Lunar Phases: A Triptych by Taylor Leatrice Werner
“You were thinking egg the cop shop. I was thinking you slide over my belly, you slide onto my hand, take your sharp little breaths from my lips.”
Fiction by Taylor Leatrice Werner
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2019 Maiden————
Amy is real. She is right here. Her hair static clings to the front of my sweater. That is the weight of Amy’s head on my shoulder, that moisture is her breath. Amy’s cast off molecules, her biome, her CO2, particulates of who she was when we were little girls. Those are Amy’s hands, one cradling the other, lying loosely, palms up in the space between my knees.
My leg is asleep, but I don’t want to move. The bus bounces in the dark as it conveys us across the middle of nowhere. It’s almost midnight, and so maybe seventeen hours since our folks noticed we’re gone, twenty-four hours since the departure time on our tickets. Halfway to Amy’s Emerald City, Amy’s techie brother’s inflatable mattress, Amy’s favorite vegan hot dog truck, and the wall with all the gum, and Tenzing Momo, with its dragon’s blood resin oil and its fabled loose-leaf teas, and anything else she wants to show me. I want her to show me everything. I want her to let me see her with her hair down when she’s self-conscious because it’s greasy. The hole growing in her molar. The darker skin inside the crack of her ass cheeks, flesh I would open like a thank you card.
Halfway to Seattle, and I’ve got a deadline. Before we pull into the Greyhound station, I want her to know. I’m gonna say, Amy, I love you. No, not like that, I mean I’m telling you, love love. And please don’t ask me if I’m sure. Please don’t smile at me with your mouth only, like you want to go back home.
Last summer, when we got tired of Xbox, you threw your controller down and said what should we do? The heat was so sticky, I thought your controller would lodge in the air. You were thinking draw horns in the yearbook. You were thinking egg the cop shop. I was thinking you slide over my belly, you slide onto my hand, take your sharp little breaths from my lips. I was thinking I press together your breasts, which we used to study in the locker room mirror at the recreation pavilion as they grew, from nowhere, at which time I thought, here comes trouble.
——2019 Mother——
It comes to this: on your knees in the back of a conversion van. Asphalt aggregate stuck in the rug digs into the palms of your hands. Your tits — swollen now, and darkening — have spilled from the top of your bra. They rock painfully with every thrust, and you grunt and say yes daddy, fill my pussy. You know the pain in your voice will be processed through his filter. You don’t have to put a smile on it. To do so would not earn you a tip, or mercy. He stops for a moment. Withdraws. Catches his breath. Continues.
You are fixated on an object in the rear corner of the van. There are empty cans of Steel Reserve, balled up receipts, cigarette butts from an overturned ashtray, but a small plastic square is what catches your eye. A baggie, small enough to roll up and hide in a pacifier. It’s been turned inside out, the residue sucked clean, probably by his very own terrible mouth, the one that leaves its trail of slime on your skin, white skin the sole memento of your itinerant father. You squint at the baggie. This man said he has no yayo, sweetheart, just cash today. Before you got started, he fanned the fives and ones. But Mom taught you to always trust your intuition, to question everything, and you wonder if he’d change his tune if you offered him your asshole.
However, now come the three culminating thrusts, implying that, having got what he came for, he can want nothing you have to bargain with. He backs out and says sorry sweety, and you think he means because it was artless sex. Then the drips glide out of your body, first wetness you feel, and you understand that when he paused, he removed the condom. He feigns surprise. Says, must have come off in there.
You do not fear for your health. You think nothing of the time when you were a little girl, before weeks and hours began, when there was only one moment, rocking on whiny hinges, and your body was undefiled. You don’t think, you bastard, how dare you merge your cells with me. To presume I would be coded anew with your frightful DNA. You think only of yayo. Does he have any? Last week, it was the kind that can be smelled from across the room. The sticky kind, that makes your intestines writhe like snakes, intestinal quasi-orgasm. You wonder if it’s true that multiple men can build a child’s essence, that a child can have multiple fathers. Last, an afterthought, resignation as he wipes off with a blue shop towel: I can’t get any more pregnant.
