Cotton
Come from your perch on the other side of the room to where I sit with my book and my open pen. I’m still yours this evening. My arms are in your shirt sleeves, my feet in your gray cotton socks. The snow falls out the window in wet, lacy flakes, and the children sleep in their room upstairs with the white noise and humidifiers. You are still mine, and I still think of you in my bed like that. Like that first night we were together. I wore my Fay Wray dress and your body enveloped me like a dark hominid hand. Your lips tasted like cherry tomatoes. You were warm and wet and a little drunk. We fucked in the bedroom while my ex phoned and phoned the living room. Later the phone calls would turn into knocking on the screen door and then a twenty-dollar bill and a love letter taped to the window. It was a summer night and we had earlier seen the Big Dipper while we shared a beer in a courtyard. We walked back to my house and kissed on my back porch. We kissed and walked. I walked backwards. You braced the small of my back. Your feet danced me across the lawn and into the wall of my basement apartment. On the way inside, my hand feeling behind me for the open door, I looked into the night sky like an astronaut glancing back on a glowing Earth. I could see the beauty and motion, the past and present, the cities turning on.
~
Lydia Copeland Gwyn’s stories have appeared in the Journal of
Compressed Creative Arts, Smoke Long Quarterly, Quick Fiction, elimae,
Glimmer Train and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Haircut Stories, is
available from the Achilles Chapbook Series. She lives in New Jersey
with her husband, son, and daughter.