She was combing her hair in the mirror. Bright silver teeth flashed through the peals
of her red hair, still slick with bathwater, sticking to her neck as she dragged the
knots from the strands. The lamplight made her gleam. They sweltered in the heat;
the sun had blistered the summer sky, the air thin, the light bright and wide and
blinding. In this heat, everything slowed. Women in petticoats, men in their starched
collars. Choking themselves with neckties. The protestant ethic raised up to
nauseating heights, which holds such virtue in discomfort. Before her vanity, putting
down the comb, Rosalind’s back was bowed. The notches of her spine were a row of
gentle curves along the last layer of her stifling dress. Robert’s nightshirt hung slack
from his shoulders, the cloth translucent and sticking to his chest and back. The
bedclothes had been discarded for the air, the curtains shifting over the open
window through which glowed the horizon, its bright slash of light that glowed in its
nostalgia for the day past.
There was a bowl of water and an ewer beside the bed; he stooped over it, taking up
the hard cake of soap, and washed the day’s sweat from his face. The water was the
same fevered temperature as the air. He dried himself with a hand towel but when
he looked into the folds of flannel he saw a bright smear of blood. The surface of the
water, too; taut, reflective, it was broken by a clouded burst of red. He watched it as,
like smoke, it diffused and dissipated, overwhelmed, unable to contain itself and all
its difference.
In the daylight the mauve and cerise flowers that blossomed on the wallpaper
seemed to shiver but now they were still, somber, but the heat still clung like a low
fever. He had smelled blood all day—he was used to its dissonant scent. The walls
were thick with their blood; they had lost so much, the pair of them, to break the
distance between them, to split and separate so that they, in all their futility, could
attempt a new wholeness. He breathed; he could feel his head tilting with the
maddening vertigo of the land his sister had raised. It was too familiar. He shut his
eyes to it. He dabbed beneath his nose before folding up the towel and lying it aside.
The borders of his body swelled and bled. He moved to lie down in the bed where,
months before, he had struggled to comprehend this reality. It still caught him in its
tide. Now the church-bell tolled the night’s hour with its dyadic, metallic clang.
His sister came and laid beside him in their shared bed. He watched her settle on her
side, the line of her back to him. He moved close to her and laid a hand against her
waist; she burned under his touch, tensed, stilled, breathed one long, heavy breath
against the thick air. His palm slid over the rough linen of her nightdress; she could
afford finer but never wore it, even when he had, last Christmas, bought her a slip of
silk to wear to sleep—the cloth so much harder to procure now that Columbia had
seceded, but he managed—and it still hung, new and shimmering, in her closet,
untouched. He knew why; she found it egregious in the way it clung to her skin, how
it touched her, how it slid over her breasts and edged between her thighs the way
the meaner cloth did not. But in this heat even the most rasping touch turned
sensuous.
Her skin was layered with a film of sweat that made her shine; he watched as she
savored his hard-earned touch. He had made the same mistake for so long—of
thinking she was made of porcelain, or alabaster in which glowed a hard and
palpitating core of light. There was no light in her, nor him; no illumination but what
they lit between them. She was made of flesh as opaque and desirous as his own.
She laid her cold cheek in the crook of his elbow as he held her, her hand reaching
up to twine her fingers with his own. His other palm slid down the curve of her hip
and reached, then, for her nightdress’s stiff hem. He kissed away the beads of sweat
that shone along her shoulder. He spoke against her starry skin.
"Show me how you touch yourself."
That morning the blood had seemed drained from her face; her brow cold despite
the heat, her cheeks pale. She had peeled the layers of her dress from her body to lie,
now, in her shift. Her belly was in a vise; there was a heavy linen napkin strapped
between her legs. Her voice was firm, factual.
“I’m menstruating.”
“I know.”
Shifting in his arms, Rosalind turned to look at him for a long moment; his face was
flushed, the familiar points of his freckles burning against his cheeks, his hair
mussed like a schoolboy's over his brow. She touched his lips; blood flowed into the
creases of her fingertips, left its dark red marks on the corner of his mouth. Her
eyes, impassive, slid to meet his.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I know.”
