Words

Words
A SHORT STORY BY MICHAELA CATALANO



"Give me your words," he says. He leans in close and then low, his face to the side of mine, just above my shoulder. "I need to know," he says, and I can feel his breath on my neck.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I say, but I think I do. His hand is under my shirt. It's moving slowly up my stomach. It's warm. All of him is. I try to pull away and feel drywall against my back. For a moment I'm panicked, but just as suddenly I forget what I wanted to run away from.

"Please," he says. "I need to know." His free hand is wrapped around me. I don't know how it got there. The other is stroking my chest, hesitantly, needfully.

"What do you need to know?", I manage to ask, barely. My heart is pounding and it feels as through there is a baseball caught in my throat.

"What you are," he says, and his lips are brushing against my neck and my eyes are shut and I'm swimming in something viscous and right.

---

He is on top of me, and my shirt is off, fluttered to the floor some minutes ago, unneeded. My chest is heaving. His hand is tracing a line down my torso now, fingers trailing ponderously.

"When I was six I fell in the backyard," I say. "I hit my head. I thought I was flying. There were black clouds against a gray sky and no sun or moon and the clouds were whirling past me. They left brown spots on my skin when they passed. Like ashes."

His hand is down by my waist and it should tickle, but it doesn't tickle. He's trembling and kissing my neck.

"When I was ten I dreamed about the Rapture. I ran outside and stood on the lawn and watched my parents and all my neighbors floating up into the sky. Animals, too, and other things, cars, lamp posts. Everything was going to heaven bit by bit. And then finally it was over and I realized I was still on the ground."

His hand is somewhere different now. He is moving. My breathing is dizzy and short but I don't stop talking.

"I ran everywhere and jumped up and tried to float away but I couldn't. And then finally I came back to my yard with the huge green tree. The tree should have been in the back yard but in my dream it was in the front yard. Jesus was sitting in the tree, looking up at the sky and swinging his legs. I climbed up the tree and reached out to him, and he kicked me down."

His whole body is pressed against mine and somehow my jeans are gone and he's blazing hot, glowing red like a poker just drawn from the fireplace, and ice is melting everywhere and snow falls from the mountaintops with an echoing roar.

"When I was twelve my dad... I was at the beach and I got caught in a rip tide. It pulled me under and the water was pitch black. I didn't know which way was up. But I knew my dad was there and I reached out and thrashed and tried to find him and I grabbed hold of his leg and he shook me loose. And later when I asked him he didn't believe it happened. He said a fish must have bumped into him."

And there's something shining in me and I can't get it loose and it's burning away my insides and I can't get away.

"And last night I lay awake and I could feel something huge out there in the dark, pulling me toward it, and sounds and images were whirling around in my head so fast I couldn't make them out, and I have to run but I don't know where to and where do you run when what you're running from is yourself?"

And suddenly something has happened and nothing matters more than where I am right now.

---

"Hey," I say, shifting and holding myself closer to his chest. It's quiet except for us and there is nothing in the darkness. "Tell me."

"Mm?"

"Tell me what you are," I say, and the world is sideways and strange and absolutely right.