Kiss me
It happened in a basement smelling of must in the place where my uncle smelted iron for fishing lures and shot for the hunting trips that had been failures for years.
The basement seemed larger than the house above that had been converted from a barn into a house and transplanted across the river ages ago. It had a perpetual lean. Marble fragments covered the basement floor. Disjointed and different, the pieces were mostly black, but also some white and green. My great grandfather had worked at the marble quarry that helped the town limp on and brought these scraps home. Whatever the original intention of the basement, my uncle had converted the space into his area, a place for machine tools for making rocking chairs and fence posts, an area to make wine, to fix electronics. The darkroom had multiple purposes, from the fishing lures and shot gun shot, to storing his Penthouses and Playboys. Oddly, the porn movies were upstairs in the living room, sitting innocently among the copies of Flash Gordon and Star Trek. His hidden stash of child pornography would be discovered in his bedroom upstairs. They never told Grandma, afraid of the hellfire and damnation that would reign down for tarnishing the image of one of her boys.
They say that in a dream, a house represents your mind. Fragile or strong, scattered, quivering, full of locked doors or half made (or undone) walls. If this were the case, then the basement, that careful act of descending down the stairs, hand gliding along the rail, is like touring your subconsciousness, that place of desire.
Chad lived with his aunt across the street. During my summer visits, he came over to play cards in the living room on TV trays, with the TV on and uncle rocking in his orange recliner. But everything was out of place now.
Chad had been growing longer and more gangly and I had grown shy and nervous with him. Now I was leading him down into the basement, giving a tour of the things my uncle had left behind.
We were in the darkroom, me looking at the fishing lures neatly organized and labeled in plastic drawers, the molds he used and the container with the pour spout he must have smelted the lead in.
I felt a shiver, the kind that comes from the hairdresser running their fingers through your hair, lifting up chunks of it to form a lumpy curtain; or the kind of feeling that comes from being touched by someone you don’t know. Unexpectedly. I turned, feeling that phantom sensation of almost touching. Chad was standing there, close, looking down at me. I hadn’t finished turning when he dove for the kiss in a great gush of breath, like diving into a pool of cold water or ripping off a band-aid. He missed my mouth, hitting just the corner of it.
My reaction, instantaneous and irretractable, was to elbow him in the ribs even though I had led him down there to be alone with him. I escaped to where the adults were, who had already exchanged condolences and were talking safely about the weather.
***
We were drifting there, weightless and full of gases and fire. The time was tumultuous and the space full of bodies not settled into any sort of rhythm or pulse, but zinging and careening in all directions at once, a chaos of movement and bodies in motion. Like ours.
We had passed each other, precariously feeling the dynamic pull of the other like two marbles on a stretch of cloth; on sitting anchored in the center and the other falling helplessly towards that depression. Heavily, we passed each other, spinning of axes and feeling the hum of gravity, electrifying this passing.
We floated, spun a dance of carelessness, feeling the excitement of objects passing us, narrowly skimming our surfaces while others plunged headlong into us, evaporating in our heat or sending shock-waves and ripples through our viscous skins.
We became a triangle of love, pushed together by a third until we collided, there, shamelessly. The impact was catastrophic, forever changed and pushed, shoved into a state of constant and regular motion, dizzying ellipses that would keep the great fire at bay.
In that moment, we taste each other, exchanged these pieces of ourselves, relishing it to be satisfied with spending the rest of eternity separate, me with this swarm of life and the gradually ceasing movement of my internal landscape and you, sad and lonely except for those moments when light from the distant fire strikes your flesh and reveals your scars.
The basement seemed larger than the house above that had been converted from a barn into a house and transplanted across the river ages ago. It had a perpetual lean. Marble fragments covered the basement floor. Disjointed and different, the pieces were mostly black, but also some white and green. My great grandfather had worked at the marble quarry that helped the town limp on and brought these scraps home. Whatever the original intention of the basement, my uncle had converted the space into his area, a place for machine tools for making rocking chairs and fence posts, an area to make wine, to fix electronics. The darkroom had multiple purposes, from the fishing lures and shot gun shot, to storing his Penthouses and Playboys. Oddly, the porn movies were upstairs in the living room, sitting innocently among the copies of Flash Gordon and Star Trek. His hidden stash of child pornography would be discovered in his bedroom upstairs. They never told Grandma, afraid of the hellfire and damnation that would reign down for tarnishing the image of one of her boys.
They say that in a dream, a house represents your mind. Fragile or strong, scattered, quivering, full of locked doors or half made (or undone) walls. If this were the case, then the basement, that careful act of descending down the stairs, hand gliding along the rail, is like touring your subconsciousness, that place of desire.
Chad lived with his aunt across the street. During my summer visits, he came over to play cards in the living room on TV trays, with the TV on and uncle rocking in his orange recliner. But everything was out of place now.
Chad had been growing longer and more gangly and I had grown shy and nervous with him. Now I was leading him down into the basement, giving a tour of the things my uncle had left behind.
We were in the darkroom, me looking at the fishing lures neatly organized and labeled in plastic drawers, the molds he used and the container with the pour spout he must have smelted the lead in.
I felt a shiver, the kind that comes from the hairdresser running their fingers through your hair, lifting up chunks of it to form a lumpy curtain; or the kind of feeling that comes from being touched by someone you don’t know. Unexpectedly. I turned, feeling that phantom sensation of almost touching. Chad was standing there, close, looking down at me. I hadn’t finished turning when he dove for the kiss in a great gush of breath, like diving into a pool of cold water or ripping off a band-aid. He missed my mouth, hitting just the corner of it.
My reaction, instantaneous and irretractable, was to elbow him in the ribs even though I had led him down there to be alone with him. I escaped to where the adults were, who had already exchanged condolences and were talking safely about the weather.
***
We were drifting there, weightless and full of gases and fire. The time was tumultuous and the space full of bodies not settled into any sort of rhythm or pulse, but zinging and careening in all directions at once, a chaos of movement and bodies in motion. Like ours.
We had passed each other, precariously feeling the dynamic pull of the other like two marbles on a stretch of cloth; on sitting anchored in the center and the other falling helplessly towards that depression. Heavily, we passed each other, spinning of axes and feeling the hum of gravity, electrifying this passing.
We floated, spun a dance of carelessness, feeling the excitement of objects passing us, narrowly skimming our surfaces while others plunged headlong into us, evaporating in our heat or sending shock-waves and ripples through our viscous skins.
We became a triangle of love, pushed together by a third until we collided, there, shamelessly. The impact was catastrophic, forever changed and pushed, shoved into a state of constant and regular motion, dizzying ellipses that would keep the great fire at bay.
In that moment, we taste each other, exchanged these pieces of ourselves, relishing it to be satisfied with spending the rest of eternity separate, me with this swarm of life and the gradually ceasing movement of my internal landscape and you, sad and lonely except for those moments when light from the distant fire strikes your flesh and reveals your scars.
Labels: Prompted
posted by InkSpot | 2:09 AM
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