SmokeLong Quarterly

for Molly Bloom

She keeps saying she’s moving in. When we’re curled into each other in bed, she says yes and yes and yes. She says, I’ll pack my things. And then the next day, she refuses to hold my hand in the street as we pass by some church. She used to be religious. Believe in god and Jesus and all the ways you can sin. Now she sins every day, she says. With me. The fact that our bodies are the same: small and compact and female. The fact that she’s not used to it: people looking twice in the street when I kiss her. This is Utah after all. This is April with all the tulips and daffodils and purple irises springing to life from bulb. We walk to the park, and all I can think of is the texture of her palm in mine. The desire I have to hold her, always always. But I resist. Because she does. In the house with the front door locked, she is a different creature entirely. Full of desire. Full of promises. She says we can put the painting her grandmother made above the couch. It will look wonderful there, she says. My turn to nod and agree. Yes and yes and yes. She says what will she do with her plumeria? He needs a lot of light, she says. She says, maybe on the front porch in the summer—he can handle the heat. But in the winter, he hibernates. He hides his leaves away inside his body. He can be in our room, she says. And I love the way she says “our.” The way I forget that she has yet to tell her parents—both Catholic. Or her sisters. And in the night, while she sleeps, I imagine she likes to wake up next to me. Our bodies in the same plane. Our bodies under the same rectangle of fabric. I imagine, for a moment, she too desires us together, a woman to come home to. But then she turns away from me, a crescent moon of body holding onto the side of the bed like her life depends on it. Like we’re floating on some river down a stretch of rapids. Like the river is made of lava and beside her is someone she’s not sure will help her survive. Like below the mattress are some vicious fish that thrive in molten heat, like if the heat didn’t get her, they would. And like the reason she fell in to begin with has to do with me. My body here on this floating sanctuary. My body betraying her as she slips into the peril below. And I would be here still, alone, always reaching for her. Always saying yes and yes and yes.