A. Homes: Safety of Objects: Stories

“Yes it is,” Sally said and she stayed like that for about five minutes with Ben just watching her and both of them feeling more confused than they were willing to admit.

Suddenly they both saw something outside. It was a strange kind of something; a flicker of light, not white light like the flashlight, but red-orange light like a fire.

“Let’s go outside,” Ben said just as Sally was thinking they should go upstairs and beg to be allowed to sleep up there.

Sally shook her head.

“Come on,” Ben said. “We have to.” And even though Sally couldn’t imagine why they should go outside in the middle of the night, especially when they had just seen something out there, she was glad to be able to move.

There was something strange about the way Ben said “we have to,” as though whatever they had seen out there had something to do with them and they had to go outside and face it.

She started to put on her nightgown but Ben grabbed it and pulled it off her.

“No,” he said. “Naked.”

“I don’t want to,” Sally said.

Ben took her arms and pulled her to the sliding glass door that led outside. It was dark out. Sally didn’t like the dark.

“Are you scared?” Ben asked. Sally shook her head.

“I just don’t want to.”

“We have to,” Ben said.

Sally believed him. He took her hand and they walked toward the door.

* * *

Ben and Sally stood naked in the night, in the grass just beyond the back patio of Sally’s house. They stood five feet apart, facing out into the woods. The woods behind Sally’s house were part of the same stretch of woods that spread out behind all the houses on the street. They were a piece of the same woods that Ben and Sally had set on fire.

They stood, without realizing it, directly under Sally’s parents’ bedroom windows, which were open to the night air. They were silent, hypnotized by the sensation of the air on their naked bodies.

Ben’s erection stuck out in front of him like a compass or a divining stick. In the breeze it seemed alternately to shrink slightly and then get bigger than before, beating like a pulse. Ben touched himself. He couldn’t resist. He put his fingers around the head and rubbed a little bit. Sally saw him, watched him, and it was as though by touching himself — or maybe by not asking her to do it for him — he’d somehow broken the bond between them and had betrayed her. She didn’t say anything, but when Ben noticed her watching he stopped and let his hands fall to his sides.

The woods beyond the patio were pitch-dark, and so were the backyards to the left and right. Through the darkness and the leaves on the trees they could see lights on in houses far away. The breeze blew the leaves and the lights seemed to flicker like fires.

There was a small noise, heavier than a breeze but still very light, nothing to be afraid of. Ben and Sally looked at each other but were not scared — or were already too scared to be any more scared. The noise got louder, leaves moving, maybe an animal walking, and then they heard voices.

Ben and Sally stood tranquilized by their bath in the night. Neither had the power or desire to move. Two tall figures stepped out from the darkness, stepped out from behind the brick wall that separated the patio from the rest of the backyard. Sally immediately recognized the two figures as someone’s older brothers, but couldn’t remember whose. Ben knew them and kind of let one of his knees relax as if trying to assume a casual pose. In a way he was proud to be out there naked with Sally. His hard-on stood apart from him, independent, as though it had a life and a mind of its own; he tried to ignore it.

The two young men were carrying things, a television set, a large radio, a big bag, and other things that weren’t clear in the darkness. They stood directly in front of Ben and Sally, facing them each one-on-one. With the two boys there, somehow Ben and Sally were no longer together but stood alone. The four of them stood wordless in the backyard.

One of the boys put down the TV he was carrying, pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket, and lit it. They all breathed deeply, inhaling the smell. The cigarette glowed, flaring as the boy inhaled. He took a couple of drags and then handed the cigarette to Ben — whose erection, Sally noticed, seemed to be sinking. Ben smoked the cigarette.

“Honey, do you smell something burning?” Sally’s mother said.

Through the house and the night her voice sounded distant and far away.

Ben dropped the cigarette on the ground in front of him. The boy in front of him reached his sneakered foot out and crushed the cigarette into the grass. The four of them stood, completely motionless and breathless, waiting to be caught.

But there were no sounds other than the wind in the trees and no lights came on anywhere and after a minute they all started breathing again and thought they were safe.

The boy facing Sally put down the TV and the bag he was carrying. He reached out to Sally, his fingers sort of pinching together in the air. He reached for her breast, or the start of what would later be her breast, but changed his mind. The backs of his fingers brushed against her nipple for a second and Sally felt strange.

He lowered his hand, extended his index finger, and gently pushed into the break between Sally’s legs. He left his finger there, not inside, not outside, but held in the flesh of the slit.

Sally looked at Ben and saw that he had his erection back. Sally felt the finger there, felt the rest of the fingers and the hand outside her. It was as though someone had asked her to do a magic trick, to hold a pencil in her crotch for a minute or more.

In time the boy pulled his finger out and as he did, Sally could feel his fingernail lightly scraping her insides.

After the boy pulled his finger out, he picked up the TV and the bag, looked at the other boy, and they both walked into the darkness.

Ben and Sally turned and went inside. Sally could still feel the imprint of the finger when she sat back down on the trundle bed. She felt the feeling of the finger and rocked back and forth on the sensation of the finger having been there.

“You can’t say anything” was all Ben said to her. “There’s no way to explain, so you can’t say anything.”

They sat naked for a minute in their beds and then it seemed too dark, too cold, and too late to be that way and so they put their clothing on again.

“Where’s my underpants?” Sally said.

Ben shrugged. He was tired and overwhelmed.

“I need them,” Sally said.

She made Ben move the beds so they could look under them and behind them and she started to get a little hysterical and Ben got mad and told her to “calm the fuck down.” Sally got in bed and tried to sleep, but the sensation of being naked under the nightgown with the fingerprint was too much and at a certain point, in the middle of the night, after Ben had fallen asleep, she had to go upstairs for underwear.

From the end of the dark hall she heard the steady rumble of her father snoring; his deep ragged inhalations worked like a magnet, pulling her down the hall toward her room.

Before entering her room, Sally reached in and turned the light on. Her underwear drawer opened with a loud wooden squeak which woke her mother.

“What are you doing?” her mother asked in a sleepy voice from the next room.

“Getting something,” Sally said.

“Go to sleep,” her mother said in as much of an angry voice as a sleeping mother could manage.

Sally stood in the center of her well-lit room and pulled on her underpants. She felt better, protected in the light, in her room, with the elastic around her waist and legs, the thicker cotton crotch pressed against her, covering her and the fingerprint like a blanket.