Her gaze softened. He clutched at her like a child, the chambers of their minds and
hearts as close as they could be in these twinned bodies that were never meant to
touch. They had been split; there was no contraption for becoming, like the
confluence of waters poured into one jar, one in their adoration. Only the rush of
their blood—only their touch and all the other overwhelming measures of their
senses. Like a burning bough of firewood shifting, suddenly, in the grate and sending
a shower of sparks, she kissed him without reticence. He could taste his blood; soon
she turned to lie in his embrace once again.
His arms came around her; his breath was on her neck. She laid her cheek against
the pillow. Following the length of her thigh he dragged up her nightdress, the plain
lace of its hem trailing her skin, until he had brought it to her waist. With her help he
pushed away her stained underclothes; now he laid his palm flat against her bare
flesh, perched, waiting, until it slipped across to her front. She trapped his searching
hand between her thighs for a long moment, then firm, steady, her fingers slipped
beneath his own to follow his request. He felt them as they slid against herself once,
twice, self-consciously; he pressed with his fingertips and she gave a short,
involuntary cry. He placed his lips to her neck; they smelled of salt and inescapable
heat—the metallic rush of blood enveloped them both. By her guidance he felt the
shape of her. He bled. His head throbbed with the motions of her fingertips. He felt
her tense against him.
Soon her own hand left his and instead grasped him by the wrist. He paused his
movements, unsure, until she dragged his palm down to cup her cunt. He slid a
finger inside her and she coiled, dragging her knees up, her back arching against his
chest. He only held her more firmly; her grip on his wrist tightened, then released.
He pressed himself, hard, against the small of her back. He left a trail of blood along
her neck—his fingers were slick with her own.
He heard her, through the haze of heat, whisper his name, call for him with that
sobriquet that could only come close to what they were, could only circle the
significance of their bodies. Here, it lost its meaning and hung heavy on him; he
raised himself up and watched, kissing at her flushed skin, as she touched herself.
Her eyelashes trembled above the sharp line of her cheekbones, webbed with blue
veins which rushed with the truth of her devotion. At once she cried out, her free
hand coming to stifled the sound in the reserved way he knew. He pulled her close,
stilling the wanton trembling of her spine against his chest. Their blood mingled; it
was on his fingers when he grasped at her waist and kissed her mouth. Long, dark
stains; it lined her nightdress, now slid wantonly to her breasts, trapped between
their bodies. She pulled it from her body, lying bare before him but for the sheen of
sweat that made her gleam. Long tendrils of her wet hair stuck to her cheeks as if
she had swam to lay with him on the shore, her chest rising and falling with the
sound of the sea inside her.
He put a questioning hand to her knee and she parted them for him; he settled
between her thighs, his hands braced against the disheveled bed. Always impatient,
she dragged her legs around his waist and drew him inside her. He gasped; she
pressed her palms to the small of his back, the sweat-slicked skin stretched over
muscles that stirred and strained with every shudder of his hips. From his place
above her he saw the smatter of his blood as it dropped on her neck, made a trail
along her collarbone. It smeared under her fingers as she brought them to touch
where the drops had fallen.
“Robert,” she said gently. He shut his eyes, wiping at his bloody nose with his sleeve.
“It’s nothing.” His voice was quick and breathless. He bent to kiss her. There was
nothing but the warmth and press of her body and the taste of blood between their
tongues. Soon, soon, the same sound she had made came from his own throat,
deeper, more roughly, pressed against her neck where he laid his fevered brow as
he trembled, suddenly, with his own weight. She cradled him inside her, the twinned
beating of their hearts thrumming only inches apart, their mouths red. They were
littered pieces of themselves, a whole never to be composed of their fragments, no
truth to be read in their scattered parts. They were wounded from want. He pulled
away from her, irreparably stained.
She watched his labored breath; she had given him so much of herself. But on her
skin, their blood looked only like a trace of a fox’s kill on snow. Rising, she took up
the cloth at the bedside and wiped her throat and thighs before she returned to their
bed.