by Brian Turner
The accident occurred a week later. I had taken a transport back from my school and had been peering at one of my screens with such intensity that I actually missed my stop—the first time I had ever done so—and when the transport stopped again I leapt off onto the platform without much consideration as to which station I had arrived at, noticing the sign for Loomtown only after the transport had whisked away. That I had never been in the Blue quadrant only speaks further of my own sheltered upbringing, so for a long while I simply stood upon the platform, watching the Blue pass in relative silence below me, the fluid motion hypnotic and beautiful, wondering if Skeery was somewhere down below and even hoping against all hope that I might find her figure amid the moving flow of pedestrians upon the sidewalk. And then, as if in response to my thought, I did indeed see one figure who reminded me strongly of Skeery, so strongly, in fact, that I nearly shouted her name. Of course, it was impossible that out of the population of the whole outpost I just happened to see the one person I had been thinking of, and yet the figure moved like Skeery moved and she was wearing the familiar pale white shift that she had worn each time I had seen her.
The decision I made was a split-second one, sprinting down the stairs and entering the flow of various pedestrians, mostly Blue with occasional humans threading through their more sylphlike forms, following, as best I could, in the general direction in which Skeery—if it was even her—had gone. Maybe I could reach her. Maybe I could apologize, tell her that she could come home—back to the apartment—that my brother still loved her, that he wanted her back, that I could still fix what I had broken, this one thing, this one beautiful thing I had, in my own grief, burned to the ground.
Such were my thoughts as I passed down a sidewalk eerily quiet, the various Blue around me not, of course, speaking aloud, so that the only sounds were passing transports, my own clomping shoes against the tarmac, the swish of clothing, and the occasional audible click of a light turning on or off. It was into this quietude that I wanted to shout Skeery’s name, but I still did not know if it was really her, not until the figure I pursued turned into an alley and I followed her, catching full sight of her face just as she passed into an open doorway there, realizing in that moment that it was actually her, that it was, indeed, actually Skeery. This time I did call out, my voice a kind of echoing boom against the now-closed door. I felt for the tickle of her consciousness against my own, but there was nothing. Quiet figures behind me on the street. Larval-eyed.
On the door were characters in the language of the Blue. I did not bother to look them up on my screen, instead pressing the sensor strip to find the door unlocked and uncoded. The room I entered was a dark cube striped with ribbons of glowing blue light that mimicked the skin of the Blue, the gentle pulses moving in a direction that led me to a narrow hall where the lights turned in rectangles around closed doorways. I listened for Skeery, my heart tight in my chest, not yet understanding where I was, or what the rooms and doors and the pulsing light might indicate. Later I would wonder why I had failed to enter the entry door’s sign into my screen. I might have waited outside then, might have seen Skeery upon her exit, but instead had blundered into a place I should not have, this realization also coming much later, since, in the moment of my opening the door at the end of that hallway, all I could comprehend was the agony of my mistake.
It was much later, in the darkness of the many days and nights to come, that I reconstructed what I had seen and what had happened: The briefest sense of a large room. A dozen or more Blue both seated and standing in apparent communication. But already I was staggering back from the cold blazing sun of that alien world, my eyes stabbed through with an agony of immolation even through their clamped-closed lids, my arms up at my face. So bright, so unconscionably, interminably bright it could not be believed. And then a kind of wail which I understood, even in that moment, was coming from my own throat as I fell from the open door, fell backward, even as I could feel the press of alien consciousnesses entering my own, a garble of questions and images of sizzling flesh and flashes of light: You Stranger Human Not Here; You Stranger Pain Pain Pain; You Stranger Help Danger Help Danger. And then, from amid this cacophony of voices and images and my own agony and confusion, a familiar voice, shouting silently in my head: You Hedgerow You Hedgerow Negative Negative Pain Help Help, and then someone’s hands on my arms, my body, lifting me from the tiles as if I were but a feather upon the air, my eyes still closed, red, streaming with pain, my voice rising in a kind of howl met, after a moment, by a faint shushing and the warmth of arms cradling my body, arms that had seemed like warm liquid enveloping me but now felt solid and strong and human. And then the voice: It’s all right now, Hedge. It was a voice I recognized but did not recognize and I thought at first that it was somehow my brother’s voice, but that was not quite right, for it was the voice of someone older, and as it continued to speak I felt myself melt into its softness even as the pain lessened and fell away. You’ll be all right, little Hedge. My little Hedgerow. Shhh. Shhh. I could feel his lips against my eyes, my forehead, my cheeks, the warm scratch of his beard against my skin. And then I knew who it was, my father, my dear lost father, and even as I slipped into quiet unconsciousness the feeling that came over me in that moment was that I was safe and all would be well.
Of course, I never regained my sight. For a long while I did not understand what had happened when I had opened that door, what the light was, why it had blinded me, although this was, in the end, easy enough to explain. What confused me was the vision of my father that had come to me there as my optic nerves were burned to charcoal, for even in my memory it felt like he had been there with me not as a vision but in physical form, for I had felt his arms around me, felt his lips upon my boiling eyes, upon my forehead, upon my streaming cheeks. It had been him there, it must have been, it had to be, and yet the conscious part of my mind knew he had been dead for months.
