It could have been great, but two people were trying to smoke a perfect thing to smithereens. Sometimes, her eyes would just disappear. She was thinking about Proust while I thought about her eyes. Her mind filibustered even when her hands were on my tits, until I pushed her head down. All academics need to suckle on something. “Does this make your queer theory cock hard, professor?” I asked her, but I was stroking the air, and her cock wasn’t there. We were avarice and outline. Precipice and twine. My labial folds were palms on a throwing wheel. The thud of clay was her fist ramming into my cunt. I worked my pussy onto her. We had done it a hundred times, like a lecture. But our voices caught that time. Theory forgets how a body swallows a punch.
We were smoke-jumping through a terrible burn. We were fire and things that snuff. I had to blow on her to put her out. I soothed wounds she didn’t even know. “I know you need it bad,” she said to me one day. Her fingers went to pry their way inside. We leaned into a kiss, free-falling into paper space. She kissed my lips, my clit, everywhere. We barnstormed each red target. “Sweet. Sweet. Bittersweet,” she said on alternate licks up the gild of my cunt, as she divided it like a book. “Do you want a girl job or a blow job?” she asked, as she sucked on my clit. She had to reinvent words like that. Going down on me was a “girl job,” a trick birthday candle that flickered back after it was blown out.
We were afraid of our throats turning into flame, a long tunnel of trapped screams. Two people were learning the wick effect: how bodies can burn of their own rendered fat, until there is nothing left. We warmed our hands around our fear, talking about the news as if we were talking about ourselves, becoming less newsworthy in the process. On TV, we watched people burning in an awful fire, until our eyes were small white shells. We looked for personal warnings. The crematorium of misguided impulse. Bodies piled ten high, insects of people really, eyes shocked blank. These images burned our vision into a comfortable haze. New lust, the accelerant of skin, made us lose faith in a city of kindling. We only cared about means of egress.
Two people were trying to quell incendiary wants. Her hands skimmed the litigating daisies around my eyes: Does she love me, love me not? She shooed my errant hairs. She tickle-touched my forearm. There was something clawing in me when we kissed. Her lips could slay me, the way she pried my whole body open from one insertion point. I hated the weakness in my spine, the way I folded over like a limp napkin wanting to form a swan.
Two people were looking for a government, but only found ruin. All that existed was anarchy, a fiery red A. Two people were blowing up real hope with a graffiti game.
My fingers grabbed her belt buckle like a punk kid’s collar, shaking her at the gut. I was fumbling for her theory cock. “Come on. Let’s just find out,” I said. “Let’s see what we can be.” Her hands weren’t intellectual for a moment. They were brooding bits of rough-cut wood. “Then tell me that you need me,” she said. “Blow your cover now.” How long does it take to go from graduate school to ghost town? How long to disassemble crumbling grails? We were blowing it with doubt. We expected our demands to lead to outlaws and guns.
So we tried to outrun the burn. We took thirty paces, turned and aimed. Did her terse undoing make my chest begin to bleed or had my Technicolor dress begun to run? My brain ached with wondering. My heart kept beating for her like the automatic pilot that it was. She didn’t know it, but I would have stayed with her to ash and dust. Instead, we panicked, and stampeded, and neither one got out first.
The Lakeshore Lick
The bully wind is beating someone up. It is training its punches on trees that make asthmatic whistles. She shoves me up against a chain-link fence. “I want your lips to bleed,” she says, holding my collar. She thinks I need to suck on something. Pacify the baby and the baby won’t scream. Pacify the baby and the opera will go on. The courtly midnight stragglers scuffle by in conversation past the scraggy silhouettes of slides and swing sets. She rubs my small hand up and down her cock beneath her Army pants, pulling me to the playground. I’ve spent the evening chattering like a manic boy and now she wants to stuff my mouth. “Be prepared, Boy Scout,” she whispers.
