Of Shapes & Shadows June 2005   Click to view Table of Contents Click to view photo gallery Click to view cover story

Fiction

Tomorrow: A Postcard Story
By richard stevenson

 

Tomorrow he'll put this incident to bed. Tomorrow he'll start remembering other nights instead. It will be the night she decided to leave him. Tonight, however, he will start looking for apologies among the bouquets of excuses he might have offered. He will select a long stemmed red rose, only it will not smell like a rose. Roses just don't. Not the store-bought variety anyway. Bred for their appearance only, bred to last only as long as the gesture of love requires, they maintain the clenched bud for as long as it takes to cut their stems and immerse them in water in a vase of intention.

Tonight he'll wrack his brain, looking for causes to match the effect. He has been neglectful. He hasn't shown her the right deference, has presumed on their love and traded up for something else in the presence of his friends. A good time maybe. Not selflessness. He has gotten stoned every day for a week. Acted the fool, ignored her too much perhaps. He has projected too many needs like thorns into her keeping. Has been too needy - not of her affection so much as of the camaraderie of friends. And so while the penumbra of his thoughts has touched her and the curtain on this thought still stirs with the breeze of her every breath, she will pretend she is asleep. And he will try to stir her gently.

It is not that he seeks an audience. He would have preferred separate rooms, but there are too many friends present, and now two couples to a bunk. The single men occupy the hammocks outside. The driver and his girlfriend have the bed in back of the van. Things fell to hand this way as they do, as they must do, when intimacy is a secret still clenched in bud. Only she won't open her eyes, won't gaze on him in the moonlight that stretches like an isthmus between them.

She pretends to sleep and he is reduced to even softer whispers, so his entreaties are not heard by the others. Already they ignore him and pretend he too is asleep. The sheets overhead rustle and soon the couple above are in the throes of their lovemaking. He thinks it shameless, almost brutal, as the thing he most desires in that moment is withheld from him. It is as if a beautiful butterfly were shuddering under the chloroform of moans that envelope him. As if his friend's cock were somehow impaling the two women: his own girlfriend and this stranger feigning sleep beside him. He wants to impale her. One last time while the dying shudder of a mutual orgasm carries all their voices away on a breeze. He is hard. Harder than he's been in weeks, his cock arching like some pupae against the restraints of its chrysalis. He guides its blind head against her mons, but it is no use. She is wearing pantyhose, and try as he might, there is no way he can gain entry through the defiant weave. His pawings at the waistband are repulsed. The moon shudders under the sharp, hard point of his ignorant pride.