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The ragged tearing of her breath into his neck as she bites him hard on the bone of his shoulder. There’ll be a small, ugly bruise there tomorrow. He wants her, but he waits, not moving, letting his breath and hers cut at each other, deciding who will move first, who will give in. And finally he sees it, the thing he’s been waiting for, moving behind her eyes, looking out with its own eyes. She drives him backward with her body into the white Kenmore fridge, her mouth hard against his, kissing and biting. The fridge rocks into the wall. The ice dispenser rattles. She grabs a handful, shoves it against his throat. He sucks in air, the ice shocking skin, then he pushes her away, scooping up his own handful of ice. She steps back, watches him. He reaches toward her, but she twists, blocks his hand, and behind her the tequila bottle spins, falls, splashing yellow over the counter and the floor and her. She grabs at it, and he reaches up her dress, pulling at her underwear, slapping his handful of ice chips against her skin. She shoves him to the floor and he lies on his back, spilled tequila soaking through his shirt. She pulls off her underwear and stands over him, watching his face. The thing that he thinks he sees behind her eyes looks down at him, and grins. He tells himself it’s only her, that it’s just about sex, but there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to believe it’s just her, wants to believe instead that she is alien, other, immutably beyond his reach. She pulls her dress over her head and throws it on the counter. She drapes her bra over the tequila bottle, then lowers herself onto his hips, slapping away his hands as he reaches for her breasts. She grabs the front of his shirt and rips it open, buttons breaking, then leans down and clamps her teeth onto the skin just above his nipple.
II “Jesus, I don’t remember anything,” he says to her as he clinks the spoon around the inside of his mug, the one with the lizard-shaped handle. Clink. Clink. Clink. “Just drink it,” she says. He avoids her eyes. She doesn’t talk much first thing in the morning. He should just stay in bed, he thinks, wait until she’s really awake, fully human. But he can’t seem to let her alone. The night comes back in spits and spurts—huge gaps of time lost. Too much tequila, he thinks. Shooting short shots with oranges instead of lemons—much easier on the stomach. They’d raced each other in rounds of eight (that’s how many moons he chopped the navel oranges into) biting them out of each others’ mouths, licking each others’ hands so the salt would stick, then shooting the gold back, cold and fast, gasping at the taste like gasoline in their mouths, and later savouring the brutal flavour, even forgetting about the orange moon afterward. He slurps the sweet, milky coffee. He prefers herbal tea, barely steeped. But there’s no tea left in his cupboards. He forgets to put it on the grocery list. So does she. She stands, naked, scraping her chair back from the table. He is startled by her nakedness, by the way she wears it like a second skin. It’s the aliveness of that skin, the way it slides over her muscles and bones, how it coddles the small pockets of fat on her hips. How it burns his fingers. Suddenly he wishes she would stay home from work. He opens his mouth to say the words, to spit them out into the space he piles up around himself: Stay with me. But he snaps his mouth shut just in time, biting the words back. She refills her coffee mug, her back to him. Her skin shimmies. Lumps blister up on her shoulder blades. Spikes grow from the knobs of her spine. a dark, twisting tail snakes out from between her buttocks. He stares, panic darting through him like a fish. She turns, kicks her chair into place and sits back down. Her smooth breasts rest against the edge of the table. “You’re not listening to me,” she says, the syllables hitting him like sharp stones and he realizes that she’s been talking to him. # She rushes around his brown sticky-countered kitchen doing her Tasmanian Devil thing. Keys rattle in her hand. “I’ll be home by five,” she says. His home, not hers, he reminds himself, she doesn’t live here. She only visits. They hardly ever stay at her place. Mostly she invades his. # He mops the kitchen floor with Mr. Clean straight from the bottle. Then he writes oranges on the empty grocery list on the side of the fridge. And tequila. With a shove, he straightens the fridge. Only ten hours until she’ll be back here in his kitchen. Too long. He wants her back in front of him now, tasting her. He shakes his head: but he wants her gone, too, he tells himself, so his life can land again, return to home base. Weeknights she stays here—his house is closer to her office—and lately most weekends. He feels collected—or rather, that he’s given himself up, let himself be taken and tagged and caged. Perhaps, it was the way she set her jaw, her mouth partially open, the gap between her front teeth dark, her eyes hard, like basalt. Perhaps it was that frightening hair of hers, kinky and sticking out, looking like it could eat the hairbrush alive. She tries to tame it in the shower, oppress it with conditioner, but it fights back, twisting and snarling. So dark, only a strand or two of wire-tight grey glinting. No. It was her eyes that caught him first. Frog-green, and they watched him. She never seemed to close them. You’re a watcher, he’d said to her that first night. I am, she’d said back. And so he’d looked away, at her chin, her ear, the alarm clock on his bedside table. It was 1:35 a.m. She had to be at work by seven. She bit him and pushed him off her. Her strength was surprising considering how thin she was. But as she turned away to sleep, he’d grabbed her, pulled her back, and in that moment, in the small white light from his fish tank, he first caught sight of the thing that lived behind her eyes, that invaded in order to watch and play and get fucked. He threw her legs apart, but she scuttled backwards, out of his grip. Then she lunged at him, grabbing his hair, pushing him back until he fell, and she jammed herself on top of him, his cock hard up inside her. He tosses the empty tequila bottle with the others in the recycling bin beside the fridge. Mr. Clean’s lemon-freshness burns his nose. He coughs, hand to his mouth, and finds the musty scent of her on his fingers. He smells his other hand. She’s there, too, stronger. He closes his eyes, willing her back to him, feeling his face pressed soft against her smooth neck.