The slide has terraces like an Aztec hillside. At the end, it looks like a conveyor belt in a factory. It looks like a place where people move their hands automatically, where the momentum stops but products keep pushing so the cans will move. She straddles the first hump of the slide, metal tagged all over by graffiti and hand smudges. Her legs are flung over the sides like she’s a lazy Huck Finn in a canoe. “Generally, I spit on Boy Scouts,” she says. “Usually I just cough a wad on them.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” I say. “I’m glad you were nice to me.” Granted, nice is an overstatement. She grabbed me by one ear and led me to an alley. She made me trudge for blocks carrying her backpack. She harangued me on the way with rude remarks about the way I dressed, my country drawl, the way I moved. She alternately slapped my face until it burned and kissed me. She looked at me like I was barely palatable but she was barely picky. “Your mouth is shaped like a badge,” she said, tracing her thumb on my lip. “Like a circle was sewn around it to keep it open. Stupid little vestibule.”
We are from different sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. We are, like Civil War reenactments, a repetition of events. We are parts of each other. We are a severed one. It’s as if we’re fighting out of antebellum costumes, fighting for a future where divisions don’t exist. But how naïve we are—to think that we can even fight the drives that make us fuck and suck and fall into dark corners. To think we can repair a country that’s so different from itself.
She rubs her hand on her cock, teasing my need. She is shaped like what, like Italy? I’m too uncultured to know. She is shaped like a wolverine as it creeps, like a skinny kid who can nevertheless fight with a tire iron. Her long legs make their M over the sides of the slide. She has one button left to undo and her boxers are tufting out. I see the dick in there and I’m gulping air to get there. “When do I ever get a fucking good deed?” she starts. “When do I get to be a helpless old lady? I’ve got packages to be carried if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” I say, and give her a nodding glance. She looks at me with hostility. “I do know.”
“Garrulous little wiener,” she says. “Boy Scouts do not know when to shut the fuck up.”
When I go silent, I hear the absence of the game of stickball that has ended blocks away, the stick that hands are wrapped around that might become a weapon. Wind is beating chain. The sound of cheap is making perky music in the yellowed lights. “I’m going to fuck your mouth so hard,” she says suddenly. “I’m going to give you elocution lessons.” Her hips are trying to squeeze her cock out of its cotton cage. Her eyes are careful tacks that spread out insect wings. “I’m not all that experienced at sucking dick,” I say. I don’t tell her I think about it all the time but haven’t done it.
“You’re a magician who can swallow fire, you understand?”
She takes her lighter from her pocket and she flips it open, thumbs a flame out of it. She holds the flame about an inch below my chin so that the tip of it could drill a hole into my jawbone. It goes from warm to hot. It goes from innocent to immolating. “Swallow,” she tells me. I do. She moves the flame so that it echoes down my throat.
I can make crops grow, so I’m sure I can make cocks respond. I would like to tell her what I know of nature but we are in the city. There is nothing natural about the battle the grass fights to grow between the concrete cracks. In fact, it looks pathetic, olive drab because it’s dry this time of year. She has got to haze me, or I’ll be as lonely as that grass. I’ll be a uniform of olive drab amidst a sea of red aggression. Her hands are poised like meaty spiders, thinking their own venom. Then there is her dick. It doesn’t need to think. It’s like bamboo. The universe is always saying, “There’s a sky, and there’s a beanstalk, Jack.” The universe is just one cold unstopping taunt.
She pulls me down against th
e slide. I hit the metal with a thunk, my awkward limbs collapsing. I’m bent like a snake, my head and arms reaching over the curve to where she is. She yanks her dick out violently and shoves it in my mouth. “Take it all,” she says, and pushes into my mouth. She’s almost ripping out my hair to pull my head down on her cock. She is completely choking me. I’m trying not to lose my lunch. She pulls me off and I start coughing. “What are you—some kind of ballet dancer?” she asks. “You gag like a bulimic.”
She doesn’t know how tough I am, but I can’t speak of it. I want to tell her how the boys at school once made me eat a cricket. The spine was crunchy and I didn’t puke. A gang of rugby players wrestled me at recess and they forced the cricket down. I thought about its singing legs. How boys were just like crickets, making opera in their trousers shuffling back and forth. It made me horny thinking how the boys knew I was just a fag and not a girl, and probably beat off thinking of my frightened eyes. “I’ll keep it down,” I say. “I can. You’ll see.”
