Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” I sighed, and Mothra flapped triumphantly past me and vanished into the house. “Constance, I’m letting bugs in. Really big bugs.”

“I’m not afraid of bugs,” she said. “Well, except for centipedes. I was stung by a centipede once. Hurt like fuck. Do spiders count as bugs?”

“Bugs are insects. Spiders are arachnids. Anyway, centipedes aren’t spiders.”

And it went on like that for a time, five or ten more minutes — the comfortable, meandering talk of comets and bugs. She mentioned the Heaven’s Gate Cult suicides, their connection to the comet she’d seen, and I told her that I’d also seen Comet West, way back in 1976, two years before she was born. Then Constance finally came inside, and I shut off the porch light and locked the door behind her. She asked if I wanted a cup of chamomile tea. I didn’t, but I lied and said that I did. She filled the kettle and put it on the stove, then took a couple of tea bags from a green box of Sleepy Time. And fuck it, at this rate, she’s going to be back from Foster long before I get to the point, supposing there is a point to any of this, that any fraction of it’s more or less important than any other.

She made us tea. And then she asked me if I’d like to fuck her. And there it is, no more beating about the bush (ha-ha fucking ha, ba-da-pa-pa), and she really wasn’t much more subtle than that. She sat down at the table with the two steaming mugs of tea, and asked, “Sarah, how long’s it been since you’ve had sex?”

“Jesus,” I said, and I must have forced a nervous laugh or twiddled my thumbs or done something equally inane. “You do have a delicate way with words.”

“Do you want to sleep with me tonight?” she asked, sipping at her tea, and watching me intently over the rim of the mug. “No strings attached,” she added. “Right now, I think we’re both pretty lonely people. I think it might do us both good. Like the sea.”

“Sort of like that kiss at the beach,” I said, staring at my own cup of tea.

“Sort of,” she replied. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve been working too much. It’s never good for me, when I get that far into my work. Anyway, I won’t be insulted if you say no. I’m a lot better at taking rejection than I am at finding four-leaf clovers.”

And I noticed then that the big moth from the front porch was circling about the light hanging above the table, and I let my eyes stray to the kitchen window, and sat there staring into the night decently hiding the red tree from my sight.

“You feel it, too?” she asked, and before I could reply, she said, “I try not to think about it, but I never stop feeling it, squatting out there, watching me.”

“It’s only a tree,” I said, unconvincingly, and Mothra beat her fragile wings against the thin shell of glass standing between her and the deadly heat of the 60-watt incandescent bulb.

“No strings attached,” Constance said again.

“Oh, there are always strings,” I replied. “Whether we put them there or not.”

“Yes or no?” she asked, and there was only a hint of impatience in her voice. Of course I said yes. She nodded and took my hand, and led me out of the kitchen, our twin mugs of chamomile tea abandoned on the table. I followed her down the narrow hall and up the narrower stairs to her garret. There, surrounded by her canvases, all of them hidden beneath drop cloths, she undressed me, and then I sat naked on the mattress and watched while she undressed herself. She’s thinner than I’d thought, almost bony, and there’s a tattoo perfectly centered in the small of her back. Two symbols placed side by side, somewhat reminiscent of a child’s stick figures, only there were no circles to indicate the heads, and the vertical lines that would form the torsos and necks extended downwards between the “legs,” like a tail. They also looked a bit like a pair of stylized arrows pointing upwards, the tips of each crossed by a horizontal stroke. The tattoo had been inked in shades of gray, and was no more than five or six inches across. It, or perhaps they, looked like this (drawing these in with a pen):

“What is that?” I asked, as she tugged her T-shirt off over her head, revealing breasts just beginning to lose the enviable firmness of their youth. Her nipples were darker than I expected, my expectations based on her generally pale complexion. They were, I saw, almost the same terra cotta as her irises, and for a moment I actually considered the possibility that she rouged them to match her eyes. “The symbol tattooed over your ass, what does it mean?”

She dropped the T-shirt to the floor at her feet and stood staring down at me, her forehead creased very slightly, as though the answer to my question escaped her.

“The tattoo, ” I prompted. “I don’t know that symbol.”

“Oh,” she said. “That. I had that done at a parlor in Silver Lake. I was pretty drunk at the time. It wasn’t even my idea.”

I lay down, admiring her breasts, her flat belly, her hips, and trying not to be ashamed of my own body, which bears all the scars and blemishes and imperfections earned by the chronic inactivity that generally accompanies the life of a professional writer.

“It’s a kanji, a Chinese character.”

“I know what a kanji is,” I said, probably sounding more defensive than I’d meant to. “What does it mean?”

“What difference does it make what it means?” she asked, slipping out of her panties, letting them fall to the floor on top of her T-shirt. Her pubic hair was the same jet-black as the hair on her head. “Maybe I was so drunk I don’t even remember what it means.”

“You really don’t remember?”

“Are you trying to spoil the mood?” she countered. “Do you want to discuss my tattoos or do you want to fuck me?”

“I wasn’t aware the one necessarily precluded the possibility of the other,” and then she frowned and told me to shut the hell up, and shut up I did. She climbed on top, and pretty much stayed there the whole time, which was just fine by me. She’s the first person I’d been with since Amanda. I didn’t tell her that, but I’m going to assume she knows it. I didn’t sit down here to write some silly erotic confessional, and it’s all a blur anyway — her fingers and her tongue, her attentive lips and those odd clay-colored eyes of hers. I’m not sure how many times I came, and I have no idea how many times she came. Afterwards, she switched off the lamp by the futon, and we lay together in the darkness, hardly talking, listening to the night outside the farmhouse.

“Forest,” she said to me. “It’s the kanji for ‘forest.’ At least, that’s what the tattoo guy told me.”

“And why did you have the kanji for forest tattooed on your back?” I asked. “Unless it’s a secret, I mean.”

“I swear to fuck,” she sighed, “I honestly can’t remember that. I wasn’t kidding about being drunk. We’d been doing shots of Jägermeister with Bud all night.”

“We?”

“Nobody important,” she said, and I didn’t press the matter. She laid her head on my left shoulder, and told me that she could hear my heart beating.

“That’s usually a good sign,” I said. She laughed very softly, and sometime after that, I drifted off to sleep. If there were dreams, I can’t remember them.

I woke to the angry caw of a crow, which seemed loud even over the chug of the AC unit.

I made coffee while Constance made breakfast, and while we were eating, she mentioned the short story again. I’d forgotten all about it, and would have been very happy to let things stay that way.