The Kiss

by Brian Turner

  “It’s tiny.

  “Get me one of those plastic containers, the ones for green onions.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know.”

  While Makayla goes, Nedra puts down the shroom basket and stares, trying to find a head, eyes, or tail. She moves in and squints. How does it work? Does the body have suckers?

  Makayla’s back. Nedra stays fixed on the dot, takes the container in both hands. She gets close, within inches, wonders if it’s studying her approach, buckling its knees for a rocket-like fling. Before someone or something throws a wrench in the moment, she shoves. The plastic smacks the wall. Attention turns toward her. Voices feel close. She’s got it, that waitress by the wall. The chick with the long ponytail. She pushes harder because maybe bats have crazy strength, can bash themselves free of anything. “I need the lid,” she says.

  “I didn’t bring a lid.”

  “Get me a lid.”

  She keeps pressing and thinks of that old Beatles song her mom always sings. Nobody told me there’d be days like these. No shit, Ringo.

  She hears Phil’s voice. “Is that it? Do you have it?”

  “I think so.”

  “That little brown spot?”

  “Yes.”

  And then Gail’s voice. “Is that it?”

  “Yes,” she says. “That is it.”

  “Here’s the lid,” Makayla says.

  “How are you going to do it?”

  “Those things carry rabies.”

  “Shut up, Makayla.”

  “Hey, it’s a fact.”

  “Who’s watching the grill?”

  “Don’t let it out.”

  “It’ll be irritated now.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “Everyone shut up. Let her concentrate.”

  “This is cool.”

  “Let her concentrate.”

  She does what they’re saying. She gets a grip on herself, concentrates. She scrapes the lid against the wall, sees her own ear and cheek in the Coors Light mirror, Gail’s frizz behind her, Phil’s mopey face, then a soup of bodies and colored light. This job wasn’t supposed to be forever. It was a transition, a way to refresh before trying college again. Earn some money. Get your self-esteem back, her mom said. But self-esteem doesn’t grow on trees, and it doesn’t show up out of nowhere—Surprise! Here’s your wherewithal!—especially when you live at home, sleep in your childhood bedroom, greet your mom’s new boyfriend every morning in the kitchen, divert your eyes from his hairy gut, act nice but decline his eggs.

  When the lid makes contact, she feels punky resistance, like Jell-O. She waits for a flutter or screech. There’s neither. She scoops harder, imagines calling for a spatula. Shushes come from all directions, and then for no good reason the bat comes unstuck and plunks down like a turd. She presses the lid tight and brings it to eye level—a test for certainty. It weighs as much as a butterfly or cotton ball. The wings pry apart from its torso, and it rocks like it’s crawling wounded and woozy from a rollover accident. Then the eyes open. Black beads. Some teacher or professor once said bats can see fine, no worse than a finch or sparrow, and if so, this little guy is witness to heavy stuff—rows of huge meaty faces blurred by plastic, a hundred eyeballs freakish and wide. He’ll have nightmares or whatever bats have when they remember the worst. It blinks at her. Hello, Mr. Bat. Hello, Nedra. And if it weren’t for the Rolling Stones song now pumping through the room, they’d whisper. She’d say everything will be okay. He’d say thank you. She’d apologize for everyone screaming like ninnies, swatting as if he were nothing but a bug. He’d ask, what is this place? She’d laugh and say, that’s one hell of a good question. He’d laugh back because he’d understand. They’d commune, nod, agree on a million things. Then he’d ask, after taking a good look around, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a rotten place like this? Well, Mr. Bat, it’s a long and stupid story that starts with my dad hightailing a few years ago, leaving us with nothing but debt and sorrow, then my own failed attempt at college because I didn’t understand rebellion and how it’s a short-term deal with no reward. Mr. Bat would say something true and consoling, something about learning from your mistakes or rising up from the ashes, and if it weren’t for the plastic between them and everyone watching, she’d offer him a kiss—not a romantic movie kiss but a tender human-meets-Muppet moment that makes kids and parents and bar managers with half a soul think, well, at least there’s that. Her lips would meet his tiny puppy face and pug nose. His beady eyes would close and things would indeed be okay.

