Published in "12x12", Coastal Carolina University, 2010 and the Wayfinding issue 8 of Selki magazine, Sitka, Alaska, 2018
She
studies him from the dark silence of the passenger seat. He is
wearing the Night: black jeans, black sweater with sleeves pushed up
to the elbow, tiny star of a diamond in his earlobe. His pale profile
and outstretched arm glow, moon-like, in the green dashboard light.
Left wrist draped across the steering wheel, his hand falls
languorously into the shadows, defined only by the red coal of a
cigarette.
Blue tattoos jump from the white skin of his forearm: the Hindu sanskrit Om, the Taoist yin yang, and on the inside (along the soft part where you'd slide a needle) the Druid design she'd once planned for her own arm. He'd had it inked into his flesh just as she'd drawn it years ago on vellum, with one exception; the intertwined deer had become hounds. She sighs.
His face turns. Eyebrows lift his eyes – a ravaged blue, bright even in the car's gloom – over the edges of his glasses. The thick lenses seem a paradoxical accessory to the black leather motorcycle jacket on the seat between them, to the copper beard, to the fiery sweep of hair she imagines might sear her if she touches it...
He leans toward her. She smells cinnamon oil and tobacco. She envisions the golden god, Shiva, dancing for her, offering flames of desire and destruction.The auburn brows arch higher. “What?”
“Just taking a last look at you,” she murmurs. She closes her eyes, frees her long hair over the back of the seat, and stretches into repose. He turns back to the road, satisfied with her answer.
The future is no more than a thin gray line of sunrise beyond the windshield.
Blue tattoos jump from the white skin of his forearm: the Hindu sanskrit Om, the Taoist yin yang, and on the inside (along the soft part where you'd slide a needle) the Druid design she'd once planned for her own arm. He'd had it inked into his flesh just as she'd drawn it years ago on vellum, with one exception; the intertwined deer had become hounds. She sighs.
His face turns. Eyebrows lift his eyes – a ravaged blue, bright even in the car's gloom – over the edges of his glasses. The thick lenses seem a paradoxical accessory to the black leather motorcycle jacket on the seat between them, to the copper beard, to the fiery sweep of hair she imagines might sear her if she touches it...
He leans toward her. She smells cinnamon oil and tobacco. She envisions the golden god, Shiva, dancing for her, offering flames of desire and destruction.The auburn brows arch higher. “What?”
“Just taking a last look at you,” she murmurs. She closes her eyes, frees her long hair over the back of the seat, and stretches into repose. He turns back to the road, satisfied with her answer.
The future is no more than a thin gray line of sunrise beyond the windshield.
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