by Amber Dawn
you would have savoured them slowly as though they were your last fix. and I would indulge you, as always.
i haven’t touched your flesh in forever, but my fingertips know your shape by heart. when i let loose another button, my fingers brush my nipple and it hardens immediately. i am wondering what your nipples feel like right now, safe inside your threadbare sunday dress, safe in your box under the ground. probably quite stiff.
oh, how i wish i were there with you, watching you sleep.
your face would reveal your ancestry; the softest and whitest, with flushed cheeks, still, and tiny maps of veins decorating your empty body. your lips would still taste like delicious rose essence, and even in this stiff office chair i can feel myself melting underneath them. your doll eyes are as clear as a seer’s crystal ball and twice as deceiving. the thought of you so far away from me starves my brain, and i find myself lighting yet another cigarette. you are to blame for all of my current addictions, and i have no intention of letting go.
another button gone, and in my mind you appear beneath me, wearing nothing but back-seam stockings tugging gently on a garter belt and a black vintage bra taut around your ribs. you look classic, in black and white, a darling vintage pinup with blonde hair falling in your face and a look in your eyes that would kill a weaker woman.
with all the powers of my lucid dream, you are suddenly real. my left heel is dangling off my toes while you trace my foot. the shock of your hands on my skin at long last sends a sudden alarm to my crotch. your eyes wander up my touch-hungry legs, searching for the source of my new awareness. i realize how badly i need you as i suck harder and harder on my skinny cigarette. my entire body is responding to the thrill of my fantasy; your ghost has given me goose bumps.
you rest your head in my lap for a moment before placing kisses all down my thighs and calves, down to the painted red tips of my toes. bring one into your mouth, send those tender sexual shivers back up my legs, look up at me with those crystal eyes. i want you to follow my shivers with your tongue, follow the scent of your prey.
i spread my legs and slide my ass down to the very edge of my office chair. your nose is pressed up against the crotch of my panties and you let out a whimper. you need it, you’re begging for it with your fucking perfect eyes, and i can’t help but tease you a second longer. a giggle and a puff of smoke later and you are whispering, “please, please dear, let me touch.” you may have abandoned your flesh, sweet ghost, but i haven’t.
i reach down between my legs and touch my clit. you can’t take your eyes off my red nails as i start making little circles, slow and careful. watch me, girl, and when i let you, please follow. i spread my lips apart and slide a finger inside, and then i put my finger up to my mouth and replace my cigarette with the taste of my own wetness.
take my panties off for me, baby girl, pull them down with
your teeth and keep them there in your mouth. i want you to taste how wet you’ve already made me. you look fantastic with my panties in your mouth. you take a finger and place it right on my clit, exposed. i let out a little gasp—your fingertips have set my nerves on fire so quick. you make perfect little circles around it, you’re such a tease. put your fingers inside me; i want you under my skin where you belong. where you have always been.
push one finger in to test me out, then put the second and third in right away. push and pull me, play with me, rest your cheek on my inner thigh, and keep your eyes looking up.
my cigarette is burning down to the filter and warming my fingers. i kill the cherry and tell you to concentrate. you nod your pretty little panty-gagged face and pull your fingers out of me. my back is arched, my heels planted firmly on the ground.
you are on your knees, between my sexy chubby thighs, pressing four fingers together and pushing into my cunt. one, two, three, four; you slide in so easily, my beautiful baby girl.
you’re up to your knuckles in pussy and you’re really starting to work it. you get deeper and deeper, never thrusting, only pushing farther inside. god, i’ve needed you inside me for so long. i only feel full when you feed me, i only feel satisfied when you’re holding my heart in the palm of your hand in the centre of my wet, wet cunt.
my muscles are squeezing around you, pulsing like my heartbeats, just for you. my head is thrown back over the back of my chair, and i know the neighbours can hear my praise for you, my skilled apprentice. i feel as though i am about to melt around your wrist when you pause and command my attention with your eyes. i could overdose on those looks, for sure. without saying a word, without asking or needing permission, you spit my panties from your mouth and smile up at me. your hand stays still inside me as you bite my thighs. you bite hard enough to pull blood to the surface without breaking the skin. i am all shivers for you, my nipples hard as ice and pointing toward the sky, my
face flushed, my body on the brink of climax—held prisoner in that delicate moment before explosion.
