eclipse

In the bleary late-morning shine, with my body—not just my body; flesh is symbol, not meaning—weighing heavy on the layers of down, Egyptian cotton, the rumpled nest of my bedsheets, I remember Luna Dahl. She drives fast and visceral back into my awareness, the delicately scattered imperfections across her naked skin, the charming crooked smile, the mortal loveliness of asymmetry and flesh-and-blood heat. I remember the way I’d left her before wandering into the wasteland, the garden’s salted earth. The way I’d filled her, the way she’d filled me, but only shallow. A sip, a taste of her.

An engine without momentum, machinery robbed of inertia, I pull my body free of the fabric trap and, when the cool air gazes my fevered skin, sit up wondering if she’ll invite the devil back with open arms, with the open heaviness of her legs. I can almost smell her: that unmistakable scent, dark and animal and raw that clings to skin for hours afterward, and I only have to breathe in to remember, to nearly taste her again. The same way I’d saturated her with my scent deep, deep, deep down to the fragile trembling girl-core.

I drag a dry tongue across my mouth and the sharpness of my teeth like the jagged ivory whiteness of a beast’s maw. I don’t want to sip now, to taste. I want to feed. Devour. Consume. The want is a pressure in the back of my throat, heat against my fingertips, an unbearable livewire urgency in the loins. And as I slip out of the bed and rise to my feet, aching with the emptiness of my freshly-reworked vessel, I wonder if Luna Dahl will break.