Black Silk

She tells her that her fingers feel like sausages. They’ve only known each other for five days and already they’re fucking. They are having an affair. It is both horrible and delicious. Everything is a secret, a whisper.

The younger woman is wettest when she has her two stubby fingers worming loverly into the older woman’s caverns. It is the perfect drama. It gives the sausage-fingered girl exactly what she needs: an older woman with breasts forever warm to have and sidle next to all for herself. And what the older woman needs right now, more than anything else, is a large round mind to put her words into. So she concedes and lets Sausage Fingers call her “Mama,” just as long as they can talk the whole way through.

Sausage Fingers pretends the older woman’s breast is a plank of wood and her own mouth a course sheet of sandpaper. “Mama,” the girl says, smothering the older woman’s nipple with her tongue. Mother. Mamere. Mamon. Sweet Pussy.

The older woman, Mrs. Sweet Pussy, loves all of these names, but she wants them to be worse than all that. She wants to hear words no one would ever imagine calling her in any other position. Words like:bitch, my bitch, my sweet little whore, cunt, rotting cunt, don’t move, don’t you fucking move. She wants to come slower, harder, faster, in no time. She wants to be turned over, tied down, beaten like a ferret, spanked with a stingray. She wants to try to come while tied to a chair, in a straitjacket, in a room, by herself, using only words. Mamon is just the first little dirty letter. Mother is the beginning of her alphabet.

They fuck in the car driving along the turnpike. Their fingers are hungry blue crabs burrowing into each other’s panties. They fuck upright in the library between the stacks with half-eaten apples green and sour and browning in their hands. Sausage Finger’s breath smells like sweet corn tortillas. Mrs. Sweet Pussy’s skin like slowly warmed milk.

They’ve only known each other for one week and already have invented their own private language.

“Mother,” Sausage Fingers says. “M is for Mother.” Sausage Fingers puts Mrs. Sweet Pussy across her lap and demands, “Repeat after me.” Mrs. Sweet Pussy arches her back into the air and waits for Sausage Finger’s next command.

Sausage Finger’s other hand is beneath Mrs. Sweet Pussy’s mound, diving like a sandpiper’s fluted beak for a runaway crab. Mrs. Sweet Pussy opens her legs without Sausage Finger’s permission. The sausage-fingered girl slaps her hand down into Mrs. Sweet Pussy’s ass and whispers, “F is for French Angelfish.”

She traces her fingers from Sweet Pussy’s crotch, up toward her anus, but teases and stops just when her Sweet Pussy starts to sigh.

Mrs. Sweet Pussy is a rare yellow sea horse hiding in a thick bed of grass. She camouflages herself, wrapping her tail around her single flowing blade, changing her color to fit the occasion. If the night is blue, her skin jets teal. When it is raining, she is gray and speckled. She flickers her dorsal fin and anchors herself to the nearest sponge

“P” she says, “P is for Peacock Flounder. S is for Stinging Sea Cauliflower. T is for Throbbing Pink Moon Jellies. A is for the Atlantic Spotted Dolphin.D is for Farming Damsel Fish.”

They drown in each other’s language. Their play is a nautical loveland and they are worthy navigators reveling in each other’s wakes. They tickle each other’s bellies with their own little pectoral fins. They spin around that single blade of grass like ripe young maidens around a maypole.

Mrs. Sweet Pussy is coming like an old well-traveled estuary: a little fresh water, a little salt, a little oyster, and a little mother-of-pearl.

Sausage Boy is too somewhere else to answer. For the first time in her life she is wishing she had a penis, a dick, a hard stiff stick. She is having what Mrs. Sweet Pussy calls a phantom. She is like an amputee who still feels the thick throbbing limb years after it’s been removed.

They don’t know each other at all, yet they know each other very well. Sausage Boy already knows how much Mrs. Sweet Pussy likes to be fucked up her ass, and Mrs. Sweet Pussy knows that what Sausage Boy needs most, more than an apprenticeship and more than a Ph.D, is a mouthful of mammary glands rammed into every crevice of her throat.

So late one night in the kitchen Mrs. Sweet Pussy hoists herself onto the counter and opens her blouse as a treat. She takes out a breast and offers Sausage Boy a feeding. Sweet Pussy teases Sausage Boy, passing the hard raised mound too quickly through his lips. He clamps down, but Mrs. Sweet Pussy pulls it away, then spanks his cheeks with the tight, tiny sand dune masquerading as a nipple at the edge of her breast. Sausage Boy lifts her by her ass and spins her like a sea cucumber down onto the warm wooden floor.

He’s trying to put his knee in her, and Mrs. Sweet Pussy doesn’t mind at all. She can take a knee, she thinks, a knee, a foot, a leg, an elbow, an anything. Every part of her wraps around his torso, as if she is a giant monstrous squid. Mrs. Sausage Pussy Sweet Boy Boy Sausage Sausage Fingers Fingers Pussy, the older woman thinks, sweating, disoriented. Mother Bitch Cunt My Little Whore Filth Sin Devil in a Brown Body, he answers.

Sausage Boy is all apuddle. He feels his phantom. Mrs. Sweet Pussy throbs on her own accord. She’s pulling every spare molecule of oxygen deep into her own wet cavern. Her thick purple ink syrups their entire world.

