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[continued from page 3]
Stella knew that only the joining of their minds that gave these words power. If they decided these things were untrue in the next moment, they would fall away. Yet she felt strangely as though the shape of her life had gone away from her, that she had been presented with the man with whom she was to become, finally, an adult. She wanted so much for this to be true that she became paralyzed with fear. She reflected, as she rode Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride with her friends, that her affectionate nickname for him, “my vampire,” might have a frightening double meaning. He had already marked her neck with a dark purple spot, like a half-heart.
When their conversation had finished, Stella’s lover had placed her on her stomach and affixed his mouth to the soft side of her neck, pressing his tongue rhythmically to the space between his teeth. After a moment of this she could no longer think. She was only an orange swath of sweating color in a ratty pair of gray underwear. He moved behind her and licked and kissed her back, pressing his erection into her crotch. The only thing between them was her worthless underwear. She smelled his high ecstatic smell. “I’m scared,” she whispered. “I can’t—I can’t let go, I feel like I’ll lose myself.”
“Let go,” her lover said, sucking at her lower back. “Surrender.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I—don’t know—”
“I love you, I’ll take care of you,” he said, cupping her slick breasts in his neat hands. “Let go. Let go.”
She was still there, under him, waiting for him to take off her underwear, to enter her. Stella blinked in the hot sunlight and answered her friend’s question about what it was like to live in Los Angeles. She thought raptly of arranged marriages and chance meetings as she waited in line for a small train that would take her and her friends back, back to the Grand Canyon, back in time to when great creatures roamed the Earth, to a time when her concerns were so small that they had not even been born into speech.
Lisa Locascio was born and raised near Chicago. She holds an MFA from New York University and is currently Virginia B. Middleton Fellow at the University of Southern California's PhD program in Creative Writing and Literature. Her work has also appeared in the Northwest Review, Fifth Wednesday Review, and other magazines.
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