You don’t have any tape or at least I couldn’t find any

You’ll have to tape it later I guess I don’t have to do it right now

It’ll still scar if you don’t leave the plastic on it but the scars will set better with it

This isn’t work you don’t have to work right now

She closed her mouth and blushed

I’m sorry it’s okay

She laid down on her stomach beside him and tucked her arms

Beneath her chest and put her head on the pillow

Rhiannon let her hands fall into the dishwater. The window over the kitchen sink was open and she looked across the parking lot to the ass-end of the building across the way, the shaded parking slots numbered and faded by the sun. There was an alley in there, between low brick buildings. She’d found her cat back there with gray velvet feet cut open on the broken beer bottles. She remembered him cowering under a ragged pink oleander and the scent of its sticky-sweet blossoms mixing in with the trash. She coaxed him out with a bit of tuna from her sandwich and bundled him into the car and took him to the vet. The Pink Siamese wasn’t open yet. She knew Steve from Bull’s place on Tropicana. Sometimes she and Steve hung out. One time they drove out to Hoover Dam and smoked a bowl and Steve threatened to climb on top of the rails and do the butterfly dance. Kicked off the dam for throwing Carl’s Jr drinks into the distant water, watching them turn over and over and spray bright blue Powerade like antifreeze mixed in with the blood of sapphires. Shit, man. Bull’s place, The Loaded Dice, parked on top of a strip club. You had to dodge fake titties to get up the stairs because most of the time between sets you’d see some honeys out there snorting coke out of a scarlet talon in the flickering fluorescent light and the stairwell always smelled like broken down Jovan Musk, cigarettes, and the inside of a gym sock. All that buzzing light made the young girls look old. One time she saw one of them, a bottle blonde from the Midwest somewhere, come into the emergency room at Mountain View with her button nose foaming blood and her spastic eyes rolled up under lids that were like windowshades. Next time Rhiannon saw her in the stairwell, a tiny piece of real estate was missing from her eyes.

Man, that was a long time ago.

She dried off her hands and let the plates soak a little longer. She glanced at the turquoise readout on the microwave.

I should be in bed.

There wasn’t going to be much sleeping and what little bit did decide to show up would arrive tattered and stinking with cold. It would crawl out of the air conditioning, wrap itself around her mind, and shiver apart into dreams.

She thought back to her last drug screening. She longed for a joint but didn’t dare risk it. She didn’t want to flag her urine and she didn’t know what would come to her if she smoked. Sometimes the things that came out of the slumbering parts of herself weren’t kind. She stared out the window, at the alley, imagining the oleander and the careless strew of broken glass, dangerous confetti, the cockroaches that gleamed like polished amber in the muddled streetlights. Last year there had been a colony of red ants nested in there. Someone’s dog hand gotten into them and the howls still twanged in her spine like slivers of shrapnel. Oh, how the poor little thing had howled. The dog was all right, but she learned from Maria downstairs that the ants had swarmed all over the poor baby’s eyes. The image made her nauseous. The viciousness of it, the wrongness, a cunning hive mind burrowing its way into a creature’s most sensitive parts. It wrought havoc with her lizard brain. Could insects hear the howl of pain? Did it register somewhere? Did sounds vibrating at a certain frequency stoke them into a fever pitch? The two apartment buildings had gone in together to get rid of it. They’d cleaned up some of the glass, too, but two weeks later the alley belonged once again to the shattered bottles, the spilled trash, and the cockroaches. Rhiannon walked past the fiesta cookie jar. Inside the jar, her small bag of dope languished tucked away inside a rubber lemon.

She stripped off her clothes and sat naked on the rumpled bed. She closed her eyes and pictured the worn-out numbers painted into the corrugated awning. 225. 226. 227 with a break in the 7. 228. 229. 230.

She took a breath.

