you're too young & eager to love

I don't know who these characters are or what's happening in their lives. I started writing and just kept going, for whatever that is worth. It sort of sounds like they might be in the wasteland, living in the desert? But your guess is my guess.


--


“Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth
and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.” - Ann Patchett, State of Wonder







Nora’s hands are the white of lilies, of ivory, of cream. Her nails gleam like the edge of a blade - curved and full of threats. When she smiles she shows her teeth, and those teeth are deceivingly small, crowding her mouth like perfect pristine tombstones. There’s secrets in that mouth, chained behind the gate of her lips.






“She’s like a leech, tell you what.” Jax punctuates his distaste with an equally distasteful spit, the chew-stained saliva arching into a pitiful loop on its downward trajectory.

The spit settles uncomfortably close to the tip of Colleen’s boot, and the look she gives Jax is one of pure annoyance. Colleen doesn’t like things like spit or sweat or cum. She doesn’t like stains or rips or messes. Dirt is her greatest nemesis. She puts her dainty hands in her lap and studies her cuticles, shifting her weight in the chair outside the trailer. There’s two lawn chairs but no awning, so Jax and her sweat beneath the merciless sun, ignoring the sounds coming from the rectangle of aluminum walls behind them.

“Like a leech,” Jax reiterates.

“I heard you the first time.”

“What?”

“I said I heard you.”

“You shouldn’t mumble,” Jax says with another spit.

This brown glob lands farther away from Colleen but she sniffs all the same, her nose wrinkling. She turns her face away from Jax in a silent gesture of dissociation - Jax is her least favorite of the quartet, the one she feels little to no affinity for, the one most likely to get under her skin. He’s as tired and worn as an old boot, his skin leathered and wrinkled from too many days in the desert sun, his hair long and silvered, but he has the perception of a hawk, predatory and cunning. His keenness disarms her because it counters the brittleness of his looks. A feeble man should be harmless at best and mildly burdensome at worst, but Jax circumvents Colleen’s need to categorize her world around her - he refuses to fit into the square box she’s made for him in her mind.

She wraps the ends of her coppery hair around her fingers and ignores the way the mobile home shivers and shakes; she stares into the distance, looking for anything of interest on the scorching horizon. The wind is hot, and the row of cacti in the distance shimmer in the midday heat. The sight makes Colleen thirsty, painfully so. She thinks of water: cold and clear from a lake in her childhood, as reflective as glass.

There aren’t many lakes left anymore, or so they say. They’ve been sucked dry. Turned into patches of dust and ashen cracks crisscrossing open stretches of meadows made brown from unending summers.

“You ever see a leech?” she asks, tilting her head back to Jax.

He grunts, and she hits his knee. “Hey, you wanted to talk, so I’m talking. You ever see a leech, old man?”

Jax rubs his weathered, knotted knuckles across his thin mouth, twisting his fingers into the tangle of beard jutting from his chin. “Wormy things. Fat when full. Rows of teeth you can’t see, but you know they’re there. Blood tubes.”

Colleen nods. “That’s right.”

A shadow cuts the sky above them, long and narrow. Colleen shields her eyes with her hand and looks up, but whatever flew over them has already moved on, swift as a river, dipping behind a rare stretch of thin cloud. She’s heard of swamp birds who have morphed into bat-like cranes, bizarre creatures that evolved to their new climates and terrain, their feathers replaced by leathery skin. She’d like to have seen it, if that’s what it was.

“Yeah,” Colleen says after a moment. “Yeah, maybe she is like a leech.”

“But ain’t you just jealous as can be anyway.”

Colleen rolls her eyes. Behind her, a woman’s muddled voice arches into a breathy, satisfied moan.

Jealousy doesn’t begin to describe what she’s feeling.






Abraham has two of Nora’s fingers in his mouth. His tongue is hot against her skin, his teeth blunt, scraping across her knuckles. He sucks wetly and she laughs, pushing her palm against his face when she frees herself from the suction, smearing his spit against his cheek. He chuckles warmly and scoops his thick arms around her, bracketing the narrow slip of her body until she’s once more curled on top and against him. Abraham is a tree, broad and massive, knotted in muscle, and she roosts in his lap as secure as a nestling.

They’re opposite a window, the lone twin bed within the trailer pushed against the far wall, and all the rich soft light falls on Nora. She looks creamy with happiness, as if she’s carved out of butter. It’s easy to fall in love with women who look like this, Abraham thinks, rubbing a calloused hand over one of her pale shoulders. He doesn’t understand how a woman living beneath the reach of a perpetually assaulting sun can remain so fair - no freckles, no lines, no tan. Her paleness is enigmatic.

Nora slips her arms around the trunk of his neck, touches her forehead to his. She rubs small circles against the base of his skull. As she kisses him, she tastes salt and spearmint and spit. When he’d found her in a drifter town off the Western coast, she’d been a mouse amongst vipers, ready for the slaughter. She hadn’t expected Abraham to be her salvation, just as she hadn’t expected to find herself willingly entering his bed.

Now, Abraham sighs, aware of the muted conversation from outside their window, of the way the sun moves across the sky. Nora lifts her eyes to the window. “We should go,” she says. “We’ve been selfish enough for one day.”

“But if we go, we lose the bed. Plus, I don’t like to sleep alone.”

Nora has heard this speech or something similar to it before. Abraham always says that the bed is too big; it’s a funny thing to complain about, an impossible thing to complain about, considering his height and chiseled width. It’s also a lie. The bed is barely big enough to contain his own limbs, his long feet sometimes hanging over the edge, let alone another adult body.

“I need someone to roll up against, or I just roll around all night,” he mumbles into her ear. “Some mornings I even wake up on the floor.”

“But, let me guess, you mostly wake up with other people?”

Abraham’s laugh knocks around his chest. “Maybe before. I miss before. Before, people were good. People were like doors.”

“Doors?”

“Solid. Inviting. Doors open, and you walk in.”

“You wanted women you could walk into?” Nora raises an eyebrow, knocking his forehead with hers.

“It’s a metaphor, and no.” He places a kiss on her bottom lip. “What I want is not to want things.”






The desert is ardent. That’s his mother’s word: ardent. Jax would never use a word like that himself. But with his hands on his hips and the heat of the sun already blistering the skin on his shoulders, that’s what he thinks of. The heat out here is beyond natural, beyond elemental. It’s devoted, enthusiastic, radiating. If he doesn’t cover up soon, he’ll have blisters the size of silver dollars peppering his back, but he has the hardest time feeling anything but respect for heat. He might even love it after sixty years of living in it.

He breathes in the thickness of the air. There’s a dust storm coming. He can smell it. The sky is still wide and open and blue, but he knows the weather patterns here. He’s about to tell Colleen that they’d be wise to stock some reserves in the trailer for overnight when Abraham throws open the door and barrels out. The steps sag under his weight.

Colleen’s entire body jumps in her chair.

Two white arms wrap around Abraham’s stomach, and Nora props her chin on his shoulder, her head poking up behind him like a cherubic marionette.

Abraham doesn’t see it, but Jax notices the way Colleen’s mouth tightens into a steel line.