There once was a girl on Nantucket. She took her career and she chucked it. Reaped and then sown, she sank like a stone; she looked at the sand and thought”fuck it.
Emily doesn’t have a car and he’s staying on the other side of the island, far back and away from the beaches, so she follows him out into the parking lot. The last cobalt streaks hover, lingering in the sky over the water. She smells fog threatening to unroll itself across the land and bury her sense of hearing in its strange pale echo chamber. Her footsteps retreat. The constant whine of wind is cut off by the closing door.
She puts her purse in her lap. She situates it there, made heavy and snug on her thighs by the weight of the gun inside. She puts her hand inside, fingers touching the shape of the gun, outlining it, reading the curves and lines of its deadly intent. Its sleek message is arousing. She fondles the gun and looks out the window, the blood in her loins rising to steal the shape of the familiar landscape and fashion it anew out of shadow. George starts the engine. It rumbles up through her. A cluster of stars vibrates in the sideview mirror.
The car pulls back. Broken shells crunch beneath the tires. There’s a sensation of free-fall, a smooth careening backward into soft sea air and the driveway, still warm with the sun’s heat. The headlights cut a swath through a clump of dune roses. Withered petals cling to the gravel, beaten into the ground by hard rain. She breathes in the fake pine-tinged scent of his skin, washed in the ghosts of old cigarettes and hung on the inside window to dry. Emily withdraws the gun from her purse. The grip rests in her curled fingers. He glances at it. The car rolls over a pothole and they both sway. She looks at him.
“How do I know there isn’t a weapon stashed over there somewhere?”
He chuckles. “You don’t.”
“That’s right.” Her voice drops. “I don’t.”
Street light flashes across his face. “I want to show you something.”
“Does that line work for you?”
The tires cling to each bend in the road. He steers them like dance partners. He chuckles. “Do you want to see it?”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“I think you’ll find it interesting.”
The car rolls through more beach land, passing the ranks of salt-worn houses with their sculpted shrubs and quaint little gardens, leaving the quiet side streets on the way into town. Emily shies away from the crowded streetlights and the shapes of people walking inside the fallen pyramids of light, the storefronts like cut-rate televisions offering freeze-frames of a culture that never existed. Passing though is just passing through and they slip under the cover of natural darkness, feel it fall back into place with a shroud of heavy blue light tinged with the thoughts of stars and a lazy sliver moon, over potholes that make shooting the curves of the beach road feel a little more like dancing. Emily looks out the window, each turn and rounded bend familiar, rising up out of the dark parts of her mind. It makes her uneasy.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise. I think you’ll like it.”
The road coming at them unfurls like a ribbon, twisting and then flattening, skimming close to rows of houses and the glimpse of moon-polished water beyond. There are trees too, a kind of evergreen that she’d be able to name if the piled-up years hadn’t pulled them out of the shapes of their genetic codes. The constant winds, the harsh kicking openers of downeast storms hitting this side, wailing on the beaches first and then screaming through the old trees.
“I know this place,” she murmured.
“Do you?” The car slowed.
A tired girl, a nosy girl, one teenage morning lost in the rolling banks of fog. The warped trees looking like punishments handed out by nature’s jury and the new liquid of sound, voices flowing like currents through the mist, carving their own strange and unpredictable courses. The sun is no ally. Sleeping in one of those broken empty houses she’d awakened to”what?
Adrenaline puckers the inside of Emily’s mouth. Its surge comes out of the dark, coated in the stink of its own fear and loathing. She looks around as he slows the car. The harsh tingle migrates into her muscles and winds them up, setting off a round of twitching. He brings the car into a deep parking slot, gravel patch running alongside the long flank of a salt-silvered house surrounded by white pines. He pushes the headlights into a raggedy bank of white beach roses and kills the engine. The whispering of the ocean rushes in to fill the silence and the sigh of wind in the twisted trees settles in waves over the roof. She pushes on the handle and jumps out, slamming the door, her limbs like an animal’s, close to the ground and one with its changing presence.
“It’s not much,” said George. “But it’s something I’ve got.”
Emily hears him like a machine: parse, code, file away for future access. She glides like a shadow down the flank of the house, disappearing into the black yard. She thinks of her dream: All around her thick and deep, star-speckled, sanded down by the sounds of waves, are drifts of darkness. Houses like shells perch in scrub pines and cranky wild rose bushes, whistling empty in the constant wind. She swallows the memories, digesting the good stuff. Burps up a taste of cellar and roses. Empty whistling beach full of cold and confusion.
He is there, behind her, his hand a tight circle around her upper arm. He tries to lead but with her feet she knows where she’s going. Each footfalls breaks something open, releases broken words into the center of her mind. I know this place. I know it like the aftertaste of a nightmare. Her breath comes quick and steady, ventilating her, pumping the darkest parts of her blood full of oxygen. Her cunt feels heavy, carved out of hot lead, held up by the cheap guywires of her tendons. Her center of gravity is lower that it was. She stumbles along inside the lacy darkness, down into a thicket of warped trees. A view of the beach flashes before her eyes and there’s more of that falling, her soul clicking, her feet heavy enough to be real.
“This,” says George, voice turning down low, husking up at the edges, warm like the scent of blood coming off a fresh kill, “this is what I have for you, Emily. This.” His fingers spread on her shoulders, squeezing them, and his face is close. His breath mingles with her breath, warming the edges of her nostrils. “You don’t remember, do you?”
She does remember. She does.
There was something, carved out of an early morning and stippled with sunlight, that cold New England fog and everything it touches slimy, even the sand. She looks into the darkness behind him and sees a morning, the dark ground…and something’s wrong. Coming up out of the abandoned cellar, into a billowing bank of mist sliced through by the sun’s hot dawn rays, like chinks in the armor, little blades of white light striking the ground and quivering in the dark.
