I stagger across the finish line and drop to my knees.
Third place.
Mud drips off my body or clings in sticky clumps, like a smeared diaper. I smell like one, too, if cows wore diapers.
On my hands and knees, I finally look up. Rowboat has Shell draped around his shoulders as they cross the finish line. They don’t bother to run. There are no more prizes.
And there’s Little, grinning as she bear-crawls toward me. Like this is all a game the grown-ups play, a game that she’ll get to play, too. She writhes like a spider above the ground, small fingers splurging mud, miniature shoulder muscles flexing on her slight frame. She’ll be a compact athlete, like her mother. Sometimes, the light ones with endurance are the winners. Sometimes they aren’t.
The victors’ tent is full of nurses, all sterile, sharp needles and sharper smiles. They usher my family in behind me, Honey’s arm on my sweaty, muddy back as I limp.
They guide me into a chair, and a nurse tries clear a patch of skin on my flaking-dirt arm. I can’t feel her scrape at me, but I jerk away anyhow.
“Her first.” I point to Honey.
The nurses share a glance, shrug, and give Honey the shot instead, a swipe of alcohol and jab before she can protest.
The shakes start up in my torso. I put my usual powders in my water before the race, but—it was a long race. Maybe I’ll pass out before I can make the decision, and they’ll shoot me up regardless. No.
“Hey, Little. Auntie’s big girl. You’re not afraid of needles are you? Take Auntie’s shot for her?” I pull her up onto my lap.
Honey’s neck stiffens with fury and she’s working on spitting something out at me, at the nurses, at Shell—but I shake my head.
“Let her have this,” I say, though I don’t think anyone else hears.
Honey won’t forgive me, but at least she can find someone else after I die. Someone who listens better.
Little bites her lip when the needle goes in. I pull her closer and press my nose into her soft curly puffs.
I open my eyes when someone clears their throat. My family is watching Yellow-Lace Calf-Bastard, standing awkwardly in front of us with one of the nurses from his side of the tent.
He looks healthier than anyone has a right to be but that’s no surprise, not with gear like he has. Still, his brown eyes sit in haunted pits and I wonder what his training has been like.
“My—I signed up—this was for my mom.” He points to his nurse, who holds a capped needle. He blinks hard at the ground. “She didn’t make it.”
I stare hard at Shell. She hesitates for just a tick, but she can’t hold up under my Coach glare. It’s the same look I give her when she tries to push through an injury. Ironic.
I hear Rowboat’s heavy sigh as Shell gets her shot and I don’t know if it’s jealousy or relief, but I feel it, too. Little’ll grow up. She’ll live and love her body without any of this pain, and her mom’ll be there for her.
And Honey will live long enough to love and dance again.
Next year, me and Rowboat’ll try again. Us and all the people I left behind in the mud today.
If we survive long enough.
But even if we don’t, even if I die tonight, on that couch, in Honey’s arms, it’s worth it. I stroke Little’s hair with a trembling hand, and kiss her head one more time.
Another throat clears, barely a scrape in the air. The nurse holds her lab coat open and two more needle plungers peek out of an inner pocket. Her gaze flicks sharply between me and Rowboat.
The nurse puts a finger to her lips. “We do what we can.”
© 2020 C.L. Clark
Cherae graduated from Indiana University’s creative writing MFA. She’s been a personal trainer, an English teacher, and an editor, and is some combination thereof as she travels the world. When she’s not writing or teaching, she’s learning languages, doing P90something, or reading about war and [post-]colonial history. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in FIYAH, PodCastle, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You can follow her on twitter @c_l_clark.
Where You Linger
by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
(Content note for sexual assault.)
We all make mistakes. As I sit on the floor of my bedroom, surrounded by the journals I kept in high school and in my twenties, and fill out the doctor’s form, I tally mistakes in the corner of the paper. Before marriage, before Dover’s and my quiet nights trading words and sharing thoughts between binged television episodes, relationships were tumultuous. My tallies reflect this. Particularly the final tally, the one that got me into this mess to begin with. The doctor didn’t ask me for a tally, just brief descriptions of all sexual encounters, mistakes or not, to jog my memory along with the age in which I experienced them. But I need to prove to myself that the dissolution of my marriage wasn’t unique, that it hadn’t been a surprise. I should have seen it coming.
