Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (31 page)

If You Love Me

by
Doc O’Donnell

If you love me, she says, you’ll do this.

She hands me a razor blade.

A cigarette dangles from my lip, ash spilling onto my lap. I stub it out because I’m not smoking it. Distracting myself. My lips feel empty and I find myself reaching for another cigarette but stop. 

Beads of sweat bubble over my forehead and slide into my eyes. 

Her bunny sleeps on her lap. Fur so white it looks like it would burn to touch. She puckers and its red eyes flick open. She folds down its floppy ears, kisses it and sits it on the bed. It watches me from behind crumpled sheets and I try to avoid direct eye contact. 

My hands are still, but I shudder from the inside out. The anticipation sets off a stampede in my heart. I hold my forearm where I plan to cut, and I breathe in the deepest breath. I imagine my flesh falling open as though it isn’t strong at all, just pretending to be. A chill creeps over my skin in the shape of the scar-to-be and gives me goosebumps. I rub the skin, trying to warm it. But it stays cold, regrettably cold.

The gold flecks in her green eyes flicker like tiny fires. Brilliant embers setting the Amazon ablaze. It means she wants me to start. I push back her dark bangs and lean in to kiss her, but she shies away. I wait for her to wink and tell me it’s all a joke. 

She doesn’t wink.

The regret I will later feel when I meet a different girl envelopes me.

Who’s Suzannah? the girl will ask.

And I’ll mumble, trying to forget that part of my life and wishing I could cut off my arm. 

But something inside of me is begging to be loved, to be wanted, to be needed—maybe even begging to be owned.

I tell myself I can wear long sleeves. I suck in a deep breath, holding it, clenching my teeth. 

And I drag the blade down my arm.

The fire in her eyes spreads to her face and she smiles, without teeth. A strange kind of smile. Scary.

The cut isn’t very deep. A surface scratch, at best. The thought of breaking open my own skin is terrifying. Blood dribbles out pathetically. It isn’t open enough for blood to spill out—yet.

I dig the blade in deeper on the second letter and the fire leaps into my arm. The blade feels heated. The blood still isn’t offensive. I apply more pressure with each letter, and by the end of her violently long name the blood flows out thick. Dark and sadistic. My sanity escapes through my open flesh, but I don’t care anymore. I don’t need to. She does. 

She doesn’t have my name engraved down her arm though.

My skin is open in the shape of
Suzannah
but, to me, it looks more like a mistake I wasn’t meant to make. 

I light a cigarette and draw back longer than normal. My lungs stretch and slap against my raging heart. I ash into the wound and it pops like crackling candy on a tongue. My head spins. I lie back. My arm dangles over the side of the bed. I have pins and needles in my hand. I clench and unclench my fist. Sharp tingles swarm. 

We collect my blood in a schooner—her idea. 

Blood trickles down my arm, running off my fingertips into the glass. It coagulates quicker than I expect. She pinches out one of the clumps and holds it out for her fucking bunny. She’s feeding me to him. I’m hers now. And I’m nothing but rabbit food. The bunny sniffs at the blob and tests it with a flick of its tongue. It decides against me and scurries under the sheets. She drops the blood back into the glass and wipes her fingers on my jeans.

Smoke falls from my mouth. It moves through her hideous name like early morning fog through an empty park. I try to kiss her but she shies away. Again. Embers from the last fire flicker in her cruel, black eyes, waiting for a breeze to spread them to a fresh patch of greenery. She pinches the cigarette from my fingers and takes a long drag before stubbing it out.

If you love me, she says, you’ll do this.

She hands me a nicotine patch.

——————————

Touch

by
Pela Via

‘We can’t,’ you said.

‘Oh. Okay.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t apologize,’ I said. ‘We can just touch.’

‘I hate this.’ 

‘Shh.

You tinkered with my breasts, drawing circles with your finger around my nipples. 

You said, ‘So light,’ and emphasized the long
i
in
light
.

‘What does that mean? Is that bad?’ 

‘No. Just pale. They’re the color of ballet shoes.’

‘In thirteen years you’ve never said they were pale.’

‘Mmm. Because men don’t state the obvious.’

I considered this. Goosebumps on my skin followed the trail of your finger. I whispered, ‘I thought that was all you stated.’

You didn’t laugh at my jokes then.

Instead you looked up at me, and when you said, ‘Only when you’re driving,’ I believed you wanted me to smile at you. 

So I did.

I pulled your hand away and bit your forefinger.

‘Ouch. I liked that,’ you said.