My brother visited me often in the hospital. He was angry about Skeery, about the Blue in general, threatening all kinds of legal action, but that faded with time. After that, we mostly made small talk, although that quickly dwindled to long silences. There was, as it turned out, not much to talk about between us now. At some point during the long period of life skills training that followed my hospitalization, he brought some new woman, a human woman, to visit me. His new girlfriend. Now I cannot even recall her name.
As for Skeery and what happened to me, I had, by then, already figured out most of the story. I had happened upon the equivalent of a Blue restaurant, a social gathering under the simulated light of the Blue homeworld, a light brighter even than that which had been installed in the bedroom Skeery and my brother had once shared. It had blinded me and had burned my face, neck, and hands with enough severity to require skin grafts. It is perhaps a blessing that I cannot gaze at my own face, but the skin there is smooth and waxy to the touch, so I know it must not be a pleasant sight.
Given what happened to me, it may surprise you to learn that I have chosen to live with the Blue for most of the years since, not on the outpost upon which I had lived with my family but at a more distant base—much closer to the Blue’s own homeworld—the designation of which will be meaningless to you, for its name is in the Blue’s own language and consists of images rather than words. I can tell you that it is roughly equivalent to a cheetah leaping through a forest of bright green trees, although of course the animal in the Blue’s language is no cheetah and the things that I call trees are hardly trees at all. Theirs is a poetic language and one which I have finally become adept at, although it has taken me all my life to reach mastery.
A few days ago, I was practicing that language with my tutor, Cern, much of which involved her teaching me how to listen to Blue conversation. I had reached a point where I could sense that someone in the area was communicating, but it always felt like a dull whispering from far away. I had been listening—or trying to listen—for a long while when something in the room’s energy changed,
a kind of musical wailing rising out of the darkness and then, from out of that wailing, something else, a familiar image: bright warmth, a great sun shimmering over a gently sloping hill covered in purple grass, the wailing slowing, fading, and the image holding for a long trembling moment before drifting away again.
You Hedgerow Hear Child, Cern said, the words matched by the image of a diminutive Blue.
You Cern Positive, I told him.
You Hedgerow Brightmemory, Cern said, the image of the purple hill returning in scattered outline, its vagueness meant to indicate, in Blue language, the general rather than the specific.
I had studied the Blue long enough to understand what Cern meant. What I had heard in that moment was a kind of lullaby, a common image meant to indicate that everything was still as it should be, that the world was warm and safe and kind. This was why the image had been of the Blue homeworld: that familiar purple hill and, to me, blindingly bright sun. Adults, too, sometimes used Brightmemory; in that context the use was unique to the recipient, a kind of living memory that the Blue could wrap around someone in distress or pain. For a child this might be a collective memory—the lullaby of security that was the Blue’s homeworld—but for an adult, Brightmemory was often the gift of the recipient’s very own best, safest memory, handed back to them in their time of need, filling their mind with security and pushing away pain and sadness and loneliness.
It was this thought, this overheard communication between a mother and child, that has brought Skeery back to my thoughts these years later and with it her own gift of Brightmemory in my time of greatest need, for of course it had been her lips against my eyes, against my forehead, against my cheeks, for although I did not know her at all, had never even tried, she had listened, unwillingly, to my own grief night after night in that tiny apartment and, when I needed it most, had clothed herself in that shape for my mind to find. Brightmemory. I can picture her outside the door in the pale shift that she always wore, luminous with her feeding as she lifted me and carried me away from that light and back into the shade of the human world. And then, through my shrieking, my blistering skin, my burned eyes, pushing away the pain with the brush of her impossible lips upon my face. And in that moment, sitting across from my tutor so many years later, the person I missed most of all was not my father or my brother but Skeery. I had never seen her again and learned much later that she had moved away from the outpost, much as I had, pushing farther into space, to the very edge of the frontier, for what purpose or reason I did not know, and while I had thought of her often in the years since the accident, there was something in the purple hill, the bright sun, the mother comforting a child in pain, that brought me back to those days after my father’s death, when I lived in that little apartment in the Quay with my brother and Skeery. How I wanted to tell her that what she did for me had changed me as a person, not the blindness, although that had changed me as well, but understanding how it felt to be safe again, and right in that moment, at the age of fifteen, at the edge of adulthood when I could feel the whole of the world tipping into some unknown orbit, Skeery’s kiss upon my burning eyes, Skeery’s mouthless comfort upon my heart.
A RECKONING OF KISSES
Beth Ann Fennelly
—He placed his beer on the pool’s lip, then pulled me into his. I’ll wager that, on the scale of kiss-taste, a drag of Marlboro followed by a swig of Bud in a forbidden pool in the chlorinated dark still ranks pretty high.
—Through a chain-link. Soccer field. Drummer in a punk band.
—Curled around my firstborn’s body, flesh-drunk, I kissed her chins and cheeks and tiny soft lips which parted, and for the briefest of moments we soul-kissed.
—I’d met the boy from the next town on my sixteenth birthday, in line at the DMV. He told me I was pretty and asked for my number. I’d never felt so grown up in my life. When he called, I said yes, so he picked me up and drove me to a lake with a boathouse. Once inside, he licked my face.
