L’Appel Du Vide (The Call of the Void) by Flint
“…I would empty my pockets to him, loose change jangling like the chain around my throat.”
Fiction by Flint
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It didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time. Not that I was thinking about the relative merits of the proposal. If I’m honest, it wasn’t about thinking at all. A tiny voice resonated up, up, up through my skin and slipped past the barriers of blood and bone to echo in my blind spot. It was a seduction without roses or romance, his teeth sharp, my curiosity feverish.
I don’t pretend to know what he wanted, other than me, turned inside out, seams showing, his fingers threaded through puffy tufts of stuffing, the sound of ripping, followed by an unraveling as quiet as my throat-caught moans filling his mouth. I wanted his wanting, and if the price was this turning, this tearing, I would empty my pockets to him, loose change jangling like the chain around my throat.
Bad or good, the idea was mine. I courted the danger, hair spiraling down to my waist, thighs flashing beneath a skirt tight as a hand on my hip, and those boots he’d commented on in his office, after class, years before anything would happen between us. That was the thrill, the hairpin turn on the seaside cliff, the held breath and his hand on my cheek, wind-slapped and stinging.
I’d like to blame it on the wind, gusting, me, teetering on the edge.
For years and years, my ear had been cocked to the siren song of women, gorgeous and wrecked in their sea-washed coves, calling me over, calling me deep inside. They called, and I came.
Then came my obedient desire. My bruised knees and my begging. The pleasure of putting my mouth around the words, yes, and Sir. The fathomless bliss of flying, and falling, from such a great and terrible height, his tongue raking the coals into a trickle of sweat sliding down between my breasts, down like the milk I would soon spill over my heavy lip, a rivulet cold as his white-blue eyes now warm and pooling between my legs, the ground rushing up in a shattering gasp, his fingers pressed against my parted lips, hushing my cries.
I’d like to blame it on his hand at the small of my back, my footing a battle long lost.
I can’t even blame myself, or the crook-toothed smile of the abyss, beckoning. My Alice in Wonderland tumble down, down, down into that bottomless wanton lust is dearer to me than I dare say, and if truth be told, were I to find myself up there again, up there on the edge with him, I would look, and I would leap, faithful as a dog.
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Header image courtesy of Fiona Roberts. To view her Artist Feature, go here.
Flint a is queer writer, activist and performance artist with an abiding interest in hybridity, performativity and generative genre-tampering, and an MFA in Writing from the School of Critical Studies at CalArts. Her work has been published and performed here, there and elsewhere—including the theatre arts anthology Staging Social Justice and the introductory issue of Two Hawks Quarterly, where her poem, 'In Praise of Two Hawks Fucking,' inspired the journal's name. Her memoir, Blood, was a finalist for the University of New Orleans’ 2017 Press LAB Award.