look up again and tell me you love me, baby girl, until i die. you know the recipe, you’ve mastered the spell. finish me off so that i may sleep in your arms forever, and wake from this dream that tortures my reality.
you follow a trail of bites home to my clit. you pull my clit up inside your mouth and suck on it as though i have a dick, and your fist enters me completely, finally filling me up. i let out the sweetest moans. you have my world in your hand. my ass lifts off the chair and my cunt pulls you so deep inside me it hurts. i am coming, spilling all over your hand, between your fingers, under your nails, down your wrist, in your sweet mouth, up your nose. my cunt won’t let you go, i want you inside me forever, baby girl. you belong here.
instead, you disappear from the floor between my shaking thighs, and i find myself alone in my office, the computer light glowing off the slick sheen of sweat across my tits. i look at my own hand, drenched in come, and lick my fingers, wishing i was tasting myself on you. what would you do with me now, i wonder?
you’re a phantom of desire, and you haunt me always. my lover, my wife, my best friend. where are you right now? what are you dreaming of under those soft eyelids, in that hot cave? i wish my screams were loud enough to wake you.
Shark
Kestrel Barnes
Queerspawn, that’s what we are: me and Paul and Castor and baby Carling. Born and raised by dykes; we are one of the ways the Lesbian Nation reproduces itself. But some of us were also born of shark, some of us study sharks, some hunt for sharks and subdue them—all of us are scarred by shark. And we know that some dykes are sharks. They move through the world in human form, but they are sharks, no less.
My Mama studied sharks; basking sharks, great strong gentle sea creatures that raise their young in matriarchal groups. Sort of like some dykes do. I read that in my Mama’s field journal.
She was a marine biologist, a scientist who did her shark research in our backyard ocean.
“Just the facts, Ma’am,” my Baba would tease her as she danced Mama around our kitchen, Paul and Castor balancing on her boots, me clutching her neck, all of us with our arms around one another, all of us together. We lived in an old summerhouse perched on an outcrop of rock overlooking the deepwater channel at Spencer Pass, way up in the fog-blown northwest rainforest. There were only a few houses scattered along the Pass, most of them inhabited by the coastal Native people who lived there long before Mama and Baba had moved there when the twins were small and I was still an unborn spawnling.
They’d met at a women’s shelter in the Big Smoke—Baba was a support worker, Mama a grad student and a client. “Theory meets reality,” they joked, though I never really knew who was supposed to be one or the other.
“Your Mama saved me,” Baba always insisted, but it was Baba who stood down the man who hurt Mama and sent him away from us forever. Baba believed then that justice conquers violence. I now know that justice doesn’t exist in nature or for those not bound by law, and sometimes not even for those who are.
“Anyway, Baba is our dad, our re
al dad,” Paul always told me.
Baba took care of us while Mama studied. When I was almost three, Mama was immersed in her field studies of the basking sharks that fed near the beaches and coves of our stormy coast. She started catching glimpses of another creature that summer, something that was not supposed to exist in our waters, an interloper or anomaly of nature. Something that couldn’t be real, except that it was. It’s an oceanic white tip shark, she’d written after weeks of observation and research:
May 28—Basking shark neonatal carcass washed up on Cripple Creek spit. Flesh wounds consistent with large predator attack (orca? shark?).
June 2—M-pod orcas sounding and hunting off Home Bay site—observed shark dorsal fin in midst (blue/grey, white striped dorsal). Orca pod agitated, observed from 14:40 hrs until 15:05 hrs. No further shark dorsal fin sighted.
June 5 —Spencer Pass channel 19:25 hrs. Observed mature sea lion being followed by white striped dorsal fin (shark?). Sea lion yanked below surface at 19:27 hrs.
June 6—Basking shark matriarchal group #51 in Home Bay swimming in circles around #51 calves— white tipped dorsal fin observed about 200 metres out. What’s going on here? No indigenous species of shark fits this description.