“You’d better fucking believe you will,” she says. She slaps her cock against my cheeks. I slide my lips over the tip. I smell the black inside my nose, the city black. The light has turned into oil. Her knees are twitching but I hold them down. I want to make her feel my lazy fields. There is a world of singing legs—a night song made of friction. I force my mouth down on her shaft. I open up my throat. She’s getting jazzed up now, and moans. She starts to rub the tiny bump above her dick, to shake and twitch. I want to hold her Zippo lighter to her mouth. I want her to believe she can extinguish everything.
But I am just a country boy without a trace of cool. My hands are ghostly pale. Girl hands that shape themselves to rings. My hands are small, effete. She grabs for one of them before she jerks and comes into the greening dark. She pushes into me like she is fighting concrete.
The Bloody Castro
She slips in out of nowhere. Against the white walls, in her uniform, she looks like an exotic plant that looks like an animal, something a topiary gardener would make. For months, I wanted to use the soldier as a verb, soldier on with her, make her soldier on with me. I watched her nimble hands uncover conflicts in an engine. I watched her shy and fumbling hands reach for her lighter. I thought about the way that she would touch me, as if she’d learned about adrenaline and how to use it.
The dark slips in like a cat. The stars collect like iron filings around the poles of the earth. The moon is a wet moon, the kind that lights up like ice under an eave. To my brain, it doesn’t seem odd that the soldier is standing in my San Francisco apartment. “I know I shouldn’t have come,” she drawls, “But Mammaw made a red velvet cake.” She holds up a plate with a sin-red cake on it. “Don’t you think it’s about time we ate the red velvet cake?”
The soldier is from the country of Louisiana. Hotter than a habañero bayou, where they eat things I wouldn’t even spit into. Her favorite cake is whipped up with a whirling mixer into frenzied peaks of egg whites and then dyed the color of hell. I love the slow Southern motion, where a person can let cake melt on the tongue until it feels as sultry as velvet. It is like days that have dragged by, with such thoughtful hesitation, in the time before the soldier and I have grown close, that have made me stroke my own downy hairs and think of chintz and silk and velvet. I think of magnolia trees in their coming out gowns in my imagined South, where the world draws its vowels out as long as possible. As if moments of exclamation are all that matter.
I stroke my hand down the embarrassed heat of her face. I like the places where she is dented by dimples and accidents and deliberate destruction. She is as flawless as the most dilapidated motel I’ve ever fucked a reckless nowhere in. She makes me feel formative, like a country that will one day be safe. She speaks slowly, in that reptilian way of bayou people who are watching, counting everything. It is unnerving how she looks at me. As if she wants to love me on a rocking chair that never sleeps.
“You’re like a kite,” she finally says, looking at my body in a way that makes my pussy warm. “All sharp angles and delicate stretch of skin and a constant threat of impromptu flight.”
She says this, and then our fingers start to let the sky uncoil.
As much as we’re hot for each other, our touching takes some time. We want it to be perfect, virginal. Her narrow hands are just like mine—lost migratory birds. We have no homing skills. I contemplate Helen Keller and water—the moment when the water touched her hands and she knew it to be water. I think of water and of hands and revelation. It takes so long before she undresses me. I think how we live our lives blind and deaf with water running down and not knowing how to name it. It feels like silk, then anguish, then beauty, and finally water. I’ve longed for water to expand, to become beauty, and then grew scared and contained it. With her, I don’t know if I should expand or contain. To be soothed might mean to be extinguished.
She slides her Army fatigues off. She wears her dick like she’s a cub on awkward legs. It is wartime. The soldier has three days here before her deployment. People are running from their own hands. They are laying cinder blocks around their thoughts, censoring pacifist words. I hand her a bottle of massage oil and roll on my belly. She straddles me with her cock poking into my back. She talks to me about the art of war. Her hands slide down the gull wings of my shoulder blades, between the scaffold of my ribs, down to the dimple above my ass. She inhales sharply, then slides upward. “I read about the art of war,” she says. “They make it sound like macho ballet, like boxing. The words they use are pride, discipline, courage, service. Those are good words, artful words.”
“Yes, they are,” I say.
“There’s art,” the soldier says. “And then there’s war. I just realized I am fighting one to keep the other safe.” The soldier’s hands slide up the sides of my body, grown as dry as windblown buildings. She starts to kiss my neck, breathing hot down my spine.
