Slippage was first published in The Suburban Review #10: The Stellar Edition.
The story was republished in The Near and the Far Vol II (Scribe, 2019), a collection of work from writers in the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program.
Slippage
We used to fuck with the light on, back before the lights went out. We walked down George Street, heat rising off the concrete, red wine in the cracks of your lips, Levis rolled above your ankles and hanging low on your boyish hips. A dragonfly hovered in front of us, riding the updrafts of heat from the baked-all-day bitumen and you laughed, delighted, said I haven’t seen one of those for ages. The ceiling of your bedroom slanted down like an attic roof, a maidenhair fern crisped by the window. You licked all the way down the seam of my body, opening me up like a zipper undone. I didn’t need to tell you softer or like this. You knelt between the altar of my crooked knees, your dark hair spread across my pale skin.
‘Don’t close your eyes.’
Your body above mine, that birthmark on your ribcage, a plum coloured stain across your delicate bones. The patch of sky out your window orange and burning, ash on the wind.
Later, after the reef died properly, a long thin scar puckering the coast, bleached like old bones, I wanted to call you. But at the time, it was hard to believe things would go that far. The brownouts were bad that year—the power was off more often than on—the humid heat and candle light making the beads of sweat on your skin glow. You’d changed your major by then, abandoned your poetry for a kind of rage I couldn’t begin to understand. You were on fire with it in the warm-dark closeness of the unfamiliar bedroom. Your hands were moving in the air, crescents to demonstrate falling, shapes to show the movement of ice breaking from glaciers, how everything was shifting and moving and expanding. I was listening to your voice, but the words didn’t matter, not compared to the fizz that was sizzling in me. I told you and you looked at me with your black eyes tarry and endless. Pressed your thumb against my lips. Said it. Said it again in English. My want sheared off into your mouth like those icebergs calving into the sea.