The woman squeezed Barbra’s arm and went back upstairs. I took Barbra’s full weight. She walked wide-legged, like a horse.
I felt helpless. We hobbled. Barbra could not see straight.
Then, halfway down the steps to the subway station, Barbra stopped and crouched.
‘We can’t stay here,’ I said.
People stared and tried to manoeuvre around us. Barbra was shaking now, in a crouch, in a terrible sweat.
‘We have to go either up or down.’
Barbra put her head on her knees. From halfway underground, I tried to field all the people. ‘Give her space. Give space!’
Barbra kept shivering. I noticed the bleeding patch
again.
‘I’m calling my father.’
‘No!’ Barbra moaned. But she still didn’t move.
I kept waiting and suggesting every few minutes that we move. This went on in the stairway for over an hour.
Finally, I called my dad at the hospital. I heard myself yelling at him in an echoing chamber.
‘I don’t want to be sent back,’ Barbra cried one step above me.
She gripped my hand. I gripped back. ‘That won’t happen, I promise. He would never do that!’
Barbra was rocking back and forth. Wet hair. Sweat beads. Vaginal pain. I thought of the way that she sheltered the flame.
It took me and my father and a stranger behind us to eventually scale the stairway back out to the street.
We took her to the car, damaged and knock-kneed. She kept crying, ‘That hurts, it hurts, stop it, please.’
My mother was gone. Now it was my job. I wanted to shelter her endlessly.
§
Time didn’t move in the family room. Barbra passed Ariane the squat, man-faced pipe head.
‘I wanna know what he’s told you about me,’ she said.
‘Um, he said you were pivotal.’ Ariane took a drag and passed the pipe back to Barbra. ‘That you initiated him into the mysteries of perversity… And that that’s why he loves being with women of colour.’
Barbra and Ariane suddenly exploded into laughter. Nostril smoke zigzagged like fireworks around them.
I thought, why do humans have to inexorably fuck? Why do they fuck with each other? They should just stop.
I knew I was anxious. Bornstein would’ve called it a fresh bout. I started deep breathing to help myself think. Barbra had her hand stuck to Ariane’s flank. Breathing didn’t work. How’d she know she liked that? I got more fucked up. I got very hard.
Do girls fuck other girls to bring buds to the trees?
I glanced at the shyster on a failed inhale. The shyster fucking creep-smiled at me. I heard sacrificial sounds. Sugarman had excised me. My neck pulsed in faint little pings on repeat. I refocused my dream. I excised this creep. I wanted Barbra to manoeuvre herself over me. I exhaled. Saliva in drops down my throat. Ariane’s head tilted back on the edge of the couch. Her throat was all stretched out, serpentine. I shifted forward on my feet. She was submissive, unhinged. Double vision was addictive. Barbra’s tongue was a barb. I felt cum in my balls. Snow fell. My sweat pooled. Barbra and Ariane tongue-kissing, tongue-fucking. I felt like a blob in the audience, spreading. Security men yanked me from Sugarman’s lair. I squatted down. My dick was a rubber plant stem. Their stretched-open lips were one circle of fire. I had all this cum in me. Boiling, uprising. I knew Ariane’s moans on repeat, on repeat.
Saliva was the juice of kissing. Saliva on waves slapping boats back and forth.
§