Mutiny Has No Master
The reflection of the sun on snow can blind you.
You don't hurt, you just feel sleepy, he whispered. I watched the oil from his fingertips leave prints on the glossy magazine he glanced at, page after page, searching to find himself in the party pages.
That's what it did to you? I mumbled, walking away, shaking my head, my shoulders loose and relaxed like a puppet.
She was like sunshine, or maybe clouds. Fancy free and pretty in the way birds are; feathers gleaming and uncapturable...but ridden with disease and likely to wound with their claws.
"He's always in magazines," she said, eyelashes fluttering, small town Lolita so easily impressed with Big City boys. No, I said. That doesn't mean much here.
But who says, really? A memory captured in publicly distributed print can be something special, can't it? Something...validating? I shrugged my shoulders, tensed and aching.
He kept crawling to me, mumbling about my warmth as he pressed the sides of my body to his lips like a prayer, the oil on his fingertips creating prints on skin already wrought with freckles. I didn't want it. I didn't want him. I need no published loverboys banging down my door, take the sunshine, won't you? Girls with pale skin like mine burn too easily to be that close to someone who thinks they're a STAR.
Mumbled excuses, ignored phone calls, emails written and saved as drafts, never pressing send. Moments spent sweating and nervous in bathroom stalls, endless showers trying to get those fingerprints off of my skin.
She kept asking and calling and breathing in shallow breaths, her lovely face becoming gaunt and rabid in her compulsion for a man she couldn't have and I couldn't get rid of. "Take sunshine," I told him on printed notes, and he would come back with "the sun resides within you, the warmth of your skin tells me so". I hated such admissions. I wanted new books.
Soon enough, seasons changed, my subsciptions to bad magazines with too many ads ended, and I no longer remember fingerprints and a girl I once called sunshine. New wallpaper, coffee pots exchanged for French presses, I learned how to sew and made myself an apron in anticipation of becoming an amateur chef in my own little world. Then an invitation came in the mail, for a wedding. Fingerprints and sunshine.
"I'm pregnant," she said, eyes wide and hair curled luxuriously against her enlarged busom and luminous skin. "It was an accident. But we're doing the right thing, I think. Getting married. Making it legit."
I stared at her, more sunflower than sunshine now; and just as stupid.
He dropped to his knees when he saw me, I could practically feel his fingertips grasping at the fabric of my dress, my belly flat and toned, nothing like the sweetly swollen stomach of his soon to be wife. I ached. She would break herself attempting to get him to love her. He would be like most men in magazines. That needs no explanation.
Mutiny committed against a child not even born yet.
"Would you be the godmother?" she asked me, eyes framed with lashes like a doe. I nodded. The captain of an unmanned ship.
"You keep your fingertips on sunshine or I'll cut them off," I whispered to him as I left. He stayed on his knees.
Xo
You don't hurt, you just feel sleepy, he whispered. I watched the oil from his fingertips leave prints on the glossy magazine he glanced at, page after page, searching to find himself in the party pages.
That's what it did to you? I mumbled, walking away, shaking my head, my shoulders loose and relaxed like a puppet.
She was like sunshine, or maybe clouds. Fancy free and pretty in the way birds are; feathers gleaming and uncapturable...but ridden with disease and likely to wound with their claws.
"He's always in magazines," she said, eyelashes fluttering, small town Lolita so easily impressed with Big City boys. No, I said. That doesn't mean much here.
But who says, really? A memory captured in publicly distributed print can be something special, can't it? Something...validating? I shrugged my shoulders, tensed and aching.
He kept crawling to me, mumbling about my warmth as he pressed the sides of my body to his lips like a prayer, the oil on his fingertips creating prints on skin already wrought with freckles. I didn't want it. I didn't want him. I need no published loverboys banging down my door, take the sunshine, won't you? Girls with pale skin like mine burn too easily to be that close to someone who thinks they're a STAR.
Mumbled excuses, ignored phone calls, emails written and saved as drafts, never pressing send. Moments spent sweating and nervous in bathroom stalls, endless showers trying to get those fingerprints off of my skin.
She kept asking and calling and breathing in shallow breaths, her lovely face becoming gaunt and rabid in her compulsion for a man she couldn't have and I couldn't get rid of. "Take sunshine," I told him on printed notes, and he would come back with "the sun resides within you, the warmth of your skin tells me so". I hated such admissions. I wanted new books.
Soon enough, seasons changed, my subsciptions to bad magazines with too many ads ended, and I no longer remember fingerprints and a girl I once called sunshine. New wallpaper, coffee pots exchanged for French presses, I learned how to sew and made myself an apron in anticipation of becoming an amateur chef in my own little world. Then an invitation came in the mail, for a wedding. Fingerprints and sunshine.
"I'm pregnant," she said, eyes wide and hair curled luxuriously against her enlarged busom and luminous skin. "It was an accident. But we're doing the right thing, I think. Getting married. Making it legit."
I stared at her, more sunflower than sunshine now; and just as stupid.
He dropped to his knees when he saw me, I could practically feel his fingertips grasping at the fabric of my dress, my belly flat and toned, nothing like the sweetly swollen stomach of his soon to be wife. I ached. She would break herself attempting to get him to love her. He would be like most men in magazines. That needs no explanation.
Mutiny committed against a child not even born yet.
"Would you be the godmother?" she asked me, eyes framed with lashes like a doe. I nodded. The captain of an unmanned ship.
"You keep your fingertips on sunshine or I'll cut them off," I whispered to him as I left. He stayed on his knees.
Xo