He took her in his hands, all feeling absent. She
readjusted them at the hips as she gazed at him, underneath lashes like
cornucopias against the blue-green walls of her eyes. "Do you love
me?" She asked Wyatt, firmly. Her hands faltered at the small of his back
which tightened reflexively as a halo of warmth spread out from her
fingertips.
He couldn't see her, not fully. He
felt that he was looking at her, her aquiline nose and splintering eyes,
through the mottled glass of a coke bottle. She, meanwhile, was groping his
body for purchase, a single square inch of skin that would relent. His feet
twitched convulsively within the confines of his sneakers, and his cheeks were
smoothed over with a neat pink hue.
Boy, he could go for a cigarette now. He wasn't
sure if his hands actually drew to the back of his jeans or he had just
imagined it. They lingered at the base of his left pocket before probing for
that all-familiar lighter, a cool plastic rectangle that could just as well
have been a cushion.
The silence wrapped the two of them together
with the snugness of cellophane. She tilted her head back, receiving the pause,
then let each finger go individually as they settled back into the space of her
hoodie. It took her a full minute to realize the magnitude of their closeness,
and the sudden alarm of it, the coolness of his eyes, sent her stumbling back.
She steadied herself, and in the depth of his
silence, found herself asking: "Why did we go on this camping trip,
anyway?" Wyatt noticed the changes in her immediately: the pained
expression in her eyes, paired with the way she held her shoulders, like two
sunken masts grounded by a sudden gust of wind.
Her apprehension didn't bother him, no. The
only image that clung to him at this moment was one of his mother's, decked out
in her finest jewelry, which shook against the apple shape of her body as she
laughed herself into a fit. He pictured her with the hands of aunts and uncles,
sisters and brothers, wrenched to her forearm in their pallid excitement.
Liver spots that danced over sagging flesh
violated the taste of her birthday cake. In an instant but many years ago, she
had turned 68-years-old. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo. He recalled with vivid tenacity
he stench of death in the room, her bleary eyes as she lowered a fist-sized
clump of frosting into her mouth. "Just the good parts," She had
spoken of the cake. "Save the rest for someone who wants it."
It was a dreadful time, those sixty
days before she died. He closed his eyes to disappear Marlene and saw his
mother again, this time with tubes snaking up and down her throat, her chest,
the hanging flesh of her biceps. She told him not to worry, she was more or
less ready. She wistfully alluded to the approach of old age as standing on a
sliding board that increased the sharpness of its angle each passing year. Her
clarity finally allowed her to understand the pit of nothingness that hung in
waiting.
Desperate mortal fear rang out in every corner
of her affected mind. The crackling inside her head represented telomeres
splitting apart. The very fabric of her being was unraveling, and soon she
would cease to exist.
And here Marlene was, questioning her
relationship with Wyatt. She reveled in her youth without even being cognizant
of the fact. Wyatt blinked back at Marlene and saw more of his mother than her
prize worthiness. He only faintly registered the springy newness of Marlene's
skin and those lips which often pursed into the shape of a tiny prickling
starfish when an idea struck her.
As Marlene regarded Wyatt with wide,
pleading eyes, he realized that her obsession with him had taken on a fervent
quality. He too realized, in a more overpowering sense, that their closeness in
age intertwined them. They could share things. Perhaps a baby.
"We're out here camping because that's
what families do." He said after a long hesitation. "Don't you want
to be a family?"
Marlene, who was now sitting down, hoisted
herself up and brushed the dirt off her pants. The tent they’d rented was in a
heap near the fire pit, reminding her of a fossilized animal in its death
throes. Her eyes traveled down Wyatt's body, from the lighter gripped in his
left hand to the cigarette clenched between his teeth, back down to his free
hand worming inside of the other jean pocket. She kept her distance this time as
they stared at the same piece of sky.
Points: 31
Reviews: 19
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