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Show Moon -154 "This happens sometimes," he says. His voice sounds small, a little frightened, and my anger turns to something else. Pity, maybe. He needs me. I should give it my best. I should be diligent, pulling and sucking at him like clay, murmuring deep in my throat like a mother to a fretting child. He'd form, take shape under my creative hands. Then Td ease him into me. So as not to frighten him, Td move slowly, let him gather his own careful momentum, until finally the wondrous thrusting like the pistons of a train, down the track, into the tunnel, arc of stars, my hands riding the bucking moon, hurtling towards the dragon-fire sun. He'd cry, "Oh God!" We'd lie in stunned silence, and I could finally say, "It's finished." I could and yet I can't. My hand stays quiet around his limpness that's soft and pale as a newly hatched bird. I brush a tiny kiss against the sweet pink tip, curl myself against him, and say, "It's all right. It doesn't matter." He closes his eyes and we stay like that, each doing in our private thoughts what we must with this sudden tenderness and shame. After this silent vigil, the man called John gets up, wraps a blanket around himself and pads to the bathroom. I hear the rattle of pipes as he turns on the shower, and I'm grateful for this time alone with my thoughts, which have begun to tumble into me like stones released by rain. What has been blurred together in my mind falls into discrete parts, and a landscape comes into focus." John, even with his gray wings of hair and cold authority, is not James. He is a stranger, momentarily enlisted for my own heedless purpose. Josh, even though he walls up Windfall-and this connection has just now come to me-is not Mark, who would have locked me up forever in a mental institution, another version of James. |