The best part about the affair is that they are pretending they know each other better than this. They are not ready to admit that what is actually happening is that they have never fucked anybody’s body this way before. They have never let anyone in this way. And the joy of it all, the unleashed boredom finally taking its authoritative way, is a greater pleasure far exceeding any salty word or properly seasoned whip. Better than coming. Coming would be incomplete without the confession of each other’s private little historical dissatisfactions.

This is the Game of Life, but Sausage Boy thinks it’s called Love. This is a Trick of the Wrists, but Sausage Fingers thinks it’s called Happily Ever After. He wants to believe in something more than a warm wet slightly sugared strawberry. But Mrs. Sweet Pussy is only willing to believe the game is called How We Get Through the Night.

Mrs. Sweet Pussy is bored and likes her Sausage Boy because he is honest about his needs. He comes to her office one a week and gladly writes a check for her services because he is getting what he really came for: not a better understanding of his issues, but the actual thing he has wanted all along: a Mother, a Mamere, a Mamon to fuck. All Mrs. Sweet Pussy has to do is open her legs, and he falls right back in.

They pretend they are faggots meeting in the woods. She drops her skirt, wraps her arms around their imaginary tree, ass exposed, puckered and beaming for the world, and he’s in, way in. So in that Mrs. Sweet Pussy can feel him coming in, up, through her mouth.

He’s the best client she’s ever had. He learns more about his issues in one session than ten years of psychoanalysis could ever teach him.

But Sausage Boy only thinks about Mrs. Sweet Pussy in relation to himself. My Pussy. My own. Sweet Pussy is just what he needs to help him forget that vast howling canyon in the middle of his body. She is exactly what he doesn’t know he desires: an elaborate fantasy to fill his gaping motherless wound. Sausage Boy only wants to see Mrs. Sweet Pussy as his own personal convenience store. She is a microwave turned to its highest setting. Opened twenty-four hours a day. A place to stop for uncomplicated coffee, condoms, and high-octane fuel.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Sweet Pussy has her own Monument Valley to contend with. She’s ignored herself for so long, so busy milking herself for the world, that she’s developed an art, a career, of not listening to her own voice. She doesn’t know the wordno. She doesn’t even know the lettern. Her yes is automatic, something she can’t help. Her breasts leak milk at the very first glance of a mouth.

Until Sausage Boy, Mrs. Sweet Pussy has never told anyone that she wants to be tied up and left there. She has never been able to admit to all of those safe professional women with whom she has traveled, taken home, and purchased property that what she wants is rough and simple. Cell to cell. Southern, or not at all.

Mrs. Sweet Pussy is trying to admit that she is dying to be fucked properly, serviced regularly, lubricated on a ritual basis. She is trying to work her way up to telling her perfect, old-school, lefty girlfriend that what she needs right now—more than safety, more than feminist rhetoric, more than a progressive presidential candidate and a long-term monogamous relationship—is someone, anyone, with a tightly packed fist who does not want to get to know her.

Sausage Boy has never known a mother. Mrs. Sweet Pussy has never been a child. Sausage Fingers is trying to remember. Mrs. Sweet Pussy sees immeasurable value in forgetting. Sausage Fingers is a little boy trapped inside a young woman’s body. Mrs. Sweet Pussy is an older woman trying for one last time to get the animal in her right.

Three months later and their fucking gets ruined by their discovery of lovemaking. They slow down, having remembered how to think. Their gestures become complex. Intellectual engagement and elaborate calisthenics are not enough to keep them afloat.

Their boat is only one solitary plank of wood. And they have splinters and mother-of-pearl chafed into their asses. They are sinking like two large volcanic stones, and all they know how to do well together is fuck like young randy dolphins playing Grown Up beneath an ancient coral reef. Six moons later, when Sausage Boy’s apprenticeship is over, they see each other on the street, but they do not speak. Only their bodies know that brackish and salty language.

Mrs. Sweet Pussy is walking with her wife and grandkids. One of the children pretends he is playing volleyball with a purple balloon. Sausage Boy sees the balloon and remembers her thick dark ink. Sausage Boy is with her partner. They are carrying signs on their way to a rally. The girlfriend has no idea that the graying, older woman walking toward them, dripping in coral and freshwater pearls, has fucked her partner on several occasions in positions she herself is too landlocked to imagine.

They all pass each other like two friendly schools of fishes, the air around them mingling like warm currents in a small tide pool. Mrs. Sweet Pussy nods, Hello, and thinks that both women combined are younger than her own daughter. Sausage Boy nods back, like a dolphin pecking with his snout. Mamere. Mamon. My Pussy.

They don’t know each other at all. They fuck each other very well. Their bodies have a secret language, a private little alphabet.Mother is the first letter.Father is a dead language they laugh about no longer speaking.Pussyis a letter like ans or at. They use it all the time.

The young woman’s mouth smells like warm tortillas and her fingers feel like tightly packed blood sausage. The older woman’s breasts are like a million mothers. She is a walking ocean of sweet warm milk.

Orca.

Pectoral Fin.

Throbbing Pink Moon Jelly.

Hawk’s Beak Turtle.

Sargasm Weed.

Stinging Sea Cauliflower.

Damsel Fish.

Peacock Flounder.

Stingray.

A jellyfish.