The soldier hasn’t filled out her swagger. I had forgotten, until I met her, what it meant to be that age. I forgot what it meant to fumble toward light, then remember to ask permission. There is nothing whimsical about twenty-five. Like a quarter, it sinks fast and hard. It falls on tails when you want heads. The soldier moves down the sheet over my legs, then lifts the fabric up and presses her thumbs into the balls of my feet. “And what is art?” I ask the soldier.
“Art is a battle of opposing forces that ends in beauty,” says the soldier, sliding up to press her body against my back.
“Art is war?” I ask her, as I lift my ass against her cock.
“Yes,” says the soldier. “And not the other way around.”
I flip the soldier over and I start to bite her neck. I take my hand and languish on her cock. I’m dying to plant a flag, make it mine. I’m dying to feel it pushing in my pussy.
“I’d shed my blood for you, for you,” the soldier says to me. I move my lips down, slide them over her cock. The soldier hasn’t ever had a proper blow job. She can’t tell Army dykes how much she loves her dick. At night, she jerks it, talking on the phone with me. We watched so many awful war movies, engorging an imagined space, but none of them has ever shown the way a tool of rage could just be coddled and remade. My fingers splay on her thighs, spreading her legs while my lips slide down the sides of her dick. My mouth can’t get enough of it. I turn us both to blood alone, my reddened lips, her pulse and breath.
“You’d bleed for me?” I ask. I reach for her utility knife, the one we used to pop a cork. I pull a sharpened blade. My arm strikes her down like a bayonet. “You sure?” I ask. She gulps but nods. “Yes Ma’am,” she says. She probably thinks I’m going to carve her up, but I only want to make a small point throb. I prick her finger, then prick mine. I lay our fingers on the piece of cake. The crimson of our blood soaks into the vermilion, making swirls of red. I blow on her finger to soothe the cut. I slide the fork into the place I bled and feed it to her mouth. I put the fork into the section where she bled and eat that piece. “Now,” I say, and mount her with my p
ussy, easing down her cock. “Fuck me like you’re reinventing velvet.”
The Brothel
Isa Magdalena
“Are you all right, Vicky?” Sylvana asked as we stood inside a hallway at the bottom of a stair. She must have been referring to my state of confusion after our walk through the alleys of the red-light district on our way to the brothel where she worked. I’d never been in this area of the city, or to a brothel, for that matter, and was shocked by the crowds of men gawking and yelling at the women behind their windows.
“I want to come back here when we’re not in a hurry,” my lover, Martha, whispered in my ear. “I see more breast, more hip, more naked thigh than on most beaches I’ve been to!”
“Sure, honey,” I responded, dazed.
Then, turning back to Sylvana, I lied. “Sure,” I said, “I’m all right.”
She gave Martha and me a warm hug, longer and warmer than necessary. When she let go of me she said, “I would give you a tour of the house, but all rooms are occupied.” She turned around and before she began to climb the stairs, pointed to a heavy door on the left, saying casually, “Here is the domain of ropes, whips, and canes.”
As I followed her, pretending I’d handled ropes, whips, and canes on a daily basis, I focused on the points of her black high heels, which aimed at me over the edge of every stair step. When I looked higher up, I saw her tight butt swaying to the left and to the right. It was dressed in close-fitting, deep, dark, red leather. Her waist was bare and her bra matched the pants. Silver snakes dangled wildly next to her long neck. And, though I didn’t see it from the back, a frontal image of her was burned into my retina: dark red lipstick highlighted her large mouth, and makeup in shades of pink and gray made her blue eyes shine brighter, pierce deeper. The muscles of her arms were mighty and tattooed; her hair was very short, in an odd color of red. It occurred to me that this afternoon might become a little overwhelming, even if I was half in love with Sylvana. I didn’t know which way to run faster, toward her or away from her. I knew Sylvana from the classes Martha and I were taking at Xtasia, a sex temple. We were taking the classes because I was nonorgasmic. In addition to the classes, we had decided to attend private sessions with Sylvana, who worked as a prostitute and was an apprentice Hora in Xtasia.
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