by Alison Tyler
Tucked back in the woods, the hut I rented for us is just that—a hut. Open to the air around the top, with a plain hammock on the front porch. Inside, there is only the bed, and a tiny table. Margret doesn’t seem to care. She runs and throws herself on the bed so that the mattress shoots her back up in the air, sends her damp curls flying out in all directions around her. She pats the blanket next to her. Come, no matter what language you don’t speak.
I start to lie down next to her on the bed, but she shakes her head. She makes a shimmying motion, her hips moving back and forth across the simple blanket. I tuck my thumbs into the sides of my bikini bottom, wiggling my hips. Like this?
She puts her hands to her lips and nods. I slide my bikini bottom down, half inch by half inch, shaking my body with it. Compared to Margret, I’m curvy. My belly slides in above my round hips, accentuates the curvy ass that I can only keep in shape with daily bike rides. She seems to delight in my curves as much as I delight in her angularity.
There is no “Am I skinny enough?” or “Are you sure you should be eating that?” There is only me, sliding my bikini bottom down over the wet and salty curves of me. There is only Margret watching from the bed, her lips parted, her own damp body soaking into the blanket.
I slide the bottom down all the way, step out of it. Margret runs her tongue across her bottom lip and waits. I unhook the back of my bikini top. There isn’t as much here to shimmy out of, so I just let it fall away. I’ve had my nipples pierced since I last saw her: two tiny blue stones hanging from each peak. Tiny blue stones that match her eyes.
Her eyes get big when she sees them, and she puts her hand over her mouth. Then she rolls over on all fours and crawls across the bed toward me. She takes my hand and pulls me down, until I’m kneeling on the bed. When she leans forward, the smell of saltwater is everywhere. Then her tongue is on my nipple, round and round the nipple and the jewelry. Her warm mouth sucks. The piercings are newly healed, sensitive, but in a good way. Margret catches one between her teeth, and pulls up. My body reacts like she’s pulling on a string tied to my belly, the inside of my thighs. Everything pulls up with her mouth.
“Margret,” I breathe. She smiles at her name, and then runs her mouth lower, down the flat expanse of my belly. When she hits my thighs, she rolls on her back and scoots herself under me. She uses her tongue to paint pictures up the insides of my thighs. Of what, I can’t imagine, but I close my eyes and see them as long, wide streaks of blue paint.
I have shaved for her and for the ocean, short enough that when she runs her tongue along the hairs I know it must prickle her. She uses her tongue on my labia, then parts them, wiggles her way inside, slippery as a fish. Her tongue is a flat brush sweeping the inside of me until she hits my clit. Dot, dot, dabbing me. Her tongue there speaks to me without language. It is a promise of things to come, a press and release that feels as quietly natural as anything that has come before it. There was a time when Helen and I used our tongues like this, on our bodies, instead of against each other....
I brush the thought away. Don’t want to think about that right now. Don’t want to have to find the words for it.
I fold my body down until I can nestle my own tongue against Margret’s bikini bottom. She’s still working her tongue against my clit, but I try to focus. I slide her tiny bikini to the side to allow me access. I tuck my finger inside her. She is wet already, smelling of sea salt and musk.
I slide two fingers inside her, loving the wet clutch of her, the way she moans into me. With my thumb rubbing across her clit, I slide a third finger in. I fuck her like that, pushing so hard her tongue slides back and forth across my clit with the movement of her body. Through the wet fabric of her suit, her hard nipples rub my belly with the movement.
Margret arches her back. Her tongue becomes frantic across my clit, and then she gives up and sucks me, hard, into her mouth. We don’t come together; she goes first, moaning as I dive into her with my fingers. It is this sound, the meaningless vibrations of her throat as she sucks my clit, that lets me follow her.
The place we bring each other to, there are no words for that.
No words at all.
It is dark when the sound wakes me. Long and loud, like big trucks are driving over the roof of the hut. It takes me a second before I realize what it is. Howler monkeys.
