This one smells a little closer to home.
Florida, Kananga, Rose, Aqua Divin, and Holy. No one would be able to tell, considering how murky and thick the water has become, but I can smell it. All of them.
I smile. Then sit up and pass my hands along my arms, watching in fascination as the old Summer Skin sloughs away, revealing new, soft, gorgeous mahogany flesh. It’s perfect, my new skin. Perfect and beautiful and condition free.
My smile grows wider as I continue the shed. From my breasts to my feet, my legs to my belly.
I am brand new.
When I think I’m done, I stand in the water and let the few chunks plop back down. I step out and dry my feet on my old clothes stiff with plasma and reach for a decorative towel to dry the rest of my skin. I do something rude to the embroidered flower in between my legs for a little mischief, then turn to drain the tub. I’ll have one shitty clean up to do, but it won’t matter. The task won’t be halted by cracking, tight, swollen skin.
I use the same towel to wipe down the droplets on the tiles, then hang it back. I search through her lotions and pick the least scented one, slathering it almost erotically slow over the smooth expanse of my skin. Once done, I look at myself in the mirror and for the first time in years, I like what I see.
I need a plan, but for the next few days I’ll have to lay low here. My new skin will be sensitive and highly reactive to the outside. The sun is my enemy. Summer makes it worse. I want to enjoy the gift my auntie has given me. As long as the air is still kicking, I’ll be fine. No food, but I’m satiated beyond normal.
I’ll have to work on a story though, like one of those mysteries I used to love reading. Because there’s a knock at the door and a body in the hallway and I don’t want to hurt my new skin.
Gotraskhalana (“stumbling upon the name”):
A Blues*
by Tiffany Austin
There is a South in sound. Pear shaped sounds.
Inside—skinned rose flesh. Hard mattresses. Gussing up to a yard
full of opened graves. Familiar dust. Moored to bud
—all in the body. Only scar that remains
is leaning. Coltrane’s sheets. Otis
rubybreasted. Burlap thighs sitting on water.
Color turned inner on a leaf.
Between sediment of embrace, breaking
and I want to give my mother a child that weighs like my father.
Love mask, sea chipped.
Wafted with back. Dry salt cut. Reminds me
of a smell you can’t catch. Honey sun. Memory
is near here. Bodies want to be wearable
a friend tells me and that little boys’ bodies in homes
are being sent out to make sure
there is no sound after the bullets have fallen.
Raw livers. Familiar dust. A long lap of women at a funeral,
they tell me I am not a woman who will have a hard life.
They don’t know. I hope I can forget. Long and squat
necks. Honea path.* Cleve. Cusped.
*Honea path is a small town in South Carolina, where the people still discuss a hanging that was not historically recorded.
Taking the Good
by Dana Mcknight
I ran my eyes along the serrated ramparts of the superstore’s tall aisles, scanning for the tell-tale nipple of the security camera implanted into the ceiling. For all its grandiose plans of becoming the next major you-can-purchase-everything-here retail chain, it was still privy to the budget of a mom and pop. The only recording devices in the store hovered over the registers, daring underpaid cashiers to make a move—any move other than the listless thumbing of small bills into the cash drawers. I slid my gaze back to the dirty linoleum floor, where my shoe laces lay splayed against my sneakers. Stooping, I tied them with purposefully tight double- knots.
There was a shuffling behind me: plastic cellophane rubbing against the worn inner lining of a leather jacket that I could smell from my crouch on the ground and the space between me slicked almost immediately. Rising, I breathed through my nose to calm myself and turned to meet her cool gaze.
“I’m good.” She said, and I knew it was code for Let’s Go. Or I Have Everything I Want For Now. Her jacket was loose enough to hide the bulge of batteries, orange juice (with 15% real juice) and chocolate chip cookies from the random passerby; but I knew her form too well—all iron lines and shadowed clefts where hips could have jutted. Black hair, chopped into stark angles with dollar store scissors, framing a heart-shaped face. Her mouth was set into a hard impatient line under wild grey eyes that made her nose inconsequential.
