn it over in your hand, and wonder why this girl, me, would be giving such a thing to you. But it’s too hot, and you leave it where it is.

The blonde one stood up and raised her glass of the house red wine that tasted like the kid stuff from communion. She looked at me from the end of the table, said I looked radiant and I blushed the color of my dress. Magenta or fuchsia; some bright old thing stretched across me, it doesn’t matter except how the boy sitting on the opposite side of the table, taller and thicker than you, looked at me when I was in it. And you sat next to him and didn’t say a thing. There was no wish from you, there was no nod. Your tongue and your fingers were preoccupied with your potatoes and cream sauce that had taken you minutes to relate to the waitress. “No, I don’t want the chicken, just the other things that come alongside it.” But across the table, I found your feet underneath. I think they were warm enough but a little more heat couldn’t hurt. My legs slithered around them and I kept my chin close to my chest as I looked at you. That’s how seduction is supposed to go. Wrap everything up in a look and a squeeze. Then wait and listen for the sound of the click of everything being in place. Which, it was. At least at the time.

One year earlier, I was on a bridge, standing with that taller and thicker boy. Same color hair as you but different eyes; same attempt at seduction, but different answer. “Nope,” he told me. But this time, hands turned into folds of cloth, covering me, draping me with silk or cotton or burlap, easing into dips and valleys, under the breast, behind the knee. And then, on the floor of the living room, growls and flushed skin; we had to chase down the alcohol. We let the sharks and eagles on the television screen shout at each other about love and sex and violence and he touched me first. I didn’t even ask him to. I didn’t even think he had a spark of a thought like that in that big round head of his.

AND ALL THE WHILE, the owl on the wall stared us down, made of string and nails, stretched taut across with judgement and sympathy for how these things change other things and how it may seem that he isn’t looking at you but its only because you won’t look at him and what’s the use of talking when it only splits your chest apart and that big hunk of a heart is there and waiting for him to grab it and take a bite and spit it out because your blood is too rich for his taste buds.