H.E. Riddleton, "Women as Furniture"

Inside the tent resides a space apart from the world and incubated as a womb, whole with Lala wrapped up in her red and purple cocoon of insulated blankets, titillated in process of accidental reshaping. Outside, I had sat on a log, annoyed by the hardness of things. I had always governed myself in the world of soft things: women, couches. Two couches sit now in the back of my 1991 Dodge Ram that has always been reliable. I knew that despite my love for softness, it was the hard things that would persist. Men would continue with their beer and their brass and their unafflicted guilt despite my intrusion and my escape, all rubbing some poor girl in the bed of their truck, not unlike my own, pounding her with their irretractable hardness. Outside, littered across the earth that men label as woman, there are unopened beer cans, stains of grease from fast food and uncleaned engines. I too, like a man, picked myself up from that log and tossed the unemptied can into the bed of the truck, and, unlike a man, passed my Lavender Menace bumper sticker, bumpy with the rust and the wet. Somehow, that Ram has survived the sharp climb away from Seattle for seven years on our annual camping trips. Plowed right through the wall of pause and continuity and chugged its lighter fluid on. Inside, I undress and wrap myself in several of the quilts we had brought with us and try to shut my eyes, but Lala nudges me; she is sighing and whining and calling out, unable to find me. I wonder if she is looking for me as she thrashes off the blankets. Then if she is looking for anything at all or simply all of nothing. Nothing too can be searched for and how often in my life I have surveyed for it. 

Outside, I had leaned against the back of my truck, breathing in the night. I had watched the stars, witnessed Cetus drown invisible into that dark blue. Andromeda is safe now, I thought to myself. And then I recalled, as I ground the tip of my big toe into the surrounding ash of the dead fire, watching sparks turn from lit dust into dirt, how my biggest childhood fascination was with Greek monsters that tried to kill women. There would be nights where I would run from my brother’s room, too ashamed to call for my mother to massage my back or acknowledge the scars on my wrist where shoelaces tied more than my feet down and a substance other than mud pies soiled my thigh—the promise of a fairy house had been denied. When I was nine, magic was more real behind a locked door in a lonely room, with a blanket over my head and a flashlight in my hand like my own wand, far surpassing that of my brother’s—resisting conflation is necessary to reclaim memory— and all the monsters imprisoned in a book on my lap. In these books, I would become every Lady’s rescuer. I turned toward the tent where my damsel in distress attempts sleep. Andromeda is safe now in the village. Andromeda is safe now, but maybe better without me.

Inside the tent with its flimsy walls so ready to cave in, Lala turns away from me, despite her tossing, and into the canvas barriers as if somehow, they offered more security for her than I did. I promised her this time would be different; this time, there would be more than just sticks and stones in the fire. 

                                                                                                    ***

A month ago, a lunar month, a whole belly cycling out menstruation, we had gone to Zora’s Furniture Shop to buy a new couch. It took quite a while with Lala, drunken and beautiful as some maiden poisoned by centaurs, lollygagging around the furniture, fainting on fainting couches, straddling unarmed chairs, trying to convince me to fuck her on a purple couch, to open up the cushions and slip right in, right in front of everyone. 

Lala bounced and bubbled up like some shriveling curtain captured by the wind, only to flutter down, fuzzy and dull, as if she were what she simply was in all the pretexts of her polarities, something I did not have the strength to name yet. As she danced away, in front of me, gliding unguided, I stiffened, folding inwards by the pressure of all my extensions, so used to reaching towards her, now pulling away, and crossed them over my already bound chest. 

“How do you feel about blue?” Lala smiled with her eyes half closed, her palm combing the back of a plaid orange recliner. That is one way to get her legs up, I thought and then I crushed the thought. “Or does it make you think of penises?”

Everything makes me think of penises. You cannot escape them. Everything makes me want to think of its opposite, to pray for its opposite to somehow take over, to make the world woman, not nominally, but actually. Stick not a flag in it, but create more water ways, rupture dams, allow the floodgates to open. All sail towards Planet Clitoris. I did not tell her this though, at least not exactly. “It makes me think of oceans.”

Her red hair suffered their surfaces. She spoke, fire fixing water. “It reminds me… that I am drowning”. Lala squatted down, her back bending as she formed an arch—one could just walk right through if they wanted to—her legs parted, letting light in and out, only to have her knees knock back together as she examined the concealed stumps that supported the body of a blue sofa. “Let’s get legs. Let’s break them. Let’s prove that something is still standing.”

