Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

Lead blood it.

Goddamn it.

She was forced to stay an extra four months for carving GODDAMN IT into her arm with a sharpened and resharpened pencil.

THE LOST YEAR. She was in the parking lot of Our Lady of Little Flowers Church. She was there for a commitment ceremony. He asked, What’s a commitment ceremony? She called him a dumb fuck. It’s when two queer people want to love each other in public. He didn’t say anything, then did. She’d been clean nine months. Does it mess with you? What? That she’s marrying someone else? Someone not you? Or that you married me? Is that it? Was that it? Does that make you feel incarcerated or something?

All she heard in her head was blood pounding goddamn it goddamn it goddamn it, driving her crazy, making her brain propel itself down the rivers of her body into the veins in her arm into lines like what is a woman what is a woman what am I?

YEAR EIGHT. Driving in the desert. For all she was worth. With her whole body. Her mind gone wild. Her hair like fire. Her cells dividing, in rage or love or just plain need. She drove most of the year. Or at least it seemed that way.

YEAR NINE. What was shooting? To cause to be projected, to cause to fire, to kill by doing this, to wound by doing this, to put to death with a bullet as punishment, to hunt, to destroy or move with a projectile. To project something forward, out, toward. To direct with the rapidity of a moving bullet. To put into action. To detonate. To photograph. To increase in speed. To flash across the sky. To dart painfully in or through a part or parts of the body.

YEAR TEN. Pulled over on the shoulder. Flat tire. Her ordinary arms change a tire on an ordinary car. Then into her vision comes somebody pulling over. Was it her hair that drew them, driving out in blond tracks against the sky? It is a man, she thinks, a beautiful man, his hair long and windblown. He gets out of his car and from the knee down his legs get bigger and bigger. When he is a foot away from her, he stops. Then and only then she looks up. Up from the black leather boot to the bottom cuff of his jeans up his shin to his knee to his thigh up his denim to his cock. Then up his belly his torso his collarbone she pictures under his T-shirt and then up to his jaw his mouth his eyes. His whole face. Then his lips. They could be anyone’s lips. They could be hers.

“It looks like you could use,” is all she hears.

She lets this random man help her even though she doesn’t need. His arms working are beautiful. His hands. The insides of his arms. His veins cording across his arms more familiar than his face.

When he is finished, he says, “Do you want to score?”

And it hits her. Shoots through her. The past wants. Like a mouth salivating. Like a cunt begging. Like the weight of an arm. Like the next sentence. Like a faith that won’t be arrested. The past can break her body no matter what, can move her, propel her, speed her, drive her open, the past’s needing, no stopping it.

She bends down to tend to the tire. She screws the new tire in tight, pockets the wrench, slips back into her car, and drives.

She shut the silver cuff round her right wrist. It was done: wrists cuffed to brass. All there was left to do now was wait; 5:25, or 5:45 at the latest, if he missed the first train. Her wrists clanked against the brass bedposts. She pulled her arms out away from the bed, and her wrists just clinked, trapped, secure, something she couldn’t quite name. She smiled. She rattled her little wrists. She put her chin to her chest and looked down the length of her body. Her breasts flattened like fried eggs, each slipping toward its own armpit. Her rib cage rose and fell. Her belly dipped down like a flesh bowl. The curls of her pubes crinkled up toward air. She could feel herself becoming wet already. She spread her legs as far apart as they would go; her lips sucked open, the air opened her, she wiggled her toes in delight. She grinned at herself, by herself, to herself.

It had been, after all, a terrible argument. His face was darker than she had ever seen it, his teeth clicking between his words. He had been shirtless. Yeah, she had thought, he’s pumping up with anger at me, pulsing toward rupture at me, to me, about me. And she was angry as well—her too-pale skin all blotchy at the neck and chest, blood booming in each ear. She saw her own hands flare and fan in front of her like deranged birds now and again. She screamed so hard she felt the cords in her neck strain and screech, almost cracking against themselves. What a fight, one of those wonderful horrible ones.

She knew he was right. She was a control freak. It was true, if she asked him where he wanted to eat and he told her, inevitably she would say, Well, we could go there, but the wine selection is so much better at this other place, and he would of course agree. If she asked him what he wanted to do and he said, How about a movie? of course she would say, All right, but then we’ll miss the free jazz in the park. If he wanted eggs, she asked for pancakes; if he drove the car, she knew a better route; if he wanted to be on the bottom, she clamped his hips between her bony little knees and tugged until he rolled to the top; and if he wanted to be on top, she squirmed out from under like a chipmunk escaping a cat. And when he said, You don’t understand what it’s like to be black, she would say, You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and there was nothing he or anyone else could say to that.

But that day he’d just had it , he said, and he threw a glass of gin to the floor when she said, Jesus, but she was tired of having to decide everything for the two of them. The second the words left her mouth, she knew she ought to suck them back in, but it was too late, and he just snapped. And then she really blew it: She said, as if she didn’t know not to, You must really feel a need to attack me. And then thought, What a jerk. Why can’t I just let the fight go on naturally? Honestly, just quit the debate tactics and listen, that’s what he always told her, and he was right. She didn’t want to lose him, after all, he was the only good thing in her whole rotten life. If she could just develop a self to police the self that kept screwing up, a little invisible self that could stop the real her just in time.

So after he grabbed his blue shirt like a flag and slammed the door shut on her, she was left sitting there with her marvelous anger and her stupid control. She bit the inside of her cheek as hard as she could and closed her eyes tight enough for tears and pounded the top of her head, saying, Dumb, dumb, dumb.

She tried to think how to apologize—make him stir-fry and flan for dessert? spill rose petals from the door to the bubble-filled bath?—but nothing felt serious enough. How to make it up to him, how to exorcise her controlling witch-self?

How proud she was when she finally thought of it: an act of total submission. What sweeter gift could a controlling woman give a wounded man? She was so excited that she ran out that minute, caught the subway up several more blocks—they’d been there dozens of times, admiring the nipple clamps, fingering the leather, faces flushing at the plugs. They loved these stores, loved to be in them, loved to buy gels and magazines and arcane contraptions and then go home and work each other into lather and sweat and dripping delirium. She remembered the night they bought a piercing kit—how she squeezed the skin around his nipple, how the beautiful dark bump rose like a kiss toward her, how she slid the silver point through to the other side as their foreheads pressed together. She remembered the night he bent over her like a tender archaeologist, how she sat up on her elbows trying to see, though all she could really make out was his furrowed brow, his eyelashes, the top of his head, his fingers working as the point went through her without a sound. And then, when he was finished, he dipped his sweet dark face down into the sweet dark mouth, mouth to mouth, she would never forget. She bought the cuffs and ran all the way home, dreaming of their new forgiveness.