After she’d cut him, she and Carl fell asleep. He fell before her, all of his bones loosening like stones upon the bed. She touched his breathing skin and after awhile her own breath lulled into the same pattern. There was pussy-scented darkness. There were dreams. She remembered bright colors, bright sun, bright everything caught in their dark webs. He woke up and she came out of sleep to feel his eyes on her lids. She opened her eyes, looked into his face, brushed the plastic stuck to his raw chest with the tips of her fingers. He didn’t need to ask. She pushed her tongue into the cuts through the plastic and he moaned. He grew hard and restless as a lightning rod. She climbed over him and they fucked, all the sweetness brought forth in the kiss of the blade leaking out and filling the air, making it heavy, enraging their bodies with oxygen. Each thrust of his cock jammed her back into herself. When she came her flesh wrung itself tight, furling up like a bud, squeezing free every last drop of need. She collapsed into her unraveled consciousness, dizzy with blood and swooning in big draughts of flesh-steeped ecstasy. She tangled her fingers all up with his. She didn’t know how her body could keep going off like this, bursting into fireworks, taking only the ashes of her emotions and mixing them in with sweat.

In the welter of shadows, adrift in gasping recovery, he began to talk.

I listen to the talking water sometimes but only when it talks about the hummingbirds. You know, how they come back every year? I always know when.

There’s this place. I never told no one.

You’re so pretty. Like the moonlight.

I could take you out there. There’s a cornfield, like Centeotl. They flay it in the seedtime. I like to watch. There’s a farm but with water inside. My cenote. And trees. Tall ones that go all the way to heaven.

I like the way you come because you smell like blood.

Good springs, fills the cenote up. There’s a water goddess.

He held her body tight to his body with the ferocity of a child. She remembered the dampened roots of his hair, the alchemy of his sweat and the nicotine he’d inhaled earlier that day blending in with a smell like metal giving up its skin and shedding tiny dry flakes of blood. The sweetness of drugstore shampoo fading, like a dandelion blossom crushed into the pavement. The bitter salt of his tears. I don’t want to hurt you. Don’t want. He stroked her velvety soft scalp. Please. Tell me if you want to cry so I can stop it. She’d said oh honey and it takes a lot and don’t worry about it, I’m tough. I’m one bad-assed mama, baby, and if you want to make me sad it’s gonna take some doin. She rubbed his back. She pressed his forehead into her neck and patted his big shoulder blades. Don’t want to, he mumbled. Don’t let it. I’m not the demanding kind, she’d said, unaware of the chill inside his mind and the rumbling voices of the stones. You can do what you want. I’m not gonna come over all weeping on you. I’m not going to jerk your strings around with my box of Kleenex. You’re so pretty. Like the moonlight. Like the pearls inside you. She’d asked him if he wanted to share a joint and he’d said yes. She’d gone downstairs and fished the joint out of her jeans pocket and lit up. The pungent smoke swirled toward the ceiling, drifted back down in lazy veils and made everything all right. It made her calm. It made him calm. They laughed. She wanted more sex but he was too wasted so she turned on her back and slipped a finger into her pussy lips. He put an arm around her and watched her face with fascination, calling out the flush of her skin, murmuring at the dilation of her pupils, the quickening pull of her breath. She wondered if she could go off again. She did, but these waves came deep and slow, rocking outward to the edges of the bed like her hand was a stone dropped in the center of a white pool. She shivered out to the edges and back again. Like little ringing bells, he whispered, and she giggled. Slipped off the face of the world, folding back up into sleep.

Rhiannon pressed her fingers into her temples. The old words echoed in her chest.

I don’t want to hurt you.

A burst of icy adrenaline.

Don’t let it.

Her belly knotted into a fist. She leapt off the bed and ran into the bathroom, making it to the toilet just in time. She skidded to her knees, embracing the porcelain god. She threw up until there was nothing left and her throat continued to expel long grinding strings of bile. Her hand trembled as she wiped the oily sweat out of her eyes. She dug the heels of her hands into the sides of her head, her legs folded up and her ankles askew beneath her. She propped her elbows on the plastic seat, retching until she began to weep with frustration.

She banged the lever with the side of her fist. She sat back on the cold tiles and pulled a wad of toilet paper off the dispenser and scrubbed her mouth with it. The beard-abraded skin stung. Being alone was a stupid move, she thought. When I was out there I could fight the remembering. Here I’m stripped bare, left alone with the voices. I’m going to think about this all night.

She got up. Wavered on her feet. Turned to the sink. Filled up a glass of water. Rinsed the puke taste out of her mouth.

My cenote.

You’re so pretty.

Rhiannon closed her eyes.