  When applause comes, the bat flutters. She runs for the kitchen. Gail is yelling stuff, but Nedra keeps running. She shoulders the doors and curves around the prep table in one liquid motion. She gets past the dumpster and wades into the weedy field. Others are behind. Someone says to leave it—just leave it on the ground. She kneels, parts a swath of hard stems, and rests the container as flat as possible. She pops the lid on one side. The bat doesn’t move. She can barely see, but he’s still there, a silent glob. She pulls the lid toward her, then backs away. She waits, can hear shuffling, feel eyeballs on her back. Someone says to watch out. It’ll fly into your hair. But it won’t. He definitely won’t. The two of them have an understanding. Anyway, you don’t escape from something like that only to flap around in someone’s hair. You take the opportunity. You launch yourself into open sky while the orange moon lights your way. You look down on the building, its flat tarry roof, the raucous cave beneath filled with strange creatures who’ll sit and watch you suffer, who’ll scream and holler and drink their drinks while your heart nearly explodes.

  EIN KUSS IM KRIEG

  Dave Essinger

  How would you like that,” the commandant asked, his face inclined to Franz’s ear, “for those lips to be the last you know of this world?” His breath was heavy with the anise he took, that he said the ladies liked. He raised an eyebrow, waiting, as the two other soldiers from the morning’s detail watched out of the corners of their eyes. He’d sworn he’d make a man out of Franz.

  The courtyard had been a parade ground in better times, and its walls still sheltered against gusty spring winds, making what could have been a chill day temperate. They had brought the Belgian woman in to stand before the chipped wall, the spy, the dangerous beauty, and Franz thought she only looked frail, an embarrassment to the two hulking guards who held her arms.

  Franz daydreamed in the soft sun and thought of Klara instead, and how fine it was to be married: they’d both confessed it a relief, to be settled at twenty and done with the courting and preening and making themselves attractive to others. He was lucky, for her, and for this home-front post, while so many of their former schoolmates were being conscripted for the Kaiser. He barely knew how to hold this new rifle.

  His commandant went on, impatiently, “She poisoned them, you know. A deadly toxin, in the lipstick. Your last schmatzer, yes?” Immediately Franz wondered how this could be true, how any assassin could deliver a poisoned kiss without succumbing herself. And everyone knew the Field Marshal, seventy-two and morbidly obese, had collapsed in his potatoes at a state dinner, more the victim of a coronary than any seductress. Clearly, the administration had concocted a bald premise. Which by no means made the Belgian woman innocent: Franz had heard, in the newly gained territories, that no one could be trusted, not the civilians, even the women, that youths and servicemen who let their guard down were being murdered in bordellos and bars. Such ravenous hatred.

  As if cued by Franz’s thoughts, she straightened then and fixed the firing squad with a flirting look, an exaggerated moue from those allegedly infamous lips. The commandant asked which idiot had forgotten her blindfold, and a guard mumbled that she hadn’t wanted one. Franz realized he would never be able to tell Klara about the spy, her painted lips, her contempt as she kissed the air at him, her obscene mugging. She was putting on a show, even now, a calculated act, and he wondered how many times her lips, if not poisoned then sti
ll venomous, had lied with a sigh, a little breath, You kiss marvelously. Franz remembered girls laughing and calling him clumsy, saying he kissed like an ox, no, like some great monkey, no, haha, just like a trained circus bear! At least he’d never been lied to, though, betrayed in that particular intimate way.

  On his last leave home, Klara had apologized for the kriegsbrot, but had got hold of a little bratwurst, and dinner was good. When Franz pressed his lips to hers afterward, Klara received him and did not turn away. Klara had never told him he kissed well or badly. But now he wondered, how much pressure, should he move his lips more? Did his beard scratch her? She would never say it, even if he disgusted her, even if he’d neglected to wipe the sausage grease from his mouth. Suddenly anguished, he wondered how he could trust her with anything, if not that.