NOTES ON SEVERAL PIECES OF PARTLY-CRUMPLED PAPER, CRINKLED WITH COFFEE STAINS
#1 (Age 16)
Anne, the first woman I made love to, tasted like sunlight and sweat. We kissed behind a half-open door at the house where she lived with her father and stepmother. Afterward we went for Chinese food. We were together, off-and-on, for two years. We lied and cheated and searched through one another’s texts. We cooked each other Foreman grill chicken and pasta with four types of cheese. We raised one another in homes where we otherwise went unnoticed.
#2 (Age 18)
I lost my virginity twice. First, with the woman of sunlight and a Superman tattoo across her back. Second, with Mario, a Czech cigarette smoker, a college boy, a smooth talker who asked me to be his girlfriend after knowing me for one day.
We fucked in hotel rooms. We ate Whataburger after. We smoked weed from a pipe that looked like a metal cigarette and performed rainy picnics in the park. The sex was a beautiful pain. He told me I would leave him for a woman. I left him for Anne; she no longer tasted like sunlight when she begged me to come back.
“I slept with my ex too,” he said when I told him. “I don’t even care.”
#3 (Age 18)
I wasn’t done with men’s beautiful pain. The third person I slept with, Daniel, was a latent schizophrenic with hippie hair and a wallet stuffed with acid hits. Lucifer in the sky with diamonds, dancing half-naked in the front yard of a friend’s house while his parents were on vacation.
He said he wanted to take it slow. I waited a week to ask for what I wanted; for me a week was slow. Not for him. After we broke up, we argued about timing during his late-night surprise appearances at my door. He told me I’d get pregnant before the year was out. He called for five years after I stopped answering. On my 23rd birthday, I changed my number.
#4 (Age 18)
It wasn’t good. I squeezed my eyes shut. It wasn’t good.
#5 (Age 18)
We both had boyfriends when we first met in that final raging year of high school. Natalie gave me a massage on a crowded downtown street. Once we were both in college, she called again. I went to her without a thought. We sat in her apartment, as far across the couch from one another as possible, but when I got up to leave, she shoved me against the door and kissed me harder than I’d ever been kissed.
I kneaded her soft thighs in her cozy bed. She rescued me from a bad drunk in the company of my Dungeons & Dragons friends. I puked in her stripper shoes. We drank mimosas in my dorm. She only called me when she got lonely.
#6 (Age 18)
I remember Christopher crisp as a Facebook photo: red curls, a single mole on his neck, an affinity for exclamation. I met him at a National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws meeting, which I attended in the hopes of finding a new dealer. The redhead didn’t deal but kept a six-foot bong on his mantle.
He quoted scenes from Catch-22, pillow talk with a prostitute. I watched him play football games on his Wii. We played beer pong with his friends. Once I puked in his sink: spaghetti with mushrooms and peppermint ice cream. Every ti
me he asked me over, I went. Then he stopped asking.
#7 (Age 19)
So I fucked his friend Simon over a game of strip poker. “Pretty good for a dude, huh?” he said. It wasn’t.
#8 (Age 19)
Simon’s friend Oliver was better, a sweet blond who wrote bad poetry and lived in a private dorm next to Anne’s college apartment. I visited him after Anne. I visited Anne after him, soaking wet from rain. The cookie taste of him still lingered on my lips when I slipped my tongue between her legs.
“What do you want?” the blond asked.
I didn’t lie. “I want Anne to leave her girlfriend and come back to me.”
“Then we have no business being together.”
#9 (Age 19)
But Anne didn’t love me anymore. I sweated out her sunlight in the dark of my room in the house I shared with two roommates, a dozen fevers moving through me with no further explanations. When I was well again, I befriended Anne and her girlfriend, Cathryn, and Anne’s roommate, Dana, who was fucking Cathryn too.