The next time he called I begged my sister to tell him I’d been sent to boarding school. She did, but charged me thirty minutes of back-scratching.
—Years before, my sister and I practiced on each other in a hotel bathroom. We also critiqued each other’s “sexy walk.” We never spoke of this again.
—After snowmobiling in Wisconsin. His lips were so chapped that they cracked mid-kiss and I swallowed his blood. I thought this should end up meaning more than it ended up meaning.
—Sitting on the fountain rim in Prague, I heard a commotion behind me. Before I could turn, something slicked the back of my neck—bird droppings?—and then the skinny back of a Romani (“Gypsies,” I’d been warned by the Czechs, “all thieves”) sprinted past, his hoot lingering after his boot soles flashed around the corner.
Was it a dare? An insult? Panicked flirtation? A distraction designed to remove my wallet from my bag? Here I sit, twice-my-life away, puckered, still responding to that kiss.
—The one with the girl. I kissed her not for her sake, or my own, but for the boys who were egging us on. Were I again presented with her soft lips, I’d do better.
—Strange that after all the lips, the censored kiss is the one I gave my daughter. Fourteen years ago I published a poem about it, which, the editor said, received some “interesting” feedback. Hate emails. All from women.
Recently, I found them. This time, they struck me as funny. Maybe, I thought—for so this world ripens us—maybe the women would, too.
—What’s a kiss but two eels grappling in a cave of spit? Best not to overthink it.
—My grad school boyfriend had a mustache and beard. I didn’t imagine I’d like them, but I did. I could kiss him for hours, the halo of scratchy hair making the central hot-soft even hot-softer.
But then came the month when we couldn’t make rent, so he got a job delivering pizza, a spectacularly bad idea. Fayetteville’s streets twisted around hills, and he had no sense of direction, so his pizzas were reliably late and cold. Tipping actually was just a city in China. Within three months he’d get rear-ended by a bozo without insurance. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What I wanted to tell you: drivers had to be clean-shaven. It was policy.
Before his first shift, he took a razor from its package. He entered the bathroom hirsute, and exited . . . wrong. I kissed him, and the kiss, too, was wrong. He slumped on the bed with his red, scraped jowls. “Wait a minute,” I whispered, inspired, “I’ll be right back.” I took his razor and shaved “down there,” shaved off every single hair. I thought it would be a turn-on, but I didn’t feel sexy. Not at all. I looked like a child, like a Barbie. Now we were in it together, broke, depressed, slumped, razor-burned, and bald-jowled.
Reader, I married him.
—Today is our daughter’s fifteenth birthday. These days, she and I rarely kiss.
—Maybe, at the end, there will be a reckoning of kisses. Maybe, along with good deeds, they tally our generosities of flesh. Maybe how we’re judged is this: Were you a waste of breath? Maybe eternity feels like an endless kiss.
LATE-NIGHT SESSIONS WITH A BLACK LIBERAL PROGRESSIVE
Christopher Paul Wolfe
She was already in the bed when I came home. I could smell the incense burning from down the hall. It was coming from our room. Something called Black Gold. She’d picked it up from the African spot on the corner over the weekend along with two bottles of body oil, a bar of black soap, and an African medallion. I don’t frequent this store often. From what I can see, when passing the storefront and its enthusiastic owner, the shit he sells just isn’t the type of shit that I need. But she’s always willing to give a motherfucker a chance.
I take off my coat and tie, shirt and pants, socks and shoes, and slide into the bed next to her, but I find that there’s an extra head, sets of arms and legs, between us. They belong to my second-born, aka Number Two, aka the four-foot cock-block—I love him but, damn. I pick him up by his pieces and put them where they belong. When I return, I find her in the same
position, lying on her side, her head turned away from me with a black silk scarf wrapped tight around her twisted wet locks.
She’s making this steady sideways shift of her hips. If you don’t know any better, you’d believe that she is either anxious or possibly aroused. But we’ve been married for six years, enough time to see two babies climb from her womb, enough time to have had more fights than either of us care to remember, over kids, money, infidelity—the typical shit that threatens a marriage as a going concern. Six years is enough time to know that she’s just trying to put herself to sleep.
I slide across the bed and put my body up against her flannel pajamas. I kiss her behind her ear, down her neck, and along the ridge of her collarbone.
“You ain’t getting none,” she says, shrugging my lips off of her and turning farther into her side of the bed, farther away from me.
I lie there with a full view of the back of her covered head and those locks twined together like wet black ropes dangling down over her shoulders, saturating her pillow.
“So, it’s like that?” I say.
“Please get your dick off my spine,” she responds. “You’re poking me.”
“Baby, why are you acting like that?” I say, removing my erection, as she demanded, from the small of her back.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
“Hunting big game, baby. You know that. I’ve been trying to put food on the table.”
“Well, I put the food on the table tonight,” she says. “The food on the table, the kids in the tub, and now I’m putting my ass to sleep,” she says, and keeps rocking her body. “And besides, you seem to have forgotten that I just got my teeth whitened.”