Margret lies awake next to me, her body rigid in my arms.
“Was de hell?” she whispers. At first I think she’s speaking English, but then I realize it’s just one of those phrases that sound like their English equivalents. It still amazes me sometimes how similar languages are, even after hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart. Languages are a species like any other, I guess, each adapting to its environment, but most still keeping their roots. Some even growing more and more alike over the passing years, despite every hypothesis that says they shouldn’t.
I could say, “Howler monkeys,” but I know she won’t understand, so instead I pull her close to me. I say with my body, “It’s safe,” and then I kiss her so she’ll know for sure.
But her mouth is set flat against mine, and her lips don’t open. She is letting me hold her, but she is not relaxed. The moon peeks through the open slats around the top of the hut, and I can see her eyes, big and wide.
The sound comes again, closer this time, a big low howl that fills the hut and echoes all around us. If I didn’t know what it was, if I hadn’t heard howlers before, I’d be going out of my fucking mind too.
“What the fuck was that?” Margret says again, and this time when I understand her, I think that I have suddenly absorbed a new language, through osmosis, while we slept. And then, in another heartbeat, I realize she is speaking English.
She seems to realize it at the same time, and covers her mouth with her fingertips. I let go of her, sit up on the bed.
“Shit,” she says through her fingers. “I am so very sorry, Lilla. It was meant to be a surprise that I learn English. I ruin the...surprise.”
Hearing her speak makes me feel like I am farther from home than just in another country. I am on another planet, an alternative universe where everything you thought you understood is reversed, a book that is read from right to left, bottom to top.
For once, I can’t say anything. All those languages in my head, and I don’t have a word. Not one. She meant to surprise me, I see that now. It is a gift she has tried to give me, learning this language, something to bring us closer.
But all I can see are her lips moving. Her tongue is forming words that I do not want to understand. I turn away. She comes behind me and puts her arms around me, but already her fists are closed tight, filling with words.
MICHAEL HEMMINGSON
THE MOMENTS
EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE in the middle of September—for instance, a hotel room in Sebha at four in the morning, after driving from Tripoli. It was the last time Dominique and I had fucked; or the last time I remembered fucking her. I’m not exactly certain.
I had walked around for two hours waiting for her to wake up after the drive.
It was still summer and an unbearable heat radiated everywhere. I wandered the sparsely populated market area, bought a carton of Camels out of the back of a giant, dilapidated truck with Niger plates— smuggled all the way from the coast, I thought.
This had always been a crossroads for everything illegal: drugs, booze, people.
When I returned to our room, Dominique was coming around; no air-con, sweat all over the bed and clothes sticking to her in the wrong places. She was small and dark, with brown eyes and hair, a big smile with a lot of white teeth. She had been in some real shitholes: smuggling drugs to the Zapatistas; working with some kind of cultural group in Vietnam back in ’96; sharing a squat in Istanbul with hashish-smoking human rights investigators. She was wicked smart and had a temper. I’d met her my first year of college and I had no idea what she was doing here, with me, at the emptiest end of the Sahara.
—Where you been?
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—Around, I said, there’s not a lot to see here; we can rest for a day or two, maybe check out that noise the car’s making.
The car, a Range Rover of unknown vintage, was falling apart. I had my doubts it would cough along much longer.
I sat down next to her on the narrow bed. She leaned against me and made a face, and I could feel the heat on her skin. I touched her hair and rubbed her neck. We were quiet, and the world was quiet outside; we touched each other and said nothing. She leaned back and began pulling off her shirt; it came off sticky, with a fight. Her small breasts were bare— no bras here in Africa—dark nipples stiffening in the cool predawn breeze that began blowing through the open window like a childhood memory.
I leaned down and began sucking on her little tits.
She was trying to help me pull off my pants, getting everything more tangled. I stood and slid them off. She was naked and watching me. The bed was covered in deep shadows; I couldn’t see her face well and I didn’t need to. I didn’t want to. I lay down on top of her, my hand down between her legs.