I didn’t tell Anne that I drove each weekend to swallow bitter pills and fuck a blue-haired candy kid, Xander, king of the club. His last name remains unknown. We had nightly phone sex. I drove an hour to be in his bed every now and again and stayed as long as it took to finish. He knew nothing about me. It was easier to delete his number when Anne came calling, came crying. She had found out about Cathryn and Dana.
We moved Anne out of her apartment and into the home I shared. She wrote “I love you” in paint on my desk. We didn’t make it official.
#10 (Age 19)
At least that was my excuse when I met the most beautiful woman I’ve ever loved, cherry cheeks and gruff throat and the cutest drunk smile I’ve ever seen. Meredith and I kissed for the first time in a dance club against the red brick of a pillar.
It was time to leave the sunshine behind, but we always hold on to first love longer than we should.
Too drunk, we wound up on a bare mattress in an empty room in the house I now shared with Anne. We woke to Anne screaming in the door. I didn’t remember a thing.
After a long night of fighting, I pledged myself to Anne. I tried to be friends with those cherry cheeks, tried to keep her around, but Meredith left my house one night and said she wouldn’t come back.
I cut ties with Anne the next day in a brief tearless goodbye. I loved Meredith even when she told me she was moving up north. We didn’t last that long. Even before she moved, her clothes smelled like Anne’s ex-girlfriend Cathryn, my first enemy, my only enemy. When Meredith begged me back, I stood my ground.
#11 (Age 19)
Nothing counts on Halloween. Especially not a woman you forget before you even know her.
#12 (Age 19) & #13 (Age 19)
Once upon a time I loved a woman who smelled like sunshine. Later she loved a woman with long hair and a dark past who would become an enemy and a friend; isn’t there a word for that? They lived with Dana, the daughter of a pastor. Dana and Cathryn, they were made for each other, or at least for that part of their lives.
I had taken a lover when I had a lover, first with Daniel, then with Meredith. Did I deserve full-circle? Cathryn was so full of mystery no one could resist her, Meredith least of all. I didn’t want Cathryn. I was the only one. But Dana was a beauty in her dark apartment where I rode my bike as soon as she heard about our girlfriends’ liaisons in party bathrooms.
“It’s okay,” I said to Dana.
“Fucking bitch,” she said.
We ate burgers and went our separate ways. One night later Dana and Cathryn were back together. Meredith and I stayed apart. I fucked Dana and Cathryn both instead, in a room with no curtains on the windows. Pushed and pulled between the woman I wanted and the woman I hated, I didn’t belong.
#14 (Age 19)
Jeremiah was covered in tattoos. When he asked me to dinner, I never went, but I showed up at his apartment late at night to smoke weed and get naked. He left the TV on all the time and I heard Charlie Sheen’s crazy laugh as I fucked him. Too much noise is still too much noise and when I left, I never came back.
Meredith moved to Colorado and I cried a lot.
#15 (Age 20)
Here is where I tried again. Here is where I walked with a man eight years my senior who didn’t know what he wanted and wanted what he didn’t know. Michael and I played board games on his carpet. I wanted him all the time and he couldn’t give that much of himself. I was in a hurry, wanted to move too fast, wanted to get the hard parts out of the way, wanted to experience it all then and there and he drank too much anyway.
#16 (Age 20)
It was Grayson I wanted, a boy who left hickeys all over my neck. A friend of a best friend. A bowl cut, like the Beatles.
When I got too drunk, I asked Grayson to walk me back. I stumbled under a tree and he caught me, kissed me. We snuck into my house.
“Your bed’s full of books,” he said. I pushed them off. I’d been sleeping alone for weeks.
“You and your girls,” he said.
“Boys too,” I said. I kissed him again.
I don’t remember the rest. I blacked out. He left before sunrise. The next day I heard nothing from him. At a friend’s place a week later, he called his new girlfriend by my name.
