Chapter 37 Itch
Itch
I now pray for the architect’s competency of this lighthouse for a whole new storm, to think how my screams and moans could shatter these windows.
Being pressed against its bricks, grasping in between its mortar for hand-holds, we scrape away the moss and lichen to write hieroglyphics of our bodies.
I grapple against this monument of safety, praying for its support as Lir and I try to crumble it to the ground.
Can these bodies of soft flesh bulldoze this isle of sharp basalt into soft silky sand?
I don't know—but, it sure seems like we’re trying.
This rock has become a church of pleasure which I gladly bow to as its most ardent disciple.
I can’t believe there was ever any distance between our bodies, how could water and time ever have separated us?
When we were made to fit together just as the water flows up to the shore, the rock will wear away to become closer and closer, eventually not being able to pick out every grain of sand from the water as it falls through my fingers.
“Lir! I’m still human…” I huff exhausted, my breath rising only inches before it disappears into the mist which surrounds us like gray dove wings holding in our combustible heat.
He wraps all around me, pampering me with his mouth and hands.
Cupped and soothed all over my sore frame.
His smile parts to coo me, “Have we made enough love to satisfy my voracious lover?” Kissing my shoulder between his lovingly satiric words he moves up along my collarbone and neck.
“Are you finally content? Have I finally satisfied you, hm?” He purrs.
While he nibbles a bit to tease me and I retort with my own breathless taunts, “Oh, me? The one who is just seducing innocent you to no end?” I fawn backwards in jest. “You beg ‘no more, no more’, but I am not a sympathetic God!” I pull his face close, clutching it just a touch harshly, I sarcastically continue, “When I see that wholesome little face—“ He looks at me with a most lecherous smirk. “I just must devour you up!” I laugh.
I give him little love bites while tickling up his side. He laughs as we flop into a tide pool, our hair braiding itself into the sugar-kelp that wraps around us. That is, until my stomach growls.
“But really, I do need to eat something soon or I wont be able to make fun of you so poignantly,” I say as I press my pointer finger into his chest, tracing little swirling outlines in his skin.
“What would you like for our fine dining tonight my love? Lobster? Mussels? Perhaps a tuna, if I can wrestle it to the shore?” He says grinning and flexing enough just on the edge of ritualistic flaunting.
“Aw, no hardtack?” I say pouting jokingly. “Whatever you can manage Lir, I’m not picky.” I wave my hands to show the shape of a fish I’m miming taking a bite out of.
He laughs as he pulls me closer into his embrace. I think he is going to start kissing me again, but he pauses and rustles with something at the side of his head. “What is it? Something bothering you?” I inquire.
Fumbling for a second, he eventually un-clicks one of the gold rings on his right ear.
It looks so comically small in the middle of his palm, so perfectly dainty as it glints against the backdrop of his deep skin.
He takes my hand, so tenderly, as if it is the most precious thing he has been lucky enough to hold.
He hovers over each finger as her rubs warm circles with his thumb, contemplating which one would best accommodate the small loop.
Just as he reaches the first knuckle of his chosen digit he looks up at me questioningly. Without words I nod. When the ring is fully slipped onto my hand I begin to stutter, “You don’t know what this means—”
“I know exactly what it means, Andrea.”
All I can think to do is reply with a kiss, the only thing I can return as a gift to him in this moment. Burying my fingers in his hair I wrap myself all around him. I am supported by not only his hands, but his heart and soul.
I think this is going to turn back into what we were doing moments before—even though I had been so sure I could take any more of it. But, he releases me.
“So that you always think of me, even when I am away.”
“I could never not think of you. Like, the radio recordings, like the spiral of the stairs, like this ring’s infinite loop—“ I look down at how the hinged seam has become perfectly flush, almost invisible to the naked eye. “You are always weaving in and out of my mind.”
His hands remain cupping my face just a little longer, his fingers massaging my temples and the nape of my neck, as if to physically push himself into that place. To leave microscopic indentations of his fingerprints on my skin to further mark me as his.