I turned, a bit unsteady suddenly and made a casual bee-line towards the main exit. She strode behind me, silent as a hawk. The back of my head itched as if touched by ghosts.
We passed the row of registers with their Zombie detail, crossed the threshold of the automatic doors and high-tailed it to my little Toyota hatchback parked a few inconvenient meters from the front entrance. Or, at least, I picked up the pace. I had already unlocked the door and jumped in a few seconds before she had even stepped off the curb to the parking lot.
My breath was hitching, my fingers gripping the steering wheel when she opened the passenger-side door and plopped inside.
“You did well, Helene,” she said to me as she fished in the glove compartment for menthols.
The cigarette was meant to calm and it did. I felt my heartbeat slowing to a respectable gallop—the endorphins pushing and shaping my terror into a warm ball in my lower stomach.
“Did we have any more stops, Normandy?” I asked, nervous and partially horny.
“Naw.” She lit up, breathing a lungful before expelling it into the confines of the car. It was too cold to open the window. The air outside had the hard edge of fast winter all over it, leaving the earth a mess of ashy lawns and black-iced asphalt though leaves still fell in crumbled wads from the trees. I had never loved winter in Buffalo and nervously avoided anyone who did.
Reaching across Normandy’s lap, I tugged at the crushed pack of cigarettes in her hand, overly aware of the path my elbow made across her small tits. Seeming not to notice, she stuck a hand in her jacket pocket and pulled out the cookies. My stomach growled. We had traded the last of our foodstamps for Newports—Normandy’s idea, not mine.
Sighing through the drag of the cigarette—I revved the engine and peeled out of the parking lot to the freeway that would lead us downtown. It was late Friday night and there was only one dyke bar in the City still open; its counters laden with half-empty drinks that the stocky bar-backs would not be able to keep up with. We called ourselves Drink Pirates to make our poverty something other than pitiful.
We had no claim to the title of starving artists since our combined artistic merit was a composition notebook that
Normandy kept filled with scribbled quotes of better poets than herself and I. We weren’t equipped with tales that travelers stocked. And though packaged ramen and mayo-heavy egg sandwiches made up the better part of our diets; we didn’t starve. I worked and Normandy took and I was content for the feel of her hands warming under the weight of my breasts.
After a while, the glow of the neighborhoods hardened from sparse edge-of-town street lamps to gleaming neon liquor store signs. I elbowed the car door lock, nervously. Normandy, pulled out another cigarette, glaring at her reflection in the passenger window, shooting herself the same expressionless mask I often thought was reserved for only me. She ran a hand through her dark hair—patting down loyal strands as I pulled the car into a neat space a block away from the bar.
“Can we get any closer?” Normandy asked, pausing in her self-scrutiny to level a stony gaze around the dilapidated street.
Trash littered the ground, and blackened alleys snaked through the spaces between broken buildings, empty houses and over-grown yards. Gathered at the end of the street, a gaggle of surly butch dykes of a variety of ages fisted brown bottles of cheap domestic beer a few re
spectable feet away from the bar. A cloud of cigarette smoke dangled in the air above them.
I shook my head. “Not since last time.” My voice was a mumble, since it was obvious Normandy had been too drunk to even remember the chick who had slammed a brick through the car window when she had discovered her wallet peeking out of the back pocket in Normandy’s cutoffs. I always made sure to park away from the bar, just in case we had to quicken our exit. The women with narrow senses of justice had paunches that we could outrun at our most wasted.
Normandy climbed out of the car and I followed a step behind, watching her strong gait; the shoulders rolling under her leather with each step. The dykes at the door stared like hyenas as we passed them; poor, but bleeding with the pride of youth.