I dropped your hand onto my stomach and laughed when it crawled like a tarantula back up my chest.

‘Men don’t critique breasts the way you’re thinking,’ you said. ‘It’s like reviewing a baby. You can’t criticize a very young child? Same with tits.’

‘Breasts.’

‘I thought I was allowed to say tits.’ 

‘When we’re making love.’

‘Right. The dirty talk clause. That’s useless to me now.’ 

You sighed and I waited. 

You said, ‘No, breasts are nature’s most perfect creation.’

‘Nature’s? Not God’s?’

With or without humor—I’ve always wondered—you said, ‘If God existed, he would have commanded that breasts be sheared off.’ 

You had fallen asleep there, your cheek smashed against my skin. It was late in the night and I felt like talking. Your comments were often severe in those days. Pregnant and fatalistic. The words infuriated me when I replayed them in my mind. Your disease created a pressure in me that could go nowhere, do nothing. It was a thing I had no license to hate.

‘Your remark about God—wake up—only works if the god we know to be real had in fact existed. Wake up.’

‘What? Why— Fine. Leave me alone. I don’t care about God. Sleep.’ You wiped the shared sweat from your cheek then palmed my breast and pretended to sleep. 

Your hand was warm and my body wanted more. I didn’t want you to know. I shuddered and tried to kill the thought. 

‘You do though,’ I said. ‘You must. Are you bitter because he doesn’t exist, or because he does and he’s cruel?’

‘Liz.’

‘What.’

‘I love you.’

There was an urgency to your voice, a wakefulness that has always haunted me.

‘So much,’ you said. ‘I could be happy if you were the only person left on earth with me.’

‘No. Honey. You’re forgetting Wes.’

‘I’m not.’ You wiped your face again and contemplated your answer. ‘He’s different. He owns a part of me, of us, but it’s like my soul leaves my body to love him. Inside me, what I need to be whole and human . . .’ Your voice trailed off and I prayed you’d go back to sleep. 

After long terrible moments you said, ‘When we were first married I worried I loved you too much. Even before that. The day I met you. All I wanted in the world was to touch your hair.’

‘Shh. You don’t love me that much. You probably have another family in Cabo. It’s all lies.’

It wasn’t, and you didn’t acknowledge me anyway. But I had nothing else to say. 

I could barely form the thoughts, but the words were there. My devotion to you, all the tepid nights of touching when I wanted to be fucking, that wasn’t love. It was a heartbreaking obligation to some part of us I could no longer touch.

———

We never learned to lock our door. All the years we did secret things in quiet rooms, we never learned our lesson. I’ve always wondered what that said about us.

We were teenagers the first time it happened. In your bedroom while your family was at church, your body over me, your hand in my panties and your clothes on the floor. I heard him approaching. Ominous Sunday shoes hit the wood floor in a crescendo. But I couldn’t be bothered. I was close. The door flew open and I didn’t think to cover myself. 

‘Jesus Christ, Israel.’

I had never heard him use strong language, so I stared, sideways from the bed as I waited for him to go on. 

‘What’s wrong with you? You have no shame?’

I wanted to laugh. But I felt the static rage in your body. So I held you. Your eyes still closed, face calm. Your blood was lava.

I cleared my throat, without a thought to what I might say next. ‘Mr. Kaufman?’

His eyes popped forward from his face. 

‘
You
don’t speak to me. And would you cover yourself? For Christ’s sake.’

I pulled the sheet over both our bodies.

‘I want you out of my home, Elizabeth. There was a time my son was stronger than this.’

Together we listened to the sound of his shoes falling on stair steps. The front door slammed shut and you asked me if I believed in God.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I used to believe in loving fathers, more than omnipotent gods.’ 

You rested your cheek on my shoulder. ‘I have neither,’ you said.

‘I know.’

———

It happened again, the morning after you fell asleep on my chest. I brought you your pills then opened your pants. ‘Before the meds take effect. Let’s just try.’

You frowned but I persisted. I had you in my mouth when I heard the clumsy kick at the door. I flipped over, wiped my face and covered you with a sheet, in one motion, as we were both assaulted by running legs and punchy fat arms. My body was a bridge as he climbed to his daddy.

‘Who is this brown bear stomping on me?’ I said.

‘It’s Wessey!’ 

I glanced up at you. Your eyes were new, like you had won a prize. 

He threw himself onto you, bouncing and twisting. I watched and laughed. He giggled and made strange sounds for no reason. His hair was pure boiling chocolate, so shiny then, and eyes so deeply brown. You once compared them to discarded motor oil—these are the things I remember.