June 10-12—(University of Victoria Marine Library) studied shark species sighting reports for region (1922–present); no sharks fitting description recorded. Three great white shark sightings near Queen Charlotte Islands—could this be an atypically marked great white?
June 15—Kokum Bear (SkyBear’s grandmother) told me a story she’d heard from the elders about a fearsome white marked shark that attacked a Haida war canoe (1840s?) and devoured seven men. During the next few days two more canoes were attacked, eight more people killed in the water. Haida observed shark hunting off Home Bay for an entire summer, forcing them to move to Storm Bay fall camp two months early. Kokum B remembers seeing a totem pole commemorating the sea beast erected at old fall camp.
June 17—Cripple Creek spit 18:35 hrs—grey-blue dorsal fin circling seal colony, observed shark (ten metres)—not a great white. (If not a great white, what is it?)
It was her sighting again of that dorsal fin circling just starboard of our dock that led to everything that came after.
We’d been to town for supplies and library books. Mama had insisted that Baba stay home and rest on her one day off from working the Crisis Line. Mama was always making sure Baba didn’t work too hard. She lovingly ironed her shirts and whispered sweetness into her blushing ears. And Baba could make Mama laugh and cry and sing all at the same time—I heard them many nights. On that night as we drove down the hill toward home, Mama caught sight of that thing again—the fin cutting the surface of the water. She drove out onto our dock, headlights streaming through the fog, searching for the flash of white on grey on sea-ink blue. Baba heard us arrive. She stepped out onto the widow’s walk at the top of our house and called out, “I missed you, my love.”
“Come and get the children,” Mama called up to her. “I’m staying down here with the shark for awhile. Love you …” And before Baba could reply, “Love you, too” (though Paul insisted that Baba had said it and Mama had heard her), the dock buckled and our truck slipped into the deep.
Baba howled as our truck sank. She was at the dock, ripping off her leather jacket and plunging in, before our truck sank below the surface. She pulled me out first and flung me onto the dock. Paul was next, his small body twisted at the waist. He crawled on his elbows to find me in the dark. It took a long time to free Castor from the tangle of car seats. Baba was heaving as she dragged him to the surface, but Castor wasn’t breathing. Paul said that Baba paused in the water for a heartbeat, staring desperately below before climbing onto the dock with Castor limp in her arms. She smacked Castor on the back while he spewed sea water, then blew air into his sodden lungs. She implored, demanded, prayed, “Breathe, son, breathe.” The moment Castor drew a breath, she jumped back into the water and dove again and again and again, trying to free Mama.
SkyBear said his dad heard Baba’s howls that night, but Bear Senior maintained it was the truck’s headlights bouncing off the ocean floor onto his front window that roused him. By the time our neighbour arrived to investigate, Baba was storming back from the dockside tool shed, a crowbar in her belt and a hack-saw in her hand. Baba decked SkyBear’s dad with her bare fist, all 250 logger-muscled pounds of him, when he tried to stop her from cutting Mama free.
Baba must have known Mama was dead by then, dead before the truck even settled into the sea bed, dead before she knew her children were saved, dead with her feet crushed and ankles trapped in the truck’s twisted front end. What we know and what we believe sometimes do not correspond. Maybe Baba couldn’t go home without her, couldn’t leave her love trapped in the deep, couldn’t face us kids without bringing Mama to us. So while we huddled on the dock with her leather jacket protecting us, and as SkyBear’s dad groaned back to consciousness, Baba hacked and cut Mama’s feet off at the ankles and brought her body to the surface. Then dove twice more and freed the bits of bone left in her boots, and brought her—maimed, but all of her—back to us.
Baba rocked Mama’s body in her arms and crooned sorrow into her unhearing ears. Castor wetly inhaled and exhaled, staring straight up at the stars. Paul’s legs were twisted under him at an impossible angle. I clutched Baba, my cheek pressed against Mama’s belly, staring down at her mangled legs. Mama’s bones, or the bits that jutted out from her ankles and poked jagged from her boots beside her, were yellow. Not the yellow of fresh-churned butter or new-hatched chicks or the colour that played across our kitchen walls when the sun burned bright in summer, but more like the shade of the empty eggshells you find outside the hen house when the raccoons or foxes get there before you do. Or like the yellow-grey of a pearl you choke on and almost swallow.