III She’s on top of him now, sitting straight up, rocking in a wide, hard circle. Her eyes are closed for once, her head back. He stares at her: the nest of night hair; the small breasts with their too-large toffee nipples; the long, thin neck where her air and blood rush back and forth. Her face falls toward his, eyes wide, lips loose and soft. He sees it twitching behind her eyes, grinning, taunting him, and suddenly her skin hardens. Rough ridges push outward above her eyes. An emptiness pierces him like a stake, and in that moment all he can think about is a place he has dreamed: a soft round greenness, open and wild and bright. His cock goes soft. She stops, her cold hand on his chest, her soft face close to his. It’s gone, the thing he believes he saw. “What’s the matter, lover?” she asks in a voice so tender he begins to weep, and she holds him, rocking more gently now, as he shakes with his private fear.
IV He strokes the back of her hand as she leans against him on the couch in his living room. A video she’d brought home after work plays across his big-screen TV. He’d stopped paying attention to it; she seemed to be sleeping now. She fits me well, he thinks, surprising himself, wanting her to never move, to stay leaned against him. Wanting her to need him even in her sleep. As he strokes her hand, her knuckles bulge. Her fingernails stretch into thick, yellowed claws. A spur grows out of her forearm, and the skin on her arm bubbles and blisters. He jerks his hands away, waking her, a sob catching in his throat. She stirs, hugs her smooth arm around him, her small thin hand on his hip. She goes back to sleep. # He feeds his fish, scattering the large flakes over the surface of the water. She comes up behind him, slipping her arms around his waist. Her face presses against his shoulder. “Come have a shower with me,” she says, tugging a little. He lets himself be pulled away from the tank. And as he washes her wild hair, massaging with his fingers, he tries to conjure the thing that lives inside her. He has decided that he is prepared to dismiss it, exile it to the recesses of his imagination from whence it came. He stares hard at the freckled expanse of her back, waiting for the spines and lumps to erupt. Soap suds stream over her skin. She turns to rinse, her eyes closed, face smooth and open. # “You’re a goddess,” he says to her. “And you’re a liar,” she says back, then snorts and pushes herself onto her hands and knees, her nipples above him like miniature stalactites. Her eyes tease, threaten. She kisses him, first on the nose, then the forehead. “Then worship me.” She laughs. And he’s between her legs, his tongue stroking her. She grabs his wet hair, holding him. He flicks his tongue-tip back and forth. Faster. He breathes her in, down into his lungs. She smells like mouldy leaves and clam sauce. He tastes cayenne. “I want you inside me,” she breathes. He shoves her onto her back. She’s suddenly passive, and he drives inside her, closing his eyes so as not to see hers. He can feel her throw her head back, arching. She makes that strangling noise she makes just before she comes, a howl bred with a moan. Hairs flick up at the base of his skull. She comes hard, panting. And he can feel its skin: thick, primordial, with rows and rows of tiny, sharp bumps. His eyes open. It grins at him, its kale-green eyes wide with excitement. Then, with a flick of his mind, he banishes it. She grips his cock inside of her, not letting go, while her body jolts through the orgasm. Still now, she licks her lips. Slowly, her bright eyes focus on his. He touches her face, his fingers shaking, then lowers himself against her smooth skin, slippery with sweat. He pushes his face into her soft, hot neck, breathes in the smell of her hair, and holds hard onto her, letting himself fall into bright, wild greenness. The End |