  And Franz saw fully just what the spy had taken from him, was taking, even as she posed, mocking his misery. He had never been a vengeful person, when the injury was his own. But Klara did not deserve it, this shadow of his mistrust, that he did not see how he’d ever displace. His commandant barked, Ready, and then, Aim, then spoke so close his waxed mustache brushed Franz’s ear, his breath cloyed with anise: “Fire, you fat bastard.” And though they were supposed to sight for the heart, he let his aim drift higher, to those defiant pursed lips, as if to intercept that spiteful kiss still lingering unmet in the swirling indecisive spring air, before it could land.

  THE KISSES WE NEVER GIVE

  Kathryn Miles

  We stood, a shifting cluster of humanity, pressed against the wooden railings of San Francisco’s Pier 39. It was a temperate spring day, and the contrast between the warming sun and bitter ocean created little vortices of wind that ruffled T-shirts and sent all manner of hairstyles askew. It was also Mother’s Day, a holiday that creates ripples of a different kind for a woman in a long-term relationship with a man and his two gorgeous boys. The boys were spending the day as they should have been, which is to say with their actual mother. The man, meanwhile, was stewing that work had once again taken me somewhere other than home. And so, on that awkward holiday, I was mostly whiling away the hours, first with wine and overpriced seafood, and then by playing tourist in a sea of couples and families.

  Standing on that pier, we gaped as dozens of sea lions jockeyed for their own positions on similarly slatted floats. There was more than enough space to go around, and yet the massive animals tussled over the same small patch of real estate. As they did, we squealed and took lots of photos, singularly focused on the throng of mammals until one of us—a young woman in tight jeans and a brand-new engagement ring—noticed the two sea lions that weren’t a part of the group.

  “Oh, look,” she said to her fiancé. “A baby.”

  At that, we all cast our gazes in the direction of the young woman’s outstretched finger. There, on an otherwise empty float, a female hovered over her pup, nosing the top of its diminutive head and doing all the other things you’d expect a mother to do for her baby. We all watched and cooed until, one by one, it struck us:

  Her pup was dead.

  As this realization settled, it came first with collective silence, followed by awkward assertions about nature’s will and lame jokes not even the tellers thought were funny. Some families moved on. Others stayed, bearing witness as the mother roared at any sea lion that came near. We flinched as she tugged her limp baby from one edge of the float to another, nudging its face and chest with her mouth in what, at the risk of anthropomorphism, can really only be called a series of frantic kisses. And as we continued to watch, I found myself hoping it would end: that she would realize the baby was dead and move on.

  She didn’t.

  Eventually, I had to. I left for an interview not knowing when, if ever, this sea lion would leave her pup. And I carried the image of them both for the rest of that day and the next and the one after, when I returned home to the man and his two gorgeous boys. Months passed. As they did, our ripples became waves. The waves grew bigger. And then they broke, which is to say he broke, with a force that took my breath away.

  “Like magma,” our couples counselor tried to explain to me. And each time she did, she’d motion as if her chest had cracked wide and something uncontrollable now gushed out. That uncontrollable thing, she said, was a lifetime of pent-up rage. Whenever I asked her how to dam it—if such a thing could be mended—she’d shrug: “You have to wait it out,” she’d say.

  Instead I tried my own tugging and nudging, hoping something would soften—that this rupture would close, that trees and grass would begin to grow there again. Instead, it got worse. As it did, I found myself remembering that female sea lion, wondering if this was how she felt on that float.

  We know just enough about other species to know that they do feel. Elephants display empathy by placing their trunks in one another’s mouths. Magpies hold funerals for one another—gently pecking at a dead bird, then bringing it offerings. Bonobos make out. We don’t know much about what mother sea lions do. They usually give birth and raise their pups in remote rookeries, which are hard to observe. What we do know is that it’s not uncommon for a mother sea lion to tend to her dead pup for hours—or even a day or more. Whether this is an act of grief or an attempt to save the baby, scientists can’t say. Nor do they understand when and why the mother eventually gives up. But when she does, she will abandon her pup where it rests and swim away, never looking back.

  I didn’t know how to do that. And so I spent that next season in a winter rental, thinking I would return home by spring. I went to our weekly counseling sessions, where the man railed about his anger and the counselor and I listened, dumbly nodding. I nudged harder, luring him to my new bed hoping I could fatigue his anger. He let himself be towed there. And in the resulting exhaustion, I grew hopeful.

