Christopher Ransom - The Birthing House

Pants around his knees, his orgasm interrupted but still surging, purging him of his life force, his seed, Conrad lost consciousness on the bathroom floor.

HOLLY

Once upon a time there was a boy, and this boy, he had something inside him. Hunger, curiosity, need. Older things without names. Things that got a hold of him at an age younger than most. Things that need to find a way out, things that need a home.

She arrived in a pink sweater and blue jeans faded almost white. She had bad new wave hair, thirty bracelets on one arm, and she carried a purple Mad Balls lunchbox instead of a purse. She was a true child of the eighties. Her sweater, her cheeks, and her lippy smile (when she did smile) were all shades of pink. She was a drug called Girl. Just staring at her released endorphins and filled him with light.

I know what you're thinking. It's not that. Girl was not his first sexual encounter. But she was his first love. She was the girl no one could get to, which is what made him try harder. But he could not win her attentions. He was too young, too plain.

He studied her and made plans and two more years passed. Eventually she noticed him, the quiet kid who stared at her like she was made of golden candy. She knew who he was, of course. They had some classes together, but different circles of friends, and she was a circle of one. Holly Bauerman. There isn't anything in a name. But she was Holy. This was the time in which he wore her down with one simple act of courtship: staring.

He stared at Holly Bauerman in class, in the halls, and wherever he saw her around town, at parties and in the clothing store where she worked. She found him creepy at first, and then became curious. Once, on a Monday night, he spray-painted her name in ten-foot letters on the street in front of her house. No one knew it was him. But she knew.

She resisted, but what else has the power to melt us than the adoring eyes of another? If you have ever been adored this way, and by adore I mean with the perfect mixture of fear and craving, then you know. It is not something one can give to oneself. Only another's eyes have the power to show us how beautiful we can be. When his longing became obvious and overwhelming, her disgust turned to disinterest to a thing she missed when it was withheld, until finally the watching became a form of ego food she could no longer live without. She went to the Last Day of School Picnic alone and he was there.

'Hello, Holly,' he said. 'Happy last day of school.'

'What do you want from me?' A kind of tough, quiet panic entered her voice. She stood there in her plaid shorts, her pink tee shirt and plastic bracelets, her lunchbox-purse swinging like a second grader.

'If I don't see you all summer,' he said, 'then what's the point?'

'There is no point. Point of what?'

'The best days of my life have been the first day of school,' he said. 'I just wish I had more than four of them.'

She didn't have to think back to know that this was true.

'So are you going to give me your summer, or should I get it over with and kill myself?'

She laughed, but later confessed it was the most romantic thing anyone had said to her. They spent the summer together. Once they started talking, she relaxed. He became a clown, a little brother she could abuse, a friend to cheer her up, a reliable jester in her not-so-funny world. The world that had given her things like divorce, eating disorders, rival cliques, a dented and rusting Volkswagen Rabbit - this world he washed away. Puppy love brought them together, but what bound them was divorce. They had that brokenness in common and he thanked his parents for that much, for making him into something resembling her. His new wave girl morphing into a little prep-hippie before his eyes.

The summer was slow and warm and full of nights sitting on the hood of her car at Flagstaff Mountain, looking over the town. They pretended they were in a 1950s movie and he bought her milkshakes. She showed him how to dip the fries in the shake. They stayed away from parties. It was better just to walk in the park, go to the movies, or stay at home and talk on the phone. One day they talked on the phone from ten in the morning until midnight.

She made him take long hikes with her. She told him how she loved wild flowers, herbs, iced tea. She brewed her own special concoctions on the deck in glass gallon jars. She said it was a healing art, preparing this sun tea. She said that tea was purifying, good for the soul. He had never felt so clean as when he was with her. She collected herbs from the mountains and brewed special batches for him and he believed her. Later, when she grew bold toward the end of that endless summer, she leaned back in one of her mother's chaises longues and poured iced tea down her chest and let him lap at her swimsuit. She filled her mouth and kissed him while he drank from her, a bird to her fountain statue.

Then school came, and it was news. People did not agree that it was a good fit. He was too strange. Wasn't he that kid who played with snakes? But they didn't care. They were in their own world and they laughed at everything. At the teachers, other kids. At their parents. At policemen who pulled them over for speeding. At people who cared, at people who tried.

Their physical courtship lasted six months and he was patient. They kissed for hours, sometimes all night. It became serious before the sex and after, deadly serious. They lost all shyness in bed and talked through every step of it. She taught him how to touch her and for how long until it worked better than it was supposed to work at age sixteen.

In the last semester of their senior year they were seventeen and, though they did not know it, afraid. They had been together for nearly two years and become one of those inseparable couples that cause teachers to cluck their tongues and parents to lie awake wondering how can it possibly be so serious at this age, having forgotten in their middle age that love at seventeen is deadly serious because nothing else matters, it is the first and purest and . . . because it's love at seventeen.

So the boy set out to become a man, at precisely the time when his tribe was most unwilling to let the girl become a woman.

10

When he regained his senses he had no idea how much time had passed. Daylight had faded somewhat. His shoulder throbbed and the bathroom seemed to be tilting in every direction at once. He raised himself on shaking legs and began to pull his pants up. What just happened here? How much time had he lost? Minutes . . . or hours? The last thing he recalled was experiencing a too realistic vision of Jo and the first strand of a mighty orgasm.

He patted the front of his boxer shorts and pants, then up higher to his tee shirt. He bent over, which made his headache sing, and scanned the floor, the tub, the sink. Where the hell did it go? He longed for an ultra-violet light, one of those scanners they used on CSI , the better to locate his discharged DNA.

Conrad cupped his package, shifting things around. He was sore in the way that suggested he had, in fact, climaxed. He felt it in the muscles of his loins, the need to urinate. But his chafed, limp penis was clean and dry. He held his hands up in front of his face, turning them in the light. For a moment he caught the scent of lavender, of summer spices. But it was faint, and then gone.

So, let's get this straight. It was so good I blacked out, but didn't come? Then why do my neck and shoulders feel like I've been playing catch with an anvil?

Someone knocked him down, there was no other explanation. And not the dogs. Couldn't have been the dogs. The door was still latched.

Someone knocked me down . . . and cleaned me up? Or was I out so long it dried, becoming invisible?