She didn’t bleed much, just two small pools draining out onto our dock, and some red fluid mixed with sea water sloshing out of her mangled boots. It didn’t smell like the blood I knew—not the copper-and-kisses smell of skinned knees and Band-Aids.
Mama’s blood smelled like every promise you knew wouldn’t ever be kept, like every secret that is revealed against your will. Her blood smelled just like the saddest tears, right before you cry. And her blood wasn’t warm or cold I discovered when I reached down to touch the fluid seeping from her legs. It was the same temperature as the summer night air. Baba saw me touching the places Mama’s feet should have been and she lifted my hand and printed Mama’s blood onto her own chest just above her second shirt button. Then did the same for Castor and Paul. And then she placed the last smear of Mama’s blood on my fingers against my chest and all of us were marked by Mama’s blood and by her life and death, forever. And I lay back against Mama’s belly and felt the warmth of her body slowly fade, each layer of skin releasing its heat into the darkness.
We were medevacked down to the Big Smoke by the harbour air ambulance. Baba refused to board until the zippered body bag was loaded in beside us. She held Mama’s body and us all the way down to the hospital. What all the newspapers and local gossips described as a scene of unimaginable horror was just Baba’s way of keeping our family together.
I found a picture in Mama’s sea chest that was taken at the cemetery where we cremated her. Baba was wearing her best suit and the last white shirt Mama ever ironed for her. Her shoulders were rigid with grief, arms around Castor, whose head drooped and eyes stared vacantly. Paul sat in an oversized wheelchair, eyes burning. Both boys were in their little suits, ties neatly knotted by Baba, me tucked into her jacket, purple velvet dress scrunched up over my skinned knees, smiling solemnly. When Castor and, later, Paul were discharged from the hospital, we came home to scatter Mama’s ashes off the dock and begin our life together without her. I barely remember those first months after Mama died. But I do remember the ten years we all lived together after that, before the shark came again.
Castor started to walk again, then run and fish an
d swim. But he never learned to write in anything but a precocious six-year-old’s neat block printing, or read much beyond the books he’d sounded out for Mama. When, in the sixth grade, Paul tried to help Castor study for a history test, he prompted, “‘The cliffs of Dover held archers, bows flexed, and as the enemy landed, the sea turned crimson.’ Come on, Castor, answer the question, why did the sea turn red?”
Castor pondered cause and effect. “Shark attack?” Castor finally offered.
We stopped trying to teach Castor schoolwork after that, and just let him learn how and what he wanted. And though he never graduated, he could name all the plants and animals in the rainforest and all the sea creatures in the tide pools. He could navigate his sailboat by starlight and catch and clean fish for our dinner and chop enough firewood to keep us warm all winter.
His eyes were content with all that needed to be forgotten.
Paul’s broken back healed, but he never walked again. Baba carried him everywhere at first, with me balanced on her other arm. She built ramps to the porch and dock and beach, and Castor helped her renovate the house for Paul’s wheelchair. Paul’s mind was as quick as his body was broken, and he devised engines to power his beach buggies, and he mapped and plotted every trail he blazed. He could reason and debate, and he read his way through Mama’s library and Baba’s too. His eyes burned with the need of remembering.
I ran bare-chested through all our childhood summers. It seemed like me and SkyBear, whose mother wasn’t around either, were always dogging the twins, building sand forts and scavenging the beaches for treasure, raiding the rainforest for wild berries, fishing off our dock and staying up late to watch the moon rise out of the ocean. Through all those long rain-lashed winter evenings we’d toast bread and cheese over the woodstove and snuggle under blankets while Paul read to us; we’d listen to the fog horns mourning when he paused to turn a page.
Baba dedicated herself to caring for us, to being our mother and dad, both. It’s not like Baba never had any female companionship during those years. She’d sometimes pack her duffle bag and head out to the Big Smoke, or Seattle, or even back East. Sometimes she went to leatherfolk gatherings, sometimes to feminist conferences, often just for a night at the opera or a night at the bar.