“I don’t,” she breathes. “I don’t quite…I do, but I can’t get all of it.” She looks in a circle around them. “Something happened.”
George takes her in his arms, his body heat speaking to hers, knotting up together until she feels his skin beneath her lips. The closeness makes it difficult to think. He holds the back of her head, tilting her chin, and his voice surrounds her face, thoughtful and husky, its low pitch crawling up the insides of her legs and burrowing itself in her cunt. “I’ll tell you how it was,” he murmurs, hands sliding up beneath her cheeks, holding the sea-cold away from her skin. His breath plumps her lips with its aggressive moisture. “I’ll tell you about him.”
“Just a guy, just a nobody, some kid from the mainland and there wasn’t any choosing either.” His breath quickens. “He was like a shadow.” He smoothes her falling hair out of her face. “I don’t know why. Maybe he liked me. Maybe he wanted to fuck me. I dunno. The first time, it’s like an opportunity you can’t throw back into the water. It’s there, it’s in your face, screaming that you know what to do, and yeah.” He presses his mouth into her neck. “Everyone knows that, even you, even the five year old who wants to get up early so he can make a sand castle, even the meter guy who doesn’t dare touch his harpy wife.” He pants against her skin, sliding her breasts into his hands. “I did have a knife, you were right about that, and it was sharp and I’d never used it before, but it’s easy when you’re just horsing around, you know, a little homoerotic wrestling to start the day just fine.” He rubs her nipples and she feels herself get hard all over, stiff and wrinkled, the blood slamming into her sensitive places. He loosens her straps and folds down her bodice, catches her hot smooth breasts in his palms. The cool air and the rough tingling make her moan. “I got him on his stomach and brought my fist around, a neat arc from ear to ear.” He bites into the curve of her neck, teeth gentle, tongue soft, erratic breath rubbing everywhere like steamed velvet. “Blood sprayed everywhere. I held him down, you know, keeping him on the ground so the blood wouldn’t track all over the place.” She gasps. He hauls her hips up into his groin. She whimpers. “The muscles misfire. Holding him down like that, feeling the fish-slop in his bones…it was a lot like riding a hot one, you know, a girl who’s really into it. I laid on him until he stopped moving.” He pulls up her skirt, one hand groping between her thighs. “You feel the life spurt out, riding all that blood.” His slippery fingers bump her clit. “Mmmm, Em,” he half-breathes, half-moans into her neck. “It was so good. So good.” His fingers start to move. “The best. If I’d known you…” He murmurs into her mouth, “if I’d known you were down there in that basement…” He falls to his knees and buries his face in her thighs. “You coulda had him.” The words, muffled, his voice hums deep in her pubic bone. “When I was done with him.”
She closes her eyes, drifting back and forth, half in and half out of the world, threads of past and present woven tight. They call the darkness out of her blood and hang it with jewels of mist. She falls back into the following afternoon, late, the sky purple and sliding down into the sea like a rotten plum, the taste of brimstone clinging to the wind; there are maggots, the memory of them writhing on the smoothed stained earth, hundreds of maggots making her lightheaded with nausea, making her crotch pulse in a way she didn’t understand. Panting and strung out on adrenaline, she grabs a handful of his hair with a trembling hand and pulls his forehead into the round opening at the tip of her gun.
There once was a girl.
His tongue digs, lifting up beneath her clit and there’s a deep spasm of heat. Juice floods the insides of her thighs and drips off his chin. It smells like electricity gone amok in a hayfield. So much heaviness, the dead blood in the dirt, the menstrual period of a thunder goddess. He tilts her hips, lets out a long deep smothered moan and the vibration catches in her skin. His voice quivers out to her edges. Her breath goes ragged and she presses the gun into his scalp.
There once was a girl on Nantucket. Her memory grew ripe and he plucked it. Oh look what I found, there’s blood on the ground; she sharpened his knife and he stuck it.
Hot breath in her crotch, creeping mist stealing her voice through a welter of chiming water droplets; she remembers the rain needling down out of the sky, cold and bitter, beating the maggots and grinding them into the dirt.
She leans into a tree, hips riding on his face, and her head lolls as her lungs fill, pushing out a long hard moan”AH!”that mingles with the busy trees, up where their leaves rub together with the wind shearing in off the water, forgotten stones grinding in her cunt. She’s so hot, so loose, melting down the insides of her legs, pouring herself down his throat, pulled through the tight hard pulse in her groin and turned inside out, sparks striking in her fragmented voice. They transform it into a secret syntax of emotion.
There once was a girl on Nantucket. Her will fell apart so she shucked it. Haunted by mist, bloodstains on her wrists; he lifted her shame and he sucked it.
He sucks on her clit. The neurons in her body light up in the slow drag and pop off like firecrackers. The fingers wrapped around the gun get tight, blanching at the corners. Her breath flutters. The metal trembles against his skull.
In the basement sleeping don’t wanna go home don’t want the cutesy nautical touches on the walls or the empty cereal bowls she likes it out here because its nowhere and the dark is scary
He spreads her, holds her open and drives his tongue down through the bottom of her furrow, up to the tight ticking pulse in her clit; too much oxygen drifts up past her burning cheeks, lifts inside her head, swirls in the corners of her eyes.
It’s all wrong up here the shadows have gone backward and no sound a lot of blood stirred into the ground
“You like that?”
She struggles to get a breath. “Y-Yes.”
“Mmmmmm.”
Her orgasm claws its way out of his mouth. When it comes, it blacks out the world.
There once was a girl on Nantucket. A hot hour came and she struck it. Afraid she would drown, she whispered it down, and how did she do it? She fucked it.