Just to whet your appetite, a few tastes of the kinds of things you’ll find in the pages of my indie side project out this fall, Inappropriate Crush…
Her hands cannot decide where to roost. They move from her lap to the black plastic arms of her office chair and back. He smiles at this, and because she cannot see him do it.
When his thumbnail grazes her skin as he gathers up her hair, she sucks air through clenched teeth. He sticks his fingers in it like a comb, and twists so that her chin tips back, her neck lengthens, arches, tender and straining. Her closed eyelids tremble and he listens, pleased, to the catch in her breathing when his beard brushes her throat.
The humid trail of breath evaporates from her jaw, her ear. Her hands have come to rest on her thighs, palms up as if praying. She is licking her lips when he pulls the chair back and spins it around, hard and fast, stopping it with his knee against her thigh. Her chuckle is low and soft and stops short when he looks her in the eye and shakes his head no. One knee to either side of hers now, he pulls the chair-back closer, until all she can see is the white of his shirt.
* * *
Perpetual motion was impossible. No machine could keep on going forever, without any of its parts wearing out. These were things she knew to be true, truths so self-evident that even the poor myopic boys in the white lab coats had eventually figured them out. These truths, however, presumed that all conditions were normal. Which generally and most of the time they were, but specifically and once in a great while they were not.
A miracle was what people usually called that. Mary had never liked the term. It implied something grand, something unequivocally wondrous, something to be prayed for, hoped for, rejoiced over for days, months, centuries. Miracles were never like the monkey’s paw, or poor Midas’ daughter. People didn’t think of those as miracles, just stories with punchlines en suite, opportunities to utter phrases like “be careful what you wish for” and indulge in a little holier-than-thou finger-waggling. The lack of logic disheartened her. A miracle was as much a miracle when it gave you something you didn’t want as it was when it gave you something you did. People always complained about how few miracles there were, but really it wasn’t that they were so rare as all that. People just refused to count the ones they didn’t like.
* * *
At some point in the probably not distant future, longtime degenerative kidney disease will cash in its chips, settling for once and all the bet on how long my mother’s kidney transplant will manage to hold out. When it does, I will be prepared. Yes, my mother will “pass over,” to be sure, she will, as she sometimes puts it, “go back where she came from.” But she is leaving me her forwarding address.
As inheritances go, I suppose that my mother’s estate is typical, modest, unassuming, certainly nothing to provoke envy. Nor will anyone have reason remark that she was stingy. Commentary about the way some folks contrive to make a point from beyond the grave, however, is probably inevitable. As my mother’s eldest child, and the one who can be trusted not to be disrespectful of her, er, proclivities—at least not where she can hear it—I stand to inherit half a lifetime’s accumulation of things intended to facilitate communication with the dead.
* * *
I put on fresh lipstick and left it as a kiss on her cheek. Her hands were narrow and strong and hungry on my shoulders and her lips stayed slightly parted. In the panes of her eyeglasses I could see a halo burning past my ears, winter-white and glistening.
Her eyes closed when I reached to brush the cowlick out of her eyes, a small maternal gesture, half blessing and half reprimand. The facets of the glass doorknob were under my palm by the time she opened them.
Can I call you sometime?
I turned halfway at the top of the stairs, then walked into the night, draped in a secondhand robe of stars.
Inappropriate Crush will be available in a signed, numbered run of 75 copies by pre-order only. Copies are going fast. Here’s how to get yours.
