Eros, Manifest
by
MK Sturdevant
The early storm had changed the smell of the house overnight. She opened the door and looked out. The air hurt. Brown oak leaves pushed out against their white load, the pine boughs looked gray and black from where she stood. These, like all the colors in a beard.
She picked up a box of matches and shook it. The tinder scratched against the cardboard, morning’s first noise.
There was no way of knowing what he was doing at this very moment. He was and he was not gone. Eros doesn’t abide by distinctions. Eros arises as its own thing, as a being born when bodies die in the terrible, unpredicted experience of each other. Eros is never understood, it is worse than love.
Among things she grasped more clearly were the distance in miles between her front door and his, his process for making paint, and how he hung his underwear to dry. These facts weren’t useful anymore. She only knew the dried sticks she was breaking and splintering with her bare hands were the prefect size for shoving under the main log just now coming alight, the immolation effecting a useful heat.
Next, water. Then coffee. Some cleaning.
It felt easier this way, without contact, with all communication turned off. And anyway, even if skin does hang on a body so well that some other body desires it, still the two would both starve trying to eat such a thought, wouldn’t they.
Agreeing with herself, she hung up a wet rag.
But then, we prostrate ourselves before marriage, the cruciform fixture of two peers for whom all questions of skin whither at the foot of impossible categories: forever, one, everything.
She stoked the fire, hard, and jabbed a red tongue of flame. One pang of heat swelled under her wrist. It fueled a memory but she pushed it away.
No one gets everything. This fire wasn’t everything, but it was something. She refused to tie up her soul again with more than something. She relished the peace of holding nothing at all to be desirable. Her pinky finger spun a deep blue swirl under the middle of the lowest log.
She looked up.
A pair of wings was wrestling off snow in mid-air. She went out. Cut into the snowy ground, by something like the tracks of a small mammal or the frottage of an abstract modernist, were two shapes: a zero, and a one.
The snow was a sign, it was him, it was gorgeous, a dangerous impasto of diamonds. She knelt down and brought it to her mouth then buried her bare arms in it: first the one, sustaining her faith in the live wire, then the zero, holding it open.
She picked up a box of matches and shook it. The tinder scratched against the cardboard, morning’s first noise.
There was no way of knowing what he was doing at this very moment. He was and he was not gone. Eros doesn’t abide by distinctions. Eros arises as its own thing, as a being born when bodies die in the terrible, unpredicted experience of each other. Eros is never understood, it is worse than love.
Among things she grasped more clearly were the distance in miles between her front door and his, his process for making paint, and how he hung his underwear to dry. These facts weren’t useful anymore. She only knew the dried sticks she was breaking and splintering with her bare hands were the prefect size for shoving under the main log just now coming alight, the immolation effecting a useful heat.
Next, water. Then coffee. Some cleaning.
It felt easier this way, without contact, with all communication turned off. And anyway, even if skin does hang on a body so well that some other body desires it, still the two would both starve trying to eat such a thought, wouldn’t they.
Agreeing with herself, she hung up a wet rag.
But then, we prostrate ourselves before marriage, the cruciform fixture of two peers for whom all questions of skin whither at the foot of impossible categories: forever, one, everything.
She stoked the fire, hard, and jabbed a red tongue of flame. One pang of heat swelled under her wrist. It fueled a memory but she pushed it away.
No one gets everything. This fire wasn’t everything, but it was something. She refused to tie up her soul again with more than something. She relished the peace of holding nothing at all to be desirable. Her pinky finger spun a deep blue swirl under the middle of the lowest log.
She looked up.
A pair of wings was wrestling off snow in mid-air. She went out. Cut into the snowy ground, by something like the tracks of a small mammal or the frottage of an abstract modernist, were two shapes: a zero, and a one.
The snow was a sign, it was him, it was gorgeous, a dangerous impasto of diamonds. She knelt down and brought it to her mouth then buried her bare arms in it: first the one, sustaining her faith in the live wire, then the zero, holding it open.
NUNUM
Blending Flash Fiction & Art