The blue corduroy crumbled over the dissembled stilts in short frayed tufts, almost like lace. I watched it, thought about the monster under my bed when I was a girl and then when I was a woman, then whatever I am now, and closed my eyes. I pulled at the mummification under my shirt, tugged at it. It is something that I do when things come back up, when I cannot deny breasts anymore, neither forget them nor forgive them. How do I even explain aloud this habit of mine, this need to violently undress, to acknowledge my nakedness, tell myself beneath the cloak that the body is real? It is easy. I simply don’t. “I agree, Lala. Legless couches are hiding something. Legs show that there is nothing underneath.”

She massaged the metal ball brewing mercury up from a nearby fainting couch and moved closer. “Do you think it should be Victorian? We could bring our vibrators to cure our hysteria! This is, after all, why the vibrator was invented.” She may have been screaming or whispering—sometimes, it is hard to tell which is which—nonetheless, her projection was extreme enough to warrant male stares from all across the furniture store. 

I have learned that men do not like radical reactions in women. We must be Goldilocks, searching for the “just right”. I learned this in and out of the Center where I work, utilizing my B.A. in psychology that took me eight years to get. The Seattle Rape Crisis Center to be specific where they were diagnosing woman after woman by male doctor after male doctor, by male inside female doctor after male inside female doctor, with Borderline Personality Disorder. Left and right. North and south. Too many partial selves, lined and bordered off, from wholeness. What is wholeness? I have never experienced it myself. Luckily though, I was never diagnosed with BPD. Once you cross that border, there is no going back. There is no more being taken seriously. Only brokenness after brokenness after brokenness. “I will cure you if you cure me.”

There was a moan in the air, a hanging apple, coming from the fig of Lala’s intoxicated mouth. She had never had an affinity for alcohol, but her breath smelt awfully like vodka. Perhaps, there is something in me that produces a drunk in my partners. 

Lala’s hand tightened on the painted brass of the immovable ball. “I want it to be like our red couch. The good one. The old one. The ruined one. What if red was soft? What if it did not mean blood? Would you like red again then? Would I like it? Red arousal. Red duality. Red lips.” Lala released her grip on the metal ball. “Daph, what if you could not make your lips part? What if they parted for you, against you?” She fiddled with the spotty Velcro togetherness at the back of another couch until it was fingers clawing at a wall, then a mouth smacking tobacco, and finally the itch of a face held under a hairy chest. Her eyes were wide and blue and watering, but I was drowning in another big blue. A head underwater hears none above. “…Can you ever speak again if lips move without you moving them?”

“Lilah…” I felt a heaviness in my breathing and tried my best, gravitating against gravel, to avoid the urge to rip off my clothes, unbind my chest, and show the earth what I have been hiding. I did not do this though. Instead, I glanced at the ground, examined the error in the cracks on the concrete that were meant to construct an unfinished appearance. Just like me, perpetually unfinished and unwinding, until I was kicked, forced to curve, drowning not in Lala land, but somewhere else. Always somewhere else. 

There is the dark shell of a swollen eye. There is the slit of light where all you see is a hovering shadow, the shadow named Lowry, waiting for you to get up, waiting for you to speak again.  But you cannot speak because your lip is slit and if you open your mouth, all you will taste is blood. Not natural blood. Not the holy woman’s arrival into ritual. No, this is the unnatural blood made by man, by cutting open women. And yet, there is always a way to cut deeper. Always a further slicing of already split or silenced beings.

There is the distorted shout that fuzzes, speaks over your own distortions. “You think you can think. You think you can look at me like that! Through the glass. The fucking glass. Fucking glass everywhere. You can’t even hold a freakin glass.” 

Measure out your syllables. Be weary of your hands. Assuage the baby to assure it does not cry during Sunday Night Football. Mighty is the weight of unknown reaction, the stunned echo always ushering, in the background, all future. How do you respond when all possible response is wrong? There is no good or bad anymore. We have gotten rid of the binary. There is no good. Good also means bad. 

Then, the wail that is most unwelcome comes from the other room, the ocean dweller across the hall. A baby named Patty. The shadow moves towards it, away from you. There is the maternal urge to reach across the bruise of blindness, across the valley where the eyelids sag, and crawl through. There is an intermission of pursuit as the shadow kicks you after you flail forward following passage. Once for interference. Twice to chastise. And yet you latch on, cling and claw at the appendage closest, the one that moves the whole misshapen being ahead. 