  But then I realized we sometimes don’t know any more about our species than we do others.

  On a cold February afternoon, and as swiftly as his magma had first erupted, the man left with his two gorgeous boys. There were no goodbyes. One moment I was a family member; the next moment I was not. What came in its place was grief that crushed bone.

  A farewell kiss can be the very sweetest. It can also slice right through you. But it’s the ones left inside—the ones we never get to give—that often weigh the most. I cannot say why this is. Nor can I say why any animal—sea lion, human, or otherwise—remains with something that has ceased to be. But I think maybe it’s because we know on a molecular level that so few of our feelings die with a heartbeat, with a declaration, or even with a vanishing. And so we remain, hoping these feelings alone are strong enough to manifest a return.

  ON WRITING THE INTIMATE

  Brian Turner: Over the course of several email exchanges, I asked a handful of the writers included in this anthology to think about their own internal struggles and processes when they meditate and write about moments of intimacy—specifically when writing about the experience of kissing. Basically, I sent out a small questionnaire to each of them—a kind of Kinsey Report on literary kisses—and here are some of their responses . . .

  1. When attempting to write about an intimate moment, such as a profound and meaningful kiss, what is the single most challenging aspect of it for you?

  Benjamin Busch: Intensity. How do I join words to create electricity of the kind a kiss can have? I have to be dutiful to passion without concern for how I’ll be seen in its light. In this case I just didn’t think I was allowed any disguise, no protection from how vulnerable it made me. There’s often a tendency to keep confession at a distance, to use retrospect instead of introspect as a way to hide. In a kiss, we forget to do the dishes, we drive off the road, our horizon warps and blurs. There are just the two people touching.

  Pico Iyer: Intimacy is exactly what we’re crying out for—because we’re missing—in our super-accelerated, short-attention-span, distracted times. So I think a writer has a chance (you could almost call it a duty) to liberate the reader from the fast-forward roll
er coaster on which she’s found herself and return her to that slower, more sensuous and spacious place she has inside her that has got overgrown or forgotten in our times.

  It’s hard, therefore, to get the reader to sit still long enough now to pay attention to a kiss, which is a perfect example of something that needs to be slow, absorbed, and heartfelt to be exciting; but that’s exactly why we have to do it.

  We live in the age of the blog, and the first-person narrative, which tempts us to forget that the personal is not necessarily the private, and that the felt is not always the deep. So in recording a kiss, I want to try to take the reader to that inner space where all thought of self is dissolved and we’re ready to let go of everything we think we know and hope we can control.

  Philip Metres: Of all the kisses that I could have written about, writing about a “shut-the-fuck-up” kiss to a competitor athlete on the basketball court was probably the least likely one to choose. It induced contradictory feelings of pride and shame, and that made writing about it intriguing to me. The most challenging aspect was laying bare those layers, some of which revealed my own human failings.

  Major Jackson: With great effort, I tried to navigate the borders between the literalness of a kiss and its symbolism, but also, wanting to arrive at some insightful meaning. Whenever I see young people (and it’s mostly always our youth) engaged in public acts of intimacy, I inevitably marvel at their boldness and feel the magnetic pull of intimacy.

  2.What are the pitfalls in writing intimate moments—and how do you suggest avoiding them?

  Nickole Brown: The question really is this: What aren’t the pitfalls in writing intimate moments? The problem is with language—we simply don’t have the adequate words to describe the complexities, especially when there is such a vast chasm between the way an act of love looks versus how it feels. A description that’s too emotional will shorthand the experience with abstractions of love or desire, but one that’s too literal will barrage with a tangle of lips and limbs, sort of as if one might try to describe the experience of a delicious meal by placing a tiny camera in the mouth. Make the mistake of the former, and your reader will dismiss the writing as sentimental; make the latter, and a whole undercurrent of feeling is often lost or, worse, will turn your reader off altogether. In reality, the joining of two people is a flood so complicated that it seems that literature might be the only form truly capable of not just handling the sensory details but the unpredictable fires hot with memories and other associations lit in the brain during intimacy.