I wake up tucked into the cabin cot next to Tamara, but it’s not her heavy sleeping arm that holds me. Etta’s weight is a strange density, and I may never get up. Through the open window, the night sky crackles like lightning. The air is too still, and the crickets are too loud for rain.
Are you making those lights?
Not me. My hands are kinda occupied.
My cunt spasms. The convulsion plugs me deeper into her. We could be in the past, only a couple of short months ago, when it was just the two of us carrying fear and fascination between us, our magnus essentias. I heel into her divine hands, her perfect and horrifying dead hands. Laying beside her is to pray. Like holding the swathe of light from Veronica’s rose-coloured glass lips in Saint George’s Church on a particularly glorious Sunday. Poetry. Like reading Joy Harjo or Bronwen Wallace or Sharon Olds one careful line at a time. Then reading the poem backward, last line to first, to find the meaning hidden outside of chronology. Like racing tipsy down the station stairs in platform heels to barely catch the last subway of the night as the other drunks on the subway car nod, wordlessly celebrating the fleeting victory. Like listening to Yma Sumac or Freddie Mercury hit those holy high notes. Like when a preposterously gorgeous stranger asks you to light her cigarette. Like standing before a Lynda Benglis or Roni Horn sculpture and being hypnotized by all that burnished gold. Like the centre of a panic attack when the most catastrophically terrible possibility seems quite plausible. Like waiting at the grocery checkout to see if my credit card will be approved.
Like when Tamara—my flesh and blood love—fell fast asleep with her head in my lap and, dreaming, muttered the words, “It’s a good snake. Don’t kill it.”
Like when I came upon Bobby and Lucky singing “You Are My Sunshine” together, and they replaced every “you” in the song with Lucky’s name: “Lucky is my sunshine, my only sunshine.” And I realized there is so much more to mothers and children than I personally understand.
Etta locks my arms behind my back. You give me life. You give me twenty lives, fifty. I never felt so much, not even was I was living. I never dreamed this big, not even when I was breathing. You feel it too? Don’t it feel good? You gonna cry out my name? Tell me you’ve saved some of that grind show voice for our love?
Tamara shakes me. She thinks I’m moaning in my sleep. “It’s a bad dream, Star. You’re safe. You’re here with me.” I pull her into a kiss. She coos out comforts as her lips dampen both my cheeks. She tucks the quilt back over me. “This cabin gives me the creeps. Tomorrow, we’ll start looking for an apartment,” she says. “And we’ll buy a bed. A brand-new bed.”