‘Dada!’

‘Yes?’

‘Mama say— Dada! Dada!’ You were staring right at him, inches from his face. 

‘What?’

‘Momma say yester-night Dada say I have cookie? Okay, Dada? Okay?’

‘Mommy said Daddy would let you have a cookie?’

‘Huh.’ He nodded his head. So vigorous it wobbled. 

‘Okay,’ you said. ‘I do whatever your mother wants.’

———

You never looked at me when I helped you. I took your arm and helped you balance, and we walked together in the long succession of baby steps that led from the bed to the bathroom. 

I loved you in a strange way when I assisted you. My affection was endless and fierce, begging to be challenged; I could have slapped you. But you weren’t playful then. If I was ever irritated by helping you, it was because you refused to see the humor in Parkinson’s.

I hid this though. Your dignity was a bully.

You asked for different pills that morning. 

‘But you don’t normally have these . . .’ 

‘Because they impair my speech. Hand them to me.’

‘But—’

‘They impair my speech but they improve mobility. I want them today because I’ll be alone with Wes. I’ll need to be able to move.’

‘Oh. I just didn’t think these were the ones that . . .’ 

I didn’t finish. Whatever I said then didn’t matter. 

———

Alone at the beach, I didn’t think about you. I spent the afternoon sprawled on the sand, and I thought about what your disease threatened to steal from me. I thought about never making love again. It was too much. I cried into my towel and swore to myself I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give up sex. The alternatives sickened me. The idea of reaching for you, for your flaccid body—

Driving away from the ocean, I turned onto our street as blue and red lights flashed onto our house. My hands twitched and my throat ached as I parked behind an ambulance. I have no memory of getting from my car into the house, but I know there were words repeating in my head.

What had you done. 

You killed me that day. Have you ever had to hold your mouth with both hands?

They wouldn’t let me see you then. They covered you with a sheet and all I wanted was to touch your body.

———

The house stayed dark after that, all browns and greys and whispered tones. Your dad had the pink eyes of a rabbit, though I never saw him cry. I watched him kneel on Wesley’s lion rug and lower his head to the floor. His grief settled in his bones like cement. He doesn’t go to church anymore.

Wesley only acknowledges you when he’s angry, as though his rage is his sole source of confidence. 

When he was five I heard him tell his best friend to please not touch him. ‘It hurts my skin,’ he said. ‘Like you have claws.’ I asked him about it when I put him to bed that night. He said, ‘You too, Momma. I love you. But it’s you too.’ He doesn’t remember the way you rubbed his back before he went to sleep each night. I’ve asked him. 

His eyes get still. 

He’s discovered sex and I’m concerned. He loves sex and he bristles when I hug him.

I have to hate you some days. 

Other days I wonder why God can’t make himself exist.

Alone in my bed, I have a recurring dream in which you kiss me on the forehead and laugh below my ear and we touch.

——————————

Love

by
JR Harlan

“Cut me,” she says, offering me a knife and an arm. My knife, my carving knife. Her arm is pale, veins pronounced.

Blue, thin.

I look into her cold grey eyes. I seek something there. Something pronounced. But all I get is a

tired

bloodshot

stare. 

“No,” I say, pulling on my beer. Our fridge is broken. The beer’s been on the table for a week. I drink it still, even though it’s

warm, flat.

I want to say something more. I want to see something there. Something profound. But all I can offer is a

tired

bloodshot

stare.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” She screams, slamming the knife down onto the table. The knife belonged to my grandfather, then my father, and now it’s

old, dull.

“Don’t you even care anymore?” She seeks something with that. “You used to love me, you used to care, but now you’re just a

tired

old

fool.” 

“Yeah,” I say, noncommittal. Apathetic. Her makeup is smeared from sweat, from sex. She trembles with anger, with guilt. Her blouse is

wrinkled, torn.

I want to cut him. I want to do something bad to him. But he’s not here, he’s gone and ran away like a

scared

little

boy. 

“Why won’t you do anything?” She screams, again. She’s in a rage, a fit. Her muscles tense, her jaw clenched. I almost want to laugh at her, but I stay

silent, still.

“You’re pathetic,” she says, quietly. “Call me names, call me a whore.” She wants to feel justified with that. “If you loved me you

would

cut

me.” 

“No,” I say. I take another pull on my beer. I’m surprised at myself. I should be the one in a rage, a fit. But I only feel

old, wasted.

I look at her again. I want to see something there. I want to remember the woman I married. But I can’t. “No,” I say again. “If I loved you, I

would

kill

you.”

——————————