————2019 Crone
Though it’s been more than seventy years since she was a little girl, she feels like a little girl. Fresh beneath her nightgown, standing on tiptoes on her mother’s smooth wooden stool to replace a jar of cardamom. She used to stand on it just to see the countertop in the house where she was born, eyes level with her mother’s elbow, wanting to lick her mother’s wooden spoon. Whole decades passed and she grew. No one could tell her not to eat cake batter and she ate all she wanted. These days, she eats like a bird. She barely drinks more water than a kitten. She stays up late and rises early and sleeps only a few hours a night. She lives in her four wall house, alone. No one taller to replace jars to the high shelf, or for any other purpose. The world has moved past her, like a younger sibling who says they will catch up in age, but then, does. Everyone else has died. Those younger live on another plane, psychically linked with their gadgetry. She alone stayed behind, wildcrafting, dehydrating, canning, touching paper when she read, checking time as needed on a wrist watchwristwatch, knees pulled up to her ribs, now visible in her chest, so she looks like a washboard woman in the wicker chair on her porch when she watches awkward teenage deer with patchy, uneven coats, conspiring against the wire fence around her bed of carrots.
Most of the time, she stays home. There’s a rusted out Buick in her yard with no engine, no glass in the windows, mushrooms growing from its seats. She no longer rides her bicycle, goes only where she can walk.
Sunlight from the window glints on the cardamom jar’s gold rimmed lid. She hears her breath. She has to reach, and elongating her body squeezes out air. She feels her breasts against the soft knit of her nightgown, feels them warm and alive. The glass makes contact with the wood. She adjusts her grip. Balances the jar on its hip, slides it, her outstretched fingers trembling.
And then, all the spice jars begin to rattle. Her ears move slightly up her skull. The stool shimmies beneath her. She loses the cardamom jar and it falls and hits her mortar and pestle and explodes. She nearly topples from the stool, but rights herself, hears beyond the tinkling glass, a low rumbling. Earthquake, she thinks, and steps down from the stool, careful to avoid the crown of glass points screwed into the lid, which undulates like a coin. She steps into the corner and braces and then the earth bucks with such violence, she is on her hands and knees, and electric lights have gone out. The mason jars leap from the shelves, backlit by windowlight of the afternoon, and seem for a moment to hang in the air. From the other wall come the books, their spines held up as shields, and her animal shock is interrupted by the word, come unbid into her mind: poetry. Her refrigerator hops away from the wall like there’s a demon inside of it, and the door swings open, and bottles fall out and smash, and a wooden bowl of quinoa salad hits the floor with a hollow sound she barely hears over the sustained thunder of hillsides sliding and the earth itself, ripping apart, tearing million-year-old stone into aggregate like paper to confetti, and she cannot believe it’s still going on, she wonders how much longer it can shake, swaying laterally like a dehydrated stone animal, and then, it slows to a stop. A rumbling persists for a few more seconds, stone monster knocking into things as it dives back to the center of the earth, to breathe through the rest of its tantrum. All she hears then is her own breath, coming dry up her throat. She hears that she’s making a sound—mmmmm, mmmmm—with every breath she takes. Her books lie open and face up on the floor, and it occurs to her to go to each one, to see what they say, what messages have risen to the surface. And she gathers that she is not hurt, not so much as a glass cut, and she thinks, my whole life has been like that.
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Header image courtesy of Cristina Troufa. To view her Artist Feature, go here.
Taylor Leatrice Werner earned an MFA in Fiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She's a recipient of Lannan Foundation Scholarships and the Carolyn Walton Cole Endowment Fund in Creative Writing, and was awarded a James T. Whitehead Creative Writing Endowment. She’s taught creative writing at the Taos Charter School, the Dream Tree Project, and the Bellingham Alternative Library.
Taylor lives in Seattle where her son attends a democratic free school and her dog is welcome at most eateries. She’s political, a leftist, and yet, strangely palatable to most of her right-leaning male crew mates in the electrical trade. She enjoys house music, meditation, reading in the bath, and oysters.