Then, there is the knife and the undead shadow and the penetrated becoming the penetrator, carrying the baby from crib to street to river and all across Lake Michigan, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. There is the hope that you are safe. There is the knowledge that you are not. There is the coming back, slowly and away, grounding your softness into the hardness of the floor, into the softness of a couch, into the memory of being woman loving women bearing the scars of being loved by a man. 

I came back somehow and still somewhat existed away. Lala and I settled at a purple sofa, me staggering as the drunk one now, in an abandoned part of the furniture store. Our hands slipped together and then apart. No, no. I tried to explain to her that it is not her, that I simply have to go, that I have to run, that something is coming out of me, a new chunk of birth. I ran past men, past couches and gas ovens and the implied Nembutal. The most prescribed drug at the Center. Broken women forget how to sleep. I nudged open the door of the bathroom with a figure in a dress, praying that Lilah did not wander off, be taken, distorted and reframed on a pedestal in the Center. We cycled in and out, in and out. There was only turning and regurgitating. I kneeled before the open chalice, the porcelain toilet, and wondered if they make couches with such a texture or if they only make eligible softness. As the world, my baby and my lover and my husband, tunneled out of me, pulling dirt and dirtiness from my esophagus, I touched the coolness of the rock taking my sewage. I was perfectly blind. Two black eyes freed from or trapped in infinity. I do not turn on the light when I use the bathroom. This is consistent with my continued behavior. When sitting on the toilet—finding that my body conforms to objects without the need for absolute notice—I imagine that I am offering a gift, a love-gift, to Eros, to Lala, my blindfolded depravity oozing into the unconscious. The bigger the shit, the bigger my presence, the greater the largeness I have to offer. Annoyingly Freudian, but I am always trying to prove myself without myself—what can be made rather than what can be seen. I prefer the lights off, even during sex. This was, however, neither shit or sex; this was the whole world coming out of me, all because of that red couch, that couch that split comfort in two, burying us in between the cushions, in muck and semen. I stood up, grounded my body in unseen water and looked forward, seeing neither shadow nor an unknowable self. I have also always resented mirrors. If it was up to me, I would have every single one of them covered, a veil vindicating the victim, sheets reducing reflection. I would have them hidden as if I were already dead. There is danger in capturing the face of grieving. It is the preservation of a ghost. 

I left the dark room behind, and traversed back out into the furniture store. The lights hurt my body, flickering like lasers as if they too were trying to plow through me. The exposed pipes on the wall symbolized an unwanted nakedness. Phallic sentries guarding the feminine couches. And all the salespeople were men, trying to persuade women. Coerce them. Leave your eggs open, darling, just lean back, yes, put your legs up and up and up. This one is nice, isn’t it? A state of the art Laz E Boy that will make him want to lay all over you. Now hatch, I mean, buy. 

I turned my head, oscillating below the disorganizing fluorescence, and found the purple couch. Flowers bustled out beneath the fabric and there was no red hair stroking the back of it. Lala was gone. I turned around and around until I see an orange wave like—there is a necessary bacteria in the ocean that makes orange waves, what is it? Dinoflagellates, yes, like dinoflagellates—circling to meet me and hands covering my shoulders, guiding me over the linoleum, browning like nipples—Nipples are shades of purple, Lala would say in her usual way of discussing colors, always looking for a way to bring the canvas into conversation, They go beyond the skin—this, I believe, makes them purple. Purple with white. Purple with brown. Purple with—

Lala planted me on the purple couch. I watched the impossible pattern of her pupils, of this cycle of unprovoked dilation and then constriction, the vagina giving birth and then refusing entry, again and again. Once I settled, she slumped forward, her head hanging down, her usual bun falling out, until, for a moment, I did not recognize my partner of nine years. I placed my hand on Lala’s back, my fingers dancing up and down, remembering the repertoire of rubbing and being rubbed. I recalled the first time Lala rubbed my back—the first night we spent together—and how we both cried with the knowledge that touch could not erase the bruises that had aligned my back and thighs. I remembered how this was also the first time I allowed my fingers to be actors dancing through another’s body, dancing to remember and to forget. I ignored the bearded man looking slightly around the corner. I was used to men watching us by now.

“I, um, am not sure how we learn to speak again.” I say, speaking into the ground, wanting to ground up the linoleum, dig until there is dirt cutting into my cuticles. Rupture. Rupture. Something solid, please rupture, was all I asked. Something hard to become soft. Proof that we are not the only ones so ready to erupt. My hand that was not roving her back mused through the short mousiness of my hair. My trimmed nails dug slightly into my scalp, pulling up daisies and dead skin and hair follicles. Roots. I needed to ground myself somewhere. “But you will, Lala, you will. Just maybe not in the same way”. 