Despite the time, the bar was full to bursting. Dated house- music throbbed through the shabby speakers arranged against the corners of the room. Bodies gyrated in a sea of denim and white racer-back tank tops. We were dark of cloth, sporting other uniforms for another era that had either passed or had yet to come. Normandy grabbed a half-empty beer from the bar, smoothly tipping it back as she prowled the outskirts of the linoleum dance-floor and eyed the assembled women with the casual gaze of a collector. I settled next to her in the shadows, an outline of sweatshirt and elbows. She passed me the bottle and I drank the tepid liquid somewhat gratefully.
“You smell amazing.”
The breathy voice grazed my ear and I jumped into a spin to glare at the woman standing behind me.
She was tall—the stuff of Roman Temples and Alexandrian libraries and gold-plated hieroglyphs, draped in a black body-con top that clutched her apple-pert breasts like armor. Her mouth was a shocking red—but she wasn’t a lipstick. The eyes staring back at me, even in the black of the dance-floor—were hard and aggressive. Her arms were bare and sleek with muscle and her black slim-leg jeans were tucked into boots of good leather. I had never seen a woman darker than me in this bar—and I felt my tongue click the top of my mouth with excitement and trepidation.
I felt Normandy tense next to me, but not in anger.
“Is that patchouli?” The Amazon leaned in again, her nose passing my line of tumbled hair towards the space on my neck near my ear. I looked to Normandy in alarm.
“Do you speak?” The woman asked, backing away, though her lips curved slightly upward. Her dark eyes flicked along the path of my gaze to Normandy who was staring. “Is this your girlfriend?”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Normandy answered, though the question wasn’t for her.
The woman made a low noise in her throat like a breeze through an old forest then the spotlight of her gaze slid slowly back to me. My scalp itched as I saw myself through her eyes; medium height, with shoulder-length brown coils in need of a good moisturizer. My eyes were hazel, compliments of my Polish mother and my skin was the mild beige of franchise coffee-shop lattes. My dad was brown—Dominican, because he never claimed Black.
I tugged at my dark purple plaid button-up and unconsciously shifted my stance onto my hip to minimize my belly.
“What’s your name?” Normandy asked, moving in closer. The smell of her leather jacket jolted me back into myself and I blushed furiously.
The woman’s eyes did not move from my face. “Lamia.”
Normandy was eyeing her in that way she did whenever she wanted something. And I knew exactly what it was.
This woman was the golden apple in the Tree that Normandy had thought picked clean. I looked around, spotting a clear path through the sloppy movements on the dance-floor to the back patio. There I could smoke a cigarette or four and wait until Normandy was ready to take Lamia back to our house where I would settle on the porch with my headphones and my Gits and pretend that I didn’t mind the smell of another woman on the fold- out couch that Normandy and I both slept on.
“I’ll be back.” I intoned, stepping away. “And where are you going, Beautiful?”
I stopped. Lamia was looking at me. Normandy, for the first time, looked startled. Confused. As if the possibility of such a creature as fantastic as the woman in front of us could have absolutely nothing to do with me.
My breath caught in my throat at the intensity of her eyes. There was a pockmark by the edge of Lamia’s brow. I focused on it.
“Smoking.” I managed to choke out.
“I’ll join you.” Her lips parted and I saw white teeth glimmer. “But I’ve other things if you would like them.”
“We should go outside then.” Normandy interjected, her pale eyes stark with something other than the promise of substance. Lamia glanced at her as though she had just noticed Normandy’s presence and her wealth wafting off of her like heavy perfume.
Dread swelled through me.
The pack of dykes by the door had dispersed back inside of the warmth of the bar, though their cigarette smoke lingered in the still night air. I buttoned the top of my heavy shirt, trembling as the cold punched through the fabric. Normandy led the way, passing our car and ducking into an alley off the side of an abandoned welding company. I followed a few yards behind; sneakered feet crunching over glass and pebbled mortar. I chanced a look behind me; Lamia had taken up the rear, striding silently along the street, cloaked in so much shadow the street lamps seemed to dim as she passed.
Noticing my scrutiny, she smiled.
I halted until she was abreast of me. Normandy was several yards away and still walking.