—I don’t have a condom, I said.
—I don’t care, she said.
She arched her hips, wrapped her legs around my waist. I started to fuck her, and the more we fucked, the more wildcat it got. She started to thrash on the bed and make little crying noises so I had to heavily lie on top of her, press her into the bed, stifle her. Didn’t want the sex police kicking in the door. I was starting to see that spinning dizziness that meant I was going to come soon. When I did, I thrust hard, and fell back. She rolled away, back into the sheets.
We stayed in town for two days, enough time to buy groceries, fix the arthritic car and make sure the road ahead was clear of drifting sand, land mines, intermittent fighting, all that fun North African stuff. We set out early in the morning for Ghat, the border crossing with Algeria. I wanted to go further south, cross at Tumu, but Dominique had insisted. Wanted to use her French, I guess. I don’t like to have serious talks while driving. Casual conversation, that’s okay. But these kind of involved, emotional discussions about relationships and sex, lying and betrayal— I’d rather go to some foul-smelling coffee shop and drink mud. It fucks the road up, you miss the curves, don’t get the jumps off the line....
The last year, we were living together and it was either her jumping me after she’d drunk too much, or me paying her. I was jerking off four or five times a day because she hadn’t been that interested in sex. She had been living in France for the last few months, doing her junior year abroad. I’d had some encounters, but on our small campus, if I fucked anyone, it would be hard to keep it from the general public.
I did get a blow job from a freshman named Rita: long dreadlocks and big tits. She’d sucked me off in the laundry room of my apartment complex and the noise her mouth made competed with the tumbling dryers. She seemed all right, we went for drinks a few times, but then she ran off with the assistant registrar and I never saw her again.
Like Kurt Vonnegut once wrote generations ago: So it goes.
I met up with Dominique in Paris; we rented the car, drove down through Italy, caught the ferry to Malta, spent a week in the mild sun and surf, then took the one ferry to Tripoli. We headed for the Atlantic coast of West Africa, somewhere around Lagos. The heat and emptiness recharged our sex; we’d fucked more in the last twelve days than we had in the last twelve months.
We ran into trouble at the Ghat crossing. The oldest story: our papers weren’t in order. While I was trying to straighten it out with my bad Arabic, Dominique was talking to three of the border guards. She was actually flirting with them—touching her hair, laughing and bending forward to show a little tit. They kept pressing in closer and closer to her; I could see their hands patting her shoulder; they were complimenting her hair.
The implied danger aroused me. I tried to keep my mind on dealing with the customs guy, but all I could picture was Dominique getting dragged behind the guard shack by these three and getting royally fucked—one in her mouth and the other taking her from behind on the barren sand while the third jerked off in her hair. I was getting hard thinking about it, my dick throbbing in time with the sound of idling car engines.
We finally got everything settled and we were able to drive on.
A few days later the car died, one hundred miles from the coast. We walked for hours, fighting about whose fault it was. When we reached the next village, we were through. She caught the first bus south, and that was that, I never saw her again...
I think.
I’m not sure.
It’s all a blur now, like our entire relationship....
Honestly, I can’t remember anymore. Maybe it was some new type of hell that I’ve decided didn’t happen. She still lives over there, in Europe. Hotel Terminus, the Klaus Barbie place. Lyon. A mutual friend told me she was marrying some eighteen-year-old German kid with a nine-inch cock.
The strangest thing about the trip is that I never knew where we were. I fixate on place; I must know where I am when traveling, a mental reference, a name to access certain files of gray matter. I cannot locate it on any map. No idea where the house was in Marseilles, back when she was going to school; the chapel along the cliffs where we all almost fell off because of the wind. The bar by the docks in Valletta, a 250-pound dog lying in the narrow entrance, too long to step over. I am cartographically fixated.