Eventually, he pulls back, just as I thought I would melt in his grasp.
Silently, he pushes himself up out of the pool and into the channel, twisting and turning to fit between the rocks down to the water’s edge.
Did he always have to squeeze between each one like a maze?
Or does this island just feel smaller now that we’ve rolled all over every inch of it.
Sitting nude on the rocks, I am suddenly aware of the cold air suckling Lir’s warmth away from my skin. I look down admiring his ring, my ring which shines softly. Just out of focus, just beyond my hand—something else glints in that same light.
I look down at my bare thighs. The skin just beginning to pucker up from the seas cold breeze. The goosebumps in flushed clumpings are starting to rise from my scales—
Scales?
The little iridescent slivers are scattered over my legs and abdomen.
I scrape at them watching them lift when I scratch with my nails, falling away like snowflakes reflecting the light before disappearing into the rocks.
They must be ones that have stuck to me from Lir.
We have been so wrapped up in each other, with so much friction.
Back when I was just a young girl, I remember my hands glittering in the sunlight with pieces of fish skin after cleaning a trout.
Imagining myself to have become some fairy of the moors, adorned in powdered magic.
But I was just a girl, covered in the sacrificial fish blood of dinner, nothing magical or special at all.
Down in the cold pools, I pick and pull at the little painful thorns glistening all over me.
As if I rolled in shattered glass they leave behind little bits of bleeding puckered skin.
My pallor flesh becoming bruised and exposed the more I panic to remove them.
I scrub until the redness becomes too much to bare, their small indents becoming moon craters on my skin.
Feeling like I’ve reached all of them, exhaling into half a second of reprieve, that is until my stomach suddenly drops when I feel the itch from the ones I can’t reach in the middle of my back.
Running up the stairs to the only mirror in my quarters, in the dimly lit room I try to reach and see where the rogue arrows have been stabbed into me.
My vision crimson in determination to pull out every last one clouds my pain.
I can no longer feel their barbed edges, only being fueled by an obsessive compulsion to remove these foreign objects from my tissue.
My legs shake as I step back and see my pale form, bleeding tiny pin pricks all over, as if thrown out into a bramble of pleasure and dragged kicking and screaming into reality.
I breathe almost hyperventilating, suddenly feeling a growing distance from my body.
This flesh no longer the porcelain doll I have been mindlessly pushing around for years.
I am the breathing, bleeding animal who is standing in front of me.
My chest rapidly rises and fills with the salty air, gulping it down in full bites instead of trying to filter it with my teeth.
In the reflection of the mirror, to the left of this strange screaming creature that looks back at me—through the window, strange gray shapes move in the water.
That can’t be right…
The whales shouldn’t be back until next year’s spring equinox.
For a second, I think this is just another nightmare because the shape they swim in cannot be real, cannot be natural except for in the places they swim inside my mind.
In a perfect spiral, like a giant dead nautilus coming to the surface in a bloated death float, they swim circling over and over again, coiling on the surface of the water.
Whipping my head up quickly towards the ceiling, clicking and static leaks through the floor of the above me. Slowly growing louder into a hummingbird-heart quickness that echoes the shake in my hands and the tremors in my chest.
Frantically, I run down to the water house to try and wash away some of the raised bumps and pain but the fresh water burns more than any of the salt spray rising from the ocean.
Suddenly, a different noise moves sluggishly across the sea, like molasses flowing through the rocks.
Scrambling so quickly upright, I almost lose my balance on the slick stonecrop covered rocks.
Looking across the gray and black landscape taking in its calm silence, my hair whips around me as I cup my ears to focus on the strange hollowness.
Every muscle in my body tightens with involuntary speed as I stand as a tall antenna, using any animalistic internal tool at my disposal to try and calculate the origins of the sound.
Then again—but closer!
Is the military back already?
First, all I can see is a flicker in the mist, an orange glow like a striking match. Then, an eerie howl then moves through the spires of stone that stretch out beyond the shore. Like a kraken awoken from the deep, a large black shape emerges from the fog.