The Sweetness Of Moths from Issue 78
We were at the place they called “the end of the world,” where the road stops dead at the eleventh hole of the Kona Country Club, where waves explode against a steep wall of black lava. My date parked the car. “Push your seat back,” he said and reached between my legs for the lever. My head lurched back, already his pants down at his ankles as he squirmed over the hand brake and on top. The moon lit his body aglow, reminding me of a reptile with lizard tail; his tadpoles ready for release, eager to swim the length of my channel.
I could smell the ferment of the sea at high tide. Over the boy’s shoulder I looked for the hidden road I knew led to my father’s favorite fishing grounds. This was paternal territory: salty, volcanic, prehistoric. My father had brought me here many times. Trailing behind him under the hot sun, I carried his bucket and learned that by focusing on the oily shine off his back, I could ignore the thirst, calluses, even the dizzying feeling, and follow him up the coast and back, without fainting.
“You look so adorable in this,” the boy interrupted my thoughts and lifted my skirt. He stuck his fingers in me, scratching on the way in, clawing on the way out. He pulled down my top, suckled on my nipple like a gecko on a sweet moth.
“Wait, wait,” I said, pushing against his tight amphibious skin. His cold feet suctioned to me like limpets to a rock. Then I heard the waves pounding and the roar of the sea’s retreat, and I thought of my father fishing along that same coast under the same moonlight on that very night, every night, and I could hold so very still and obedient.
I could smell the ferment of the sea at high tide. Over the boy’s shoulder I looked for the hidden road I knew led to my father’s favorite fishing grounds. This was paternal territory: salty, volcanic, prehistoric. My father had brought me here many times. Trailing behind him under the hot sun, I carried his bucket and learned that by focusing on the oily shine off his back, I could ignore the thirst, calluses, even the dizzying feeling, and follow him up the coast and back, without fainting.
“You look so adorable in this,” the boy interrupted my thoughts and lifted my skirt. He stuck his fingers in me, scratching on the way in, clawing on the way out. He pulled down my top, suckled on my nipple like a gecko on a sweet moth.
“Wait, wait,” I said, pushing against his tight amphibious skin. His cold feet suctioned to me like limpets to a rock. Then I heard the waves pounding and the roar of the sea’s retreat, and I thought of my father fishing along that same coast under the same moonlight on that very night, every night, and I could hold so very still and obedient.
Gifts From My Mother from Issue 76/77
This is how I remember her: the black shine of her hair like an oil slick, her skin cocoa in the mornings, dark espresso beans by night, the way she jutted her hip, so it was a curve you wanted to round. That’s how I remember her on those evenings when she’d leave me in the car to go across the street to Sharkey’s Bar and Grill—me, a ten-year-old girl, wanting to know what she said to those men to get them to buy her drinks.
She’d always come back with something for me: a tiny umbrella on a toothpick, and I knew she’d been drinking mai tais with an older man, profusely sweating in the heat; white long-sleeved shirt rolled up to his elbows.
A shot glass full of maraschino cherries, and I knew she’d been flirting with the help for Long Island iced teas, most likely the bartender. But those cherries were sugary and false, and left my tongue feeling like plastic.
It had to be the green olives that were my favorite. Green olives and I knew she’d been sipping straight-up martinis with a certain suave gentlemen who wore a black dress shirt, short sleeves for the humidity, who knew how to keep the drinks coming, knew not to ask why she took the olives from her glass and collected them on a napkin to the side.
And when I ate them, I could taste the sting of gin; once, instead of the sweet sliver of red pimento, I bit into something hard. Deeply sucking into that pit, I imagined what it felt like for a man to slide his hand up your dress in a bar.
Tiny gifts given to me after closing, my mother was always thinking of me that way.
She’d always come back with something for me: a tiny umbrella on a toothpick, and I knew she’d been drinking mai tais with an older man, profusely sweating in the heat; white long-sleeved shirt rolled up to his elbows.
A shot glass full of maraschino cherries, and I knew she’d been flirting with the help for Long Island iced teas, most likely the bartender. But those cherries were sugary and false, and left my tongue feeling like plastic.
It had to be the green olives that were my favorite. Green olives and I knew she’d been sipping straight-up martinis with a certain suave gentlemen who wore a black dress shirt, short sleeves for the humidity, who knew how to keep the drinks coming, knew not to ask why she took the olives from her glass and collected them on a napkin to the side.
And when I ate them, I could taste the sting of gin; once, instead of the sweet sliver of red pimento, I bit into something hard. Deeply sucking into that pit, I imagined what it felt like for a man to slide his hand up your dress in a bar.
Tiny gifts given to me after closing, my mother was always thinking of me that way.