Lala seized her head upwards without warning or caution, like some girlish groundhog disturbed by footsteps above the ground, and spoke in an explicative burst. “What about green? No. No. Green is too distant from the inside. It is coverup. It is nature. Denial of our willing removal from it. Trying to bring the trees in as we cut them further out.”

I imagined the trees leaning in and in, forming a canopy, bending in the way men cannot. A sanctuary. A temple. I launched myself from the purple seat, kneeling in front of Lala’s clenched knees. The bearded man with the cerulean vest continued to watch us. “Would you like to go camping in May, while you have a mini semester off at Green River? We can do that. We can plan right now. I will ask off from the Center and everything. Will that make things better. We can go early. Instead of in August. You can paint in the woods. You can paint me. Remember when you used to paint me? You, of course, can paint yourself. You obviously do not need my permission to do this. You may paint or not paint. Whatever you like.” 

“I like camping.” Lala’s polished fingernails, long and pig-pink rooted into her arm or my arm. Sometimes, it is difficult to distinguish. “Did you know I was a girl scout? Can’t you picture it? I already know how to start a fire.”

“Yes, I remember you telling me you were a girl scout on our fifth date… how you saw the beaver hanging from a tree and then you saved it and it bit your, um, camp counsellor.” I straightened my body and then felt my spine bend inwards, wanting so desperately to rid the world of red, to swaddle and hunch and curl as some obdurate orb around Lala, preserving her land of orange hair and purple paints. “The camp counsellor who bit you.”

“Please do not use euphemisms. I am tired of all this retouching.” She jammed her fingers into the space between the protruding pillows that kept us so far from the floor. And then again, jabbing, in and out, a thrusting motion that a man may look unto as sexual inuendo or even invitation, but any woman who has been loved by another woman knows otherwise. This was not fingering. This was stabbing.

“The man who raped you.” I said. 

She ceased her stabbing of the crease, looked up, pale as a spider web, waiting for something to fly through the air, waiting for the object of hunger to be trapped—Ariadne performing her weaving, not knowing that her body would be taken from her and changed because of what she could do. “And the beaver who avenged me.” 

The bearded man finally approached us, his hair distilling out, hiding his lips like puberty. We were far safer in our secrets as he asked us if we had chosen a couch. 

“Yes…” I looked straight into him, or slightly off, shocking the bridge of his nose. “It would be easier to go with the green.”

                                                                                                           ***

Inside the tent, in her sleep, Lala kicks off first the blue and then the yellow Ogee quilt we had bought during a trip to Maine six years ago, a trip we brought Patty on who got her own Ogee quilt. Lala fell in love with the Ogee pattern immediately—an amusement she kept touching in the sensational shock of watching my eyes as she played with the pattern that resembled a bit too deeply the vaginal opening. Lala knew she was a sapphic woman far before I did. In fact, she has never had consensual sex with any man. A pearl, she described herself, a pearl waiting for her perfect clam. 

Two weeks ago, she had cut her orange hair, shaved it to resemble a fairy painting she had made with watercolors. A true pixie cut, she told me. It cut and cornered at the curve behind her ear and then spit out slightly, not quite passing the eye. She had said it was because her bun would not quit dislodging, that her hair would keep falling into her face and remind her too much of red. Orange is invented, you know, she told me, named after the fruit and not the other way around. Orange is just a subtler version of red. 

I reach over towards her, trying to tuck Lala back in, conserve a sense of safety and warmth under the covers and wonder if there are still things that can be covered, that can be kept safe. I consider turning on the car, putting on the radio, and allowing some Stevie Nicks Bella Donna to pour in, to send Lala into a more peaceful sleep. I am about to get up, grabbing the lantern and flicking it on, when a small hand with bitten nails reaches for me. 

“Daph, please. It is dark and it is night and I am trying to sleep and I am scared. Don’t go and I won’t go.”

I lean my body back, lurching to one side to face Lala. The lantern still on, I see Lala’s green-blue eyes stare back, leaves folding against leaves and then drowning a city of blue couches. Those eyes resisted rest, refusing to remain still with pupils that undulate in expansion and shrinkage, never certain of what they were seeing, which medium they were gazing through, for everything, she said, contains simultaneously, both light and darkness, the shadow beside the illumination. Her eyes recognized this and adjusted or failed to adjust. There are now circles underneath those eyes that appear like bruises. I reach under the covers, feel the interior of my thigh, realizing that my own bruises faded in appearance long ago. I look to Lala, to the bruises that have not.

