To Begin
By Mariya Poe
It was sometime during those years we lived in a one room house on a vast plot of land with dying soil, fox babies, buzzsaw cicadas, and ten-foot cattails. Evenings, we were alone while our pregnant mother tended to our father’s depression in ways we weren’t allowed to see. One of my brothers would walk until he sunk beneath the hills and the other went somewhere else.
We must have had neighbors because a man was there with me, not for the first or last time. I wore the same dress that whole week and he bent down to touch its hem. He pulled lemon slices from the pockets of his jeans. Their wetness had soaked through down the front of him. The fruit was sticky and frayed, already squeezed. He lay the slices in the dirt of the garden and along the pond’s edge. The idea, he said, was to see what would show up to feed on the juice. See the disruption. Our mut followed me close, sniffing each slice, then us, trying to put it all together. The man wound his way through my hair. After he got started, he moved slow. I remember how it was worse because of the citrus on him.
The city’s teaching me to be a different person but the dying soil is in my body. When I’m with a man, as I am right now, my apartment flips. Everytime it’s something like this: we’re having sex on the bed, or the floor, and then we’re clinging to the ceiling. My fingers stick to the plaster. He keeps going. He sees the ceiling behind me but he thinks it’s the floor. His hands search for my hands. I want him to tell me what to do and how to feel. Footsteps from the place upstairs beat against my back. You’re so good, he’s saying. You’re so good. A drop of his sweat falls down, down. Wind blows through the kitchen window and rushes across the apartment below us.
We flip back again and land on the bed right before he’s done while his eyes are shut tight. I imagine his stomach drops like mine but he doesn’t know why. I roll off the mattress onto the hardwood to press my forehead against the cold, hard grooves, and he slides into the sheets.
There was so much light left. I twisted my neck to look at the lemons with dirt and ants all over their yellow. I hoped for some kind of magic. I wanted to see minnows catapulting themselves out of the water, flopping their bodies forward, inch by inch, toward the sour, mysterious thing.
About the Author:
Mariya Poe earned a BFA in writing from the Pratt Institute. She’s the winner of the 2015 Stony Brook Fiction Prize and her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, wildness, New Orleans Review, The Collagist, Mid-American Review, The Adroit Journal, and Sonora Review. She’s the associate editor for Carve Magazine and an editor at 101 Words.
About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:
CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.