|
|
 |
It was a terrible word choice and they both knew it. The young woman pitied him now. She was outside her body, participating in the scene, but not in the first person. She wasn't really there, except that there was a speck of something in her eye. A fleck of dust. She tugged at her eyelid.
He tucked away his penis. It had gone soft.
On the way back she held her elbows. She studied his back, in front of her. How many students had he brought into these woods?
— What kind of animal would you be? she asked, a little meanly. — A wolf?
— An eagle, he spat.
Yes, she thought. An eagle. That is the kind of vision you need to be a writer. It occurred to her that she had walked into some sort of story about the writer's fear of getting old.
He steered her to a yellow cottage, one in a row of quaint yellow cottages. Two aspiring writers swung in a hammock, drinking bourbon from the bottle and examining the porch slats with great attention, as if to make sure they were straight.
— Do you know how ridiculous you look? the writer asked them.
— Come see, they slurred. — The spiders are being born!
The sun's last light played off a cobweb insinuated in the porch railing. Spider
He rose to stand between the V of her legs and pulled out his erection for the second time. It couldn't be ignored. |
hatchlings glinted on the strands of the web, each of them tiny and translucent, with all eight legs perfectly formed. The young woman lowered her face in front of the web. It formed a lace curtain between her and the world she used to inhabit. Something had shifted. Someone on the other side would judge what she had done in the woods as bad. She could smell her own musky odor. It did not please or displease her. She noticed it, was all.
— Come, said the writer, pulling her to his room on the first floor.
One of the aspiring writers pronounced the word slut under her breath, but with perfect diction.
The writer carried the young woman over the threshold like a bride. — I'm not finished with you.
His bed was badly made. The untucked sheet hung at a diagonal beneath the light blue blanket. A cardigan hung limp on one of the bedposts. She noticed the geometry of little rosebuds on the wallpaper. She noticed the writer's reading glasses on the bedside table next to a half eaten roll of antacid tablets, and that the window shade was not completely drawn.
A writer might easily spy him kissing her. She sensed he liked this and she wondered if she liked it too. Here was her chance to excuse herself from the seduction and simply leave. She could have said no. Instead she imagined the picture the two of them made on the other side of the window frame. Better to be a slut than to be boring, she thought. Better to be honest than to lie.
— Why did you choose me? she asked, re-braiding her hair.
— Because I like the way you see, he answered.
— And because you like the way I look.
— Yes.
— Because I'm black.
He traced her eyebrows with his thumbs. — Maybe, he admitted.
She put her palm on his chest. — Because I'm black.
The writer fingered her full lips. — Yes, he whispered.
— Am I really a good writer? she asked.
— You really are.
She lay down on the bed then, lifted her dress and told him to kiss her.
He noticed her musky odor. She smelled like the mason jar of filthy pennies he'd kept beneath his bed as a boy in Duluth, he thought. He catalogued this sentence in his mind as he kissed her inner thighs.
She closed her eyes and saw the spider. It was imprinted in her memory because of the thing she had done in the woods with the writer, and because of what she was about to do. The young woman would remember the spider's swollen abdomen, the way she hung face downward in the complicated architecture of her web, and the bands, like a tigers' stripes, on her elegant legs.
The dinner bell clanged outside the dining room at the Bread Loaf Inn.
She put her hand in the writer's thinning hair. — What kind of spider was that? she asked. — Out on the porch?
He looked up at her and said, — An orb weaver.
Then he rose to stand between the V of her legs and pulled out his erection for the second time. It couldn't be ignored. Just as a gun on the stage of a play must go off before the curtain closes, the woman knew she must put him in her mouth and satisfy his need to be adored. This need was not any more pitiful or less human than her own. She sighed and got on the floor.
The woman watched her reflection sucking the writer in the cloudy mirror above the antique dresser, his hands circling the stem of her neck. This is a story about an orb weaver, she thought. I am going to be a great writer.
— Do you want me to come, baby? he asked. He had heard that somewhere, he had said it before. He liked to say it. It worked for him.
She nodded, working her tongue over the short shaft of his cock.
He closed his eyes. — Do you want to drink my cum? he asked. He pushed against her soft palette, her molars, her uvula.
To stop herself from choking, she spoke to herself in the second person:
Writer! Don't let the 'I' get in the way of your seeing. Your task is only this: open your eyes until you forget you have a throat. You are not you. You are an eagle writing the wind. What do you see? Down by the creek, the fox is washing his face. Out in the field of wasting hay the pit of the peach you ate is already reentering the earth. Who you were when you ate the peach doesn't matter. What you are doing doesn't matter, whether you want to or not, whether you kissed him or he kissed you, whether or not it is happening at all.
Far more enchanting is the orb weaver, poised like a diadem in the eye of her web, letting her spiderlings balloon away from her on strands of silk to land in the dark vegetation of Frost's woods.
n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
 |
Emily Raboteau is the author of the novel, The Professor's Daughter. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Tin House, Callaloo, StoryQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award and a Literature Fellowship from the NEA. She is currently at work on her second novel, tentatively titled The Mantra of the Dove. |
©2007 Emily Raboteau and Nerve.com
|
|
|
|