“Are you from New York City?” I asked. It was where people like her came from. Lamia’s will seemed too palpable. My voice was tin in the crisp cold.
“No.” Her breath did not raise plumes of smoke like mine did. “But I lived there once. A long time ago.”
“Then, where are you from?” I tried not to look at her, but my eyes were no longer commanded by my brain.
“Nowhere and everywhere. I’ve lived in many places in my lifetime.” I nodded in false understanding, ignoring the fact that none of my previous questions had been answered.
“So why are you in a crappy dyke bar in this crappy town?” Normandy interjected.
She laughed, a bone-warming chuckle that raised my nipples. When her gaze met mine, it held me and stroked me from the inside out. “I was looking for something…good.”
I wanted to stop walking, take her hand and pull her back from the path that Normandy had left for us, and bring her back to the cozy bleakness of the bar. Share, taste and touch all of her secrets.
But Normandy had stopped a few feet ahead and had fisted her palms in her pockets where I knew her fingers wrapped around the ivory handle of her butterfly knife. Her face was cool and steady. A thief—no, a cruel shadow of a sphinx, in an urban wasteland. I had long ago traded my compass for her, and now I felt even the stars couldn’t place me on this black night.
Lamia brushed past me, reaching in her pocket for her wallet where green, gold and black flashed within. She slipped her long fingers in and out. Pinched betwixt two red lacquered nails was a small bag of fine white crystals. I watched Normandy’s eyes dart reptilian from the wallet to the bag and I felt bile rise in my belly.
“So, are you here visiting family?” I asked, tone desperate as I tried to add the possibility of humanity, circumstances and retribution to the situation. Normandy didn’t flinch.
“No. I’m alone in this world,” Lamia replied, sliding a long red fingernail into the bag. She lifted the filled tip to my nose first and I snorted sadly.
“So am I,” Normandy said, placing a finger to her nostril.
Lamia obliged.
I am, too, I thought, but didn’t need to say.
We took several more bumps and the night air took on a shimmer—a sharpness that had not been there before.
“You are something, Lady.” Normandy’s voice broke through the silence. She had moved her body closer to Lamia and her lips slipped into the smirk that always worked. It had certainly worked on me a summer ago. But Lamia was unlike me.
No gasp incurred or mirror smile
of acquiescence. No pleasure at Normandy’s sudden sexual acknowledgement, pleasurable feminine sigh or lust-soaked kiss. Lamia was not me. Instead there was a long moment of intense quiet and that was how both Normandy and I realized that the woman before us cared nothing for her.
I felt my heart pound as cool hate blanked the arousal from Normandy’s face.
“We should go back,” I said quietly, looking to both of them. My eyes rested on Normandy’s—but her eyes were steel and her hand pulled from her leather jacket, brandishing the blade.
“Gimme your wallet. Now.” Normandy lifted the blade to Lamia’s face. I bit my lip.
“We don’t need it,” I whimpered, coke lighting my senses. I gazed at Lamia who laughed, a tone too nasty for the royal beauty of her face.
A flicker of shock passed over Normandy’s eyes and her mouth grew hard. “Did you hear me, you dumb cunt? I said, give me your wallet.”
Lamia’s head turned in a slow arc to face me and at once I was bathed in the heat of her gaze. Her eyes were gentle. “Do you want to come with me, Helene?” Her voice was frost on brick.
Brittle and stalwart at the same time. The question was for me, but pointed at Normandy.
I nodded yes, tears wavering my vision.
Normandy screamed. A sound ripping apart the stunted dams that had kept her at bay from me and the world for more years than I had ever known her. It was a scream of rage, and torture— intense things that had reflected deep in the glass recesses of her eyes. Once, I had thought of them as things of love—of past agonies too near to her heart to ever be relinquished to another person again. That patience and comfort and steady lives could save her and me both. As Normandy leapt for Lamia’s throat, I understood that I had been wrong.
She could never love me.
I screamed, too. But for Lamia. And then my scream cut
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