Black Silk (39 page)

The rain didn’t wash away Delia’s warm words, which I could hear echoing quietly in my ears. I was dying to pick up where
we had left off, too. Alas, my queen was missing from the king-size bed we shared. There was an empty space where she used
to rest, an empty pillow where she used to dream.

I approached her vanity, looking for her perfume. The one she loved so much. The one I loved so much because it reminded me
of the contours of her coffee-colored skin. Realizing she had packed it with her on her trip, I pouted like a child who’s
lost his toy.

Suddenly a single streak of lightning split the sky and zapped a flash of light into our dark bedroom. I saw the reflection
of silver wrapping paper on my oak chest. I had purchased a six-month-anniversary gift. I was going to surprise Delia with
a new bottle of the precious fragrance when she returned from St. Lucia.

It was
her
present, but I needed her near me. Selfishly, I figured this could be her gift to
me
—a way to make up for leaving me in the rain while she romped in the fun and sun of Jamaica. With guilt running through me,
I ripped open the perfect packaging and sprayed the scent all over our bed. I inhaled the perfume and became intoxicated.

I climbed under the comforter and let my dreams bring her to me. I held myself like I thought she would if she had been there.
I massaged the part of my body that longed to connect with her body. Working it with gentle friction, I prayed my imagination
would make my efforts feel like the real thing. Her real thing. Her rain.

I let visions of her pleasuring me fill the moments between missing her and liking the feeling. I let the tranquil sound of
the storm playing outside stand in for her sweet sounds of lovemaking. I handled my pulsing love limb until I psychically
reconnected with her supreme love grip.

Her mist coated my root with the affection it needed to grow and expand, and rise and resist. Drenching my dreams with desire,
lubricating my loins with lust, her rain rose like a typhoon. With the force a turbulent system passing through a balmy night,
she bathed me in passion like an adult baptism.

She took me into the wetness of her garden, raining pure satisfaction on my desert rose. My palms felt her saturating the
soil of my soul, flooding the fertile ground of my fantasies. The overwhelming sensual sensations—the perfume, the rain, the
warmth—rolled like thunder.

I rode the waves of our waterbed as the storm raged.

With the mental rhapsody and physical gratification swirling with the intensity of a hurricane, I bloomed with ecstasy, releasing
hot nectar on her side of our private flowerbed.

Dripping wet with sweat, I lay exhausted on the soaked satin sheets, dreaming I was sinking into the soft earth beneath me.
Eventually my excitement subsided with the rain. I slept the night away in the calm after the storm.

The next day weak sunlight peaked through the transparent curtains over our picture window. It announced itself, as it always
did after a rain shower, coming to replenish the love that makes the earth’s flowers blossom. The dew on the windowpane was
Mother Nature’s quaint reminder of the pleasure the night had created.

Delia arrived while I was still acquainting myself with the sun and the new day.

She was still beautiful. Her radiance provided the extra light the room needed.

“Sugar, I’m glad to see you,” she beamed, dropping her travel case. “But I didn’t expect this kind of homecoming. I was welcomed
home by the computer left on, jazz blaring from the stereo system, a burned mess in the microwave, clothes strewn about the
house, and urgent phone messages from your boss saying you missed the lunch meeting your job depended on.”

“Get over here, baby,” I replied, grabbing her and pulling her onto our bed. “Happy anniversary, sweetheart.” I kissed her
passionately and handed her an opened bottle of perfume.

“Well, I’m a little upset that you got started without me,” she said, slipping out of her clothes. “But let’s finish together.”

She joined me under the sheets. The sun suddenly disappeared, leaving us alone in our intimacy… until a quiet Chicago rain
joined us in the moment.

_________________

by Robin Coste Lewis

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.

“Are you my little one?” she asks. “Are you my Sausage Boy?”

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 word
no.
She doesn’t even know the letter
n.
Her yes is automatic, something she can’t help. Her breasts leak milk at the very first glance of a mouth.

Mother. Mamere. Mamon. Sweet Pussy.

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.