“Lala-“

“Daph-“

We both attempt to speak at the same time. I kiss my partner’s forehead, covered by a pink knit cap, congealing her shortened redness, urging her to go first. Our blankets blend together, the paisley turning into checkerboards. The Ogee quilt is now shared at both of our feet. I ask her to speak first. 

“I remember the night with the bruises. I have never forgotten that night.”

“I have not forgotten any of the nights with you”. And I have not. I have not forgotten a single one. All of the nights with him, with Lowry, I banished to a forgotten land. Suppression is redemption, I tell every therapist who tries to tell me otherwise. But those nights with him are more recent now. They have invaded us, stolen our nights. He is a master at smashing open entrances.

I want to move closer to her, noting as her breasts open themselves, like petals, at the top of her tank top, imagining the second skin of closeness peeling off into the primary. Everything is a pattern, an infinite layer of lips. I dare. I reach. I touch her naked shoulder and, after a moment of processing, she gasps, tenses, then relaxes. I move my hand back to my side of the covers, beneath the plaid. The Ogee quilt still at our feet. 

“I am sorry. I am, um, just having trouble with touch when I am sober. I don’t want to have trouble with touch. I miss your body. I know you miss mine.”

“Lilah, you don’t need to explain this.”

“I do. I hate that couch so much. I hate what it did to us. Why did I sleep there that night?”

“You couldn’t sleep, so you took a Nembutal and watched Charmed. You could not have known. I did not know, that, that, Lowry would come back, come back and try to take you from me. And he did. I should have known. I should have protected you.” For a moment, I wish the blankets would function as bricks, that they would collapse my insides, that they would punish me.

“He would have found a way eventually, wouldn’t he? Me there, red and ripe. He is a stealer of red. God, he is a caper with hands that take and take. But it is more than taking, isn’t it? Tell me how it is more. Do not just tiptoe around me. It is sometimes worse than… than… what he did. Please, just tell me that something happened to me.”
I want to cover the wounds up, cleanse them with water, pretend that lips never parted, that all of us were born with holes sewn shut, that there is no such thing as brokenness, but she is looking, keening, and looking for truth, for the power of statement, for proof, and so I speak, uncertain if it is a whisper or a scream. He opened you up. Beat you. Fucked you without you. I tell her. I do not care if there are any wolfmen watching. I don’t care if any men hear. He came in and saw you and saw our pictures and knew. He knew we belonged to each other and there was no way that he could have me, have Patty again, after so many years, after so much love between us, and so he did what all colonizers do when they know that true ownership is not possible. He raped you and raped you. All while I was overnight at the Center, taking care of other women who were having nightmares because of men like him, taking care of other women when I should have been taking care of you. Protecting you from a man I was naïve enough to marry and stupid enough to think that one stab would kill him. And on that red couch, stained, made demonic by things outside of it, by applied associations of circumstance, there you were sedated by your own sleeplessness; there was him shoving more down your throat, quieting you, silencing you, knowing that verbal silence is not enough, knowing that I would blame myself, that he was hurting me. You became an object again, a thing like you were at girl scout camp. Just a device for war. A war I knew I would never get away from. A war you were never supposed to be a part of. And he ripped you open too, just like he ripped me, just like he ripped me to make Patty, just like he ripped me to rape you. Rip. Rip. Rip. 

“Like Jack the Ripper. Like all men”. She rips off the knit cap, her hair now refusing to fall. This time, it is Lala who is reaching, extending her body across the passage of plaid and paisley and everything in between, everything containing lines and curls; she curved away from them, through them, on top of me, her legs parted over the cushion of my sweatpants. Her arms mold around my trembling form, the vulnerability of my unbound chest, my breasts heaving away from flatness.  I grow rigid, immobile, breathless. She looks down at me, her face distorted by either joy or distress, somehow both at the same time, sickened by the trace of that red river spilling from her head, relieved by the purposeful drought. This is my romance. This is what I try to make of her, to make sense of her, to better damn him. I cannot be trusted. Even as she speaks to me, I cannot know if I hear her exactly. “I can’t sleep without thinking I am going to wake up with  him on top of me, inside me. Daph, you know I did not do anything. You know. I know you must know. Just say it. I never left you. I never chose a man.”

