Lust

Natalie Parker-Lawrence

he must be looking at the person behind you, the visceral tension from across the room, the smoldering look you think you see but you look away again and again.  you peer back with a wincing smile, looking behind you as if he has made some heinous mistake.  you understand the word smolder for the first time. people mill around and talk about nothing.  you notice a scarlet wet rise of temperature in the god-forgotten room and feel the fingers of heat grabbing, despite his being a republican, despite his sansabelt pants, despite his being fifteen years older, despite his being a geometry teacher, despite his love of country music.  despite his not being the high school boyfriend. his eyes, those bluer-than-black-ice eyes, make you drip and take chance after chance after breakfast in their bed, before and after school, after ice cream, after he fixes your car, after work at night in parks and in parking lots, making you forget every rosary bead, every homily, every religion class, every catholic school.  screaming to the stars in his gold chevrolet pickup, you maneuver the metal ribs on the floor of the flat bed, sticking in your back, bruising your muscles, teaching you to look up at myriad stars while thousands, maybe millions of mosquitoes dive in and out and eat you alive.  you wondering but not caring about malaria.  you wondering but not caring about the levels of pain you will endure since that first time on the cold formica of the kitchen counter.  you wondering but not caring about the flames of danteworld in circle two, licking every part of you on fiery ice in circle nine. you wondering but not caring that the maid next door, the one with three fingers who could still hold and peel a potato, watches through the kitchen window.  i take a shower while he lumbers off to paint the outside walls of my small white house while our spouses, the sullen haint from mississippi and the dull saint from london, speed toward us, closer and closing in. I get a maid out of that deal.