His friend Eliot looked nothing like him. He kissed me on the couch in the room where Grayson sat with his new girlfriend. He drove me to his place without asking if that was where I wanted to go.
When we finished he jumped on his computer and played video games as though I wasn’t there.
#17 (Age 20)
I waited because they told me I should wait. The violinist was hard to get. Her name was Dover.
“Like the cliffs?” I said when she introduced herself in the middle of my roommate’s party.
“Got any weed?” she said.
She was sitting in my house like she belonged there, cross-legged in my dining table chair with her ponytail and her bright red leather pants.
“No,” I said. “What kind of guest doesn’t bring their own weed?”
But when she asked my roommate for my number, I relented.
The first time we made love we were in a lake at a state park, past the time we were supposed to be in the water. She commented each night on the moon and its changes. She offered up everything I never wanted to lose.
I loved her with everything I had to lose.
When I lost her, ten years after we took our vows, I lost everything I loved.
#18 (Age 35)
There are a million excuses I could give. Fifteen years of monogamy pass, and you start to itch for the excitement of a stranger’s hands, for the unraveling of a mystery, peeling back their words to reveal what’s really underneath. You feel unwanted, after years of being looked at with the gentler gaze of long-term lust. You feel the need to return to that younger self.
You’re a worthless piece of shit. You’re everything you never wanted to be.
IN THE OFFICE OF THE DOCTOR WITH NO DEGREES ON THE WALLS
“That’s everyone?” the doctor asks.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s a lot, isn’t it?”
“Do you feel like it’s a lot?”
“Oh, come on. It’s a lot.”
“Huh.” The doctor taps her pen against her clipboard. “Then it must be a lot.”
“Honestly? You think so?”
“Honestly, Ms. Moore?”
I nod.
“I’ve seen more.”
I shift in my seat, cross and uncross my legs, wipe my palms on my thighs.
“That’s everyone, you said? Are you very sure?”
“Yes. I kept good records.”
“That’s everyone you experienced penetration with in any of its forms? That’s a finger in the vagina, the anus. A finger in the mouth. A penis in the mouth. A tongue in the vagina. You want as many as possible.”
Fuck. Blowjobs. Blowjobs probably counted. I hadn’t recorded all of those encounters in my journals
, not as meticulously.
“That’s all of them,” I say.
She studies my notes. “The good news is you didn’t leave a lot of time between them. That’s good. Fewer gaps means smaller steps.” She scribbles something on her form. “You remember how this works?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me. Say it back to me. I want to be sure.”
“The memories are a map, right? I follow memory to memory. Each one is like a stepping stone.”
“Yes, that’s fairly accurate. Are you certain you got everyone? As I said, you want as many stones as possible so that you do not fall through.”
“What happens if I fail?”
“You must start again.”
“That’s all? I won’t die or get lost or go into a coma or something?”
“You start over. This means we start from the beginning. Your fee covers one attempt. If you can pay again, we can go again. But I suspect you cannot pay again.”
I think of my bank account, that red number. I pulled it all to come here. I sold off Dover’s violin.
“You assume correctly,” I say.
She hands me the clipboard. “Is there anyone you want to add?”
I add three oral-only encounters. She takes the clipboard back. It’s not everyone, but it’s as close as I can get.
“Much better,” she says.
The machine looks like an MRI, but it closes over my head like a coffin. It whirs around me, strange lights flashing in my eyes until I squeeze them shut.
“Don’t,” the doctor says over the speaker. “You need to follow the light with your eyes.”
I follow it back-and-forth, back-and-forth.
“It’s not working,” I say.
“Wait for it.”
I wait. “I don’t feel anything,” I say.
“Wait—”
And then, yes, there it is: that smell of sunlight in my nostrils. The graze of my nose on skin so pale it’s as though it’s never seen the sun. We’re in Anne’s sloppy bed at her parents’ house, behind a closed door that her stepmother will later scold us for closing.
Uncanny Magazine Issue 32 Page 6