I churn bruises into lubrication, and finally action. I reach back, no longer wanting to be relieved from my body, accepting hunger without reciprocal violence. I catch her tears. I would collect them in buckets if I had to. Not letting a single one fall. “I know. I know, Lala, my Lala land, you don’t have to explain, to justify anything. Look, look, he is nothing. He is a ripper, but we can rip too. We have ripped too. And we come back to each other. Look, I have always been yours.” She falls into me, weeping, her chin finding my shoulder and I hug her, massaging her back. “I know you never left me. I know you never chose a man. I know you love me. I should have said this months ago, right after I came home.”

“You are home now. So am I. My beaver.” 

And then we ask each other if the other would like to make love, all beauty and clarity and no pretense. Asking again and again for permission in the journey into entrances, into bodies, letting self decide self and love come after. We ask for seconds or hours with each new touch until we convulse in a symphony of yeses—“Yes”, I say; “Yes”, she returns—until there is no longer a couch. No forest outside the tent. Only two bodies in the world, othered and negated and finally free in the home we have constructed with coverings and the clatter of consent. We submerge our heads under the quilt and then decide to not hide, to live in the air. I undress in the light of the lantern. Our bodies beneath patterns, beneath the adoption of warmth. Quilts acting as memories, as warm burials. Our mouths meet, gnawing in hunger, in memory, in the reclamation of red, of the vulva in flame, of Lilah’s hair, of me unbound. Our hands meet and unmeet, are reintroduced to other parts of the other’s body, soft and vivid and even hard.. The Ogee is on top of us and our noses meet breasts. Breasts turn into teardrops and lips instigate an ocean. Nipples touching nipples absolutely.

Sometime later, we sit up, waking without sleep, to each other, discovering that it is still night. The Ogee quilt sticks to our thighs. The plaid has been pushed into the corners of the tent where the canvas shrinks and expands, the see-saw of pupils and nipples. We unzip the tent. The trees stand around us, Sequoia and Fir guarding our exit. I wonder if any of the trees are Daphne, are my namesake, are me or any other Greek women turned into trees for refusing Hermes, displaced through flowering, through the transport of seeds, into the forest of Washington. Andromeda looks down at us, still free from capture. Constellations create wholeness from pieces. Gestalt does not seem to come as easy for me, but I hope that it will become easier. All points, they say, produce a map and I guide Lala to the place where the fire was and bring the flames back responsibly and ask her if she would like to sit, wait for the show, and she finds a stone with purposes. As I haul out the couches, I tilt my head up once more to the place in the sky where Perseus is missing, where he would have been if we came in August like most years, but this year was different. The luxury of myth was stolen from us, yet, somehow, the plundering had the power to change myth all together. It was good Perseus was not in the sky because now I can tell myself that Medusa is still alive somehow. In this version, it is Medusa, head intact, a woman who is a monster who is a woman, who rescues Andromeda after she petrifies Perseus. In this version, she kills the son of the sea that raped her. In my version, a part of the sky from our position is named after Medusa, beloved and not beheaded, a story told over and over where Medusa wins the heart of Andromeda and together they live happily ever after in Lesbos, free and freed by stone, hardness and softness, two by two, as one. Disembodied and embodied, stronger than I ever was, able to carry the tomb, the body, and the tomb, I set the two couches into the fire pit. “You—we—won’t have to worry about the couch anymore. Either of the couches anymore.”

“Are we going to leave them here?” 

“No. We are going to make them leave this world. Lala, we are the maker of fires.” I grab a gallon of gasoline out of the back of the Ram, ready the couches for forced entrance into fire, douse them in gasoline, and like a knife initiating its rupture again and again, the unlit becomes the lit. Smoke pours up and I imagine us sitting together on an old cliché years from now. A porch swing, the upward transcendence of the couch.  The wood, the cushions, the mix of softness and hardness. Somehow, fire rebels against both.

There is a long pause, a fire cooking between us. Our fingers entering motion, waiting for response, waiting for the shifting of knees, for the ultimate unclench. Tired of waiting. We ask. We consent. We finger each other. Right there. As a hand, raw and red, skin falling over bone pokes out of the red couch, a rotting foot from the green. Men are always packing, so you have to pack them away sometimes. And the knife, where I became him, more than him, the successor of him, letting my breasts hang, as I had bent over a shadowy subject becoming an object, now stuck somewhere in between the two couches. Hardness. Softness. Hardness. 

As embryonic embers fall around us, we dance, we stomp them out, preventing the spread of fire’s seed. And for a moment or an infinity, the smoke folds up, contained and dancing with us and almost wet, away from the earth, away from us, polluting, yet undoing. Our fingers, our entrances still intact. No assembly required.