[continued from page 1]

An hour later, as she tried to console her sister, who sobbed threats of self-harm over the phone all the way from a bad neighborhood in New York City, her arctic nighttime journey floated in her periphery like a half-remembered dream. The southern California sun was unsympathetic. The world wobbled and struggled in Stella’s hands. She followed her friends past a wall of gold and white shapes behind a high dark hedge, murmuring, “You have to believe you won’t always feel like this. You will feel better soon. This is always true.” Clean-scrubbed white road dividers shrieked under her sandaled feet. She couldn’t focus on the real, draw herself into it.

Because no matter how close she came to the Disneyland hotel where her friends were waiting, she was still in her bedroom with her new lover, her head on his pale chest as he said the words “Magic Mountain” over and over in his musical accent. He believed that there was a ride at Disneyland with this name. His eyes were bluegray as the water outside her porthole. His hands felt her warm nude body, gripping the curves and the not-curves. “Are you going to ride the Magic Mountain?” he wanted to know, smiling around the words. Stella couldn’t yank herself into the present, couldn’t remove herself from the place he had already built for her from thin strong pieces of wood and gum. Was it a cage or was it her house? She wanted to lie there with him, to let him bite and lick at her body like she was a giant piece of fruit, as the day passed into night and then day again.

The night before Disneyland, Stella had gotten drunk with him on a combination of Dos Equis and cheap Russian champagne. They had gone, wobbling, to lie on the bed. As they begin to pet and touch each other she had asked him to say again the things that he had said before, vows and promises which had unlocked her from her safe of carefully learned caution and instinct. He had said that he wanted her to be the mother of his children. “When I ask you to marry me,” he had said to her, his body strong in her hands, “it will be the most beautiful day of my life.” Her warm yellow desires had run over his hands like honey, like gold.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Web Exclusives archive