What I even remember of that whole blurry period is off. Dominique had been late picking me up at the airport; turns out she had gotten drunk with some Belgians and passed out in a bathtub. She showed up after an hour. I was in the airport bar drinking with someone I think was named Marie. Dominique dragged me off and into the Metro, and took me to a hotel room she’d rented so we could spend a night away from her smelly French roommates.
I hadn’t gotten laid in months; I don’t know about her.
We checked in, walked up to the room, and attacked each other. Seriously, we ripped each other’s clothes off, threw each other around the room like POWs being interrogated. Before I knew it I was coming in her mouth; then we switched and I was going down on her, flicking her clit with my tongue, sucking on it hard; she was screaming, bucking, slapping me on the head and telling me to eat her.
We fucked twice, a few positions, nothing too freaky, we were just getting used to each other’s movements again, each other’s taste and smell and souls....
Later that night, I was drinking a bottle of Red Label with a stranger who was one of her friends; he was manic and frightened me. He was bi, kept rubbing my thigh. I said I was flattered, but not really into it tonight.
The last day Dominique and I were in France, before we left for Africa, I was out with Monsieur Bisexual—his name was Jean. We were having beers with people in a weird and fucked-up neighborhood on the north side of Paris: lots of crumbly buildings. We’d been at it for a while, really tearing into the liquor, sometimes going into the bathroom and smoking hash; everyone was pretty gone, and after a lot of hours went by, the group decided to go home.
Jean pulled me aside.
—Take a walk with me, he said.
He was huge, six-three easy, maybe 230 pounds. I think he was from the far western part of France, Brittany. Dark all over.
—I don’t know, Jean, I told him, we’re pretty pixilated; maybe we should go back with everyone else.
—Nothing funny; I want to show you something.
I was feeling displaced. We walked for a while, not saying much. It was late and there weren’t a lot of people out.
—Sorry about that first night you were here, all that sloppy shit I laid on you, he said.
—Forget about it.
—Do you want another drink?
—Sure.
We went into a small bar and sat along the back wall, drinking Kronenbourg draft. Jean was telling me about his childhood on the coast, his three years in the army. I noticed a woman looking at us from the bar. She was thin and pale, long blonde hair. I noticed a tattoo of
a purple koi peeking out from the small of her back. She was wearing jeans and a white tank top.
She smiled, looked away, looked back.
Jean followed my stare.
—You like her?
—Yeah, I said.
Jean was up and moving. He sat next to her, said something quietly. She leaned back and looked at me again; nodded and said something to Jean.
They got up and left.
—What the fucking fuck, I said to no one in particular.
Jean stuck his head back in through the front door of the bar.
—Are you coming or not?
I tossed a few euros on the bar and walked out. They were about ten feet ahead of me, walking side by side down the street. Their hands were resting on each other’s asses. I could see Jean’s hand squeeze her, pinch her flesh. She jumped, laughed, hit his arm. They sidelined into an alley that ran along a huge building that looked like a hospital.
The woman led Jean down a staircase and onto a small landing. She quickly stripped out of her jeans and tank top. Jean pulled his pants off. She was on her knees, working his balls with her right hand while licking up and down the length of his dick. I have to admit: he had a beautiful cock, long and curved, pretty fat, nice color. I was impressed, not jealous.
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing. My hand went down into my own pants. She was working her left hand around to Jean’s asshole; I could see the fingers slide into his crack, and when I saw his body stiffen I knew she was probing that pucker. Jean looked over at me, glassy-eyed.
—Take them off, he said.
I unbuckled, slid my pants down around my boots and kind of walk-shuffled over to them. The woman let go of Jean’s balls and grabbed mine. She popped his cock all the way into her mouth and really jammed two of her fingers into his ass. Jean was pumping, fucking this woman’s mouth, moving between her fingers and mouth like he was an engine. When he came, I thought I could hear it splash against her throat. She pulled back and started in on my cock without a word. I really wanted to fuck her; she was too quick for me. I came almost immediately; Jean watched closely and rubbed my neck as this anonymous girl drank everything I gave her, slurping noisily while her fingers started playing with my asshole.