Excerpt: But I Like White Wine

1. He is like direction

This is him, my boy.

He has legs round and firm as rubber balls, with monkey toes, long, grasping, narrow. He has little frog fingers that are skinny, the knuckles pressed together in strange places, and when I call him my frog-fingered boy he puts them to his face and covers his eyes. The pads of his fingers are thick and white, like silver coins. He makes me pulverized and strange.

He stands in our kitchen washing the dishes with his belly pushed out against the sink. He scuffs his feet, turns his toes pigeon-angled in. I come up behind him as he washes, and run my fingertips from the hard knobs of his collarbone to the backs of his thin hands. I do it to see the goose-bumps. I put my arms around his waist and press my face into his back, my feet flat and strong and bare on the tile floor.

He has, like a pufferfish, found a crack and puffed himself up to fit my life. He is wrapped around my lazy days with all the grace and wriggling charm of an octopus. He has the sleek softness of little harbor seals and the dry tenacity of a pit bull puppy dog.

He has a big hooked nose like a mountain, like his father. It is a family nose.

He has skin like vanilla ice cream. I tell him this over and over, while I tongue my way down the dinner rolls of his ribs, the mound of his ass where it swells from his legs. He has chili pepper lips and hair and ears and secret places. I like to split him in two with my tongue.

My boy is like direction, my east, my sunrise, my north, my compass. He has the push and pull of magnetic insistence.

This is me.

I have a body like circles with a bird’s neck. I swing low when I walk. I walk like a boy, sit like a boy, cock my head and wear my hair like a boy. I like things that cling, cotton that sticks to my curving trajectories.

I leave trinkets in my wake, books, drawing pencils, a sock, a bit of yarn, a leather coin purse, a pearl earring, a knife. I put them down and he cleans them up, and then I come back and can’t find them again.

I think in layers and he thinks in lines. I speak with subtext and he speaks without. I feel things hard and short, he feels things hard and long. I float and he swings.

Some nights, when it is hard to focus, I open the window to the fire escape. I sit on the bed and thread temporary needles through the skin of my arm. I know how to do it so it won’t leave marks; I have practiced many times, on many people. Sometimes when I have a job the next day, or the day after that, I will be careful. Other times I pull the needles out hard and at a slant, so they make double bruises like twin purple grapes. I like them. They make me laugh. I like to leave marks to show where I’ve been.

I was in a plane crash when I was five. I tell people this, and I tell them I remember the bumps, metal, the green sparks. But I don’t know if I do remember those things, or if I painted them into the gaps later on. This is what I do; I tell lies like they’re true. I don’t know which of my stories are real any more.

This is me. And this is him. This story is about the things he does to me, and the things I do to him.