Expoding Bits and Pieces

Married life is a bad trip: our apartment building looks like one of those concrete store-it-yourself facilities. I stand at the far end of the corridor in front of apartment 807. This morning I asked him, “Are you sure this is a good marriage? Is this how it’s supposed to be?” "Sh," he said, "of course it’s a good marriage. Don't be silly," and then he held me. My head rested on his neck like a duck asleep on its feathers and I thought finally a place to rest, a warm body on a winter’s night. I’m learning to love him in hugging bursts, in quiet longing, and then all the time aching, but sometimes my heart feels like a safe that's been sprung and looted.

It’s after eleven. I leave a note on the bedroom door. “Please keep the darkness away. Please don’t put the light out.” And I sign it, “Yours,” even though I don’t belong to anyone.

Abie wakes me up in the middle of the night to wish me Happy Anniversary. “Come on, come on,” he says, putting his green terrycloth robe on my shoulders. On the bathroom mirror, there's a foamy "I love you" written in capitals. Abie is a capital-letter, underlining, and exclamation-point man, and I, I’m a National Film Board animation. As soon as I take shape, a limb reaches out, twisting and transforming. I’m a devil and an angel─sort of a metaphysical hermaphrodite.

“Oh,” I say, “Oh.” And I start to cry. I guess he’s used to my crying─I don’t save my tears for fancy occasions─he carries me to bed just like you see in the movies, possibly French or Italian with subtitles, and he kisses me, my neck, ears, and that space between my eyes where the world stands still. He lifts himself and lies full weight on top of me and rams in. I wrap my arms around him, tightly, so he can’t see my eyes unveiled and barren. And then he cups his palms on my ass, pushing it up, down-up and down like he’s priming an engine, and it’s true, he is.

He pokes his finger up my asshole. “Move it,” he says. “Move your ass.” He knows I need friction. I squeeze my eyelids closed and all the while I’m playing this old blues song in my mind, hush now baby come home baby, find your way home, until the brush of a snare drum grazes my thighs, and the back of my cunt like a camera shutter opens, closes, opens, closes, opens, letting in the pearl white light. The sun radiates. That’s what it is. I’ve got the sun in my cunt. Not the whole world in my hands; I’d tremble and drop the damn thing. I’ve a cunt full of world, exploding bits and pieces like there's no tomorrow.

Copyright Janice Colman 2008