Fleeting. (429 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.44 on 9 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by earth collapse (View user info) at 2009-03-17 17:24:52 EDT
She would take us by the hand, lead us down to the water's edge or into the forest and she would watch us as we took our clothes off. She would put her mouth on our bodies, kiss us, smile real big when we came and then she would lay next to us while running her hands across our skin, our chests, our backs, our naked bodies, because she loved us, all of us. There was no jealousy, no resentment. She was, in a way, more than our lover, she was also our Mother. She'd take care of us when we got too high or too drunk, and she would make us feel loved, and we loved her. And occasionally she would sleep with me at night, in my bed, and maybe I lied, sometimes I would feel jealous. Sometimes I wanted her all to myself, I wanted all of her, just me, no one else, because she understood me, understood my body and my mind, and when she would disappear with Sean, or Jared, or Toby, I'd feel a sense of betrayal. And maybe she did love me, maybe even more than the others, but she never told me and for an entire summer she was there at the Quarry, that big smile and those eyes that just knew you, beyond everything else, and that told you, made you feel wanted, alive, young, and all those things.
And I think I might have told her once how much I loved her. I think I was stoned, maybe a little drunk, but I remember she just looked at me for a long time and then put her hands down my pants and I came. Maybe that was her way of telling me something, maybe that she knew, or that she felt the same way. Or maybe she just wanted to shut me up.
I remember her hair, the curly blonde locks, her pale, but not too pale skin, and I remember the way she'd pat my stomach after I came, as if to say 'good job.'
Sometimes she would talk about her past. She'd whisper stories of her childhood, or she'd talk about her parents. Sometimes she'd tell me stories about her brothers, and one time, laying next to me, she said, "I was eleven, and we had this tree behind our house, and my younger brother was six or seven," and she began curling my hair between her fingers, "and the tree was mostly rotted away, but every spring there would be blossoms, a few, and I can't recall what kind of tree it was, but my father used to always say that it was the 'ugliest damn tree he'd ever seen' and that he was going to 'cut it down one of these days.' He told us not to climb on it, but of course, one day my brother climbed all the way to the top, which wasn't really all that high, and I kept telling him to come down or else Dad was going to whoop his ass when he got home." She sighed. "And well, he did come down. The branch he was standing on just cracked and he fell to the ground with a thud and just lay there, not moving, and then he started crying. He'd broken his arm. He wore a cast for what seemed like a year, and it didn't matter that he had broken his arm, because he still got his ass whipped when Dad found out. You see, the broken arm was for being stupid and the belt across his ass was for disobeying him." She laughed a little, stopped, and then started again, "He was a marine, had been in Vietnam, a real tough guy, real manly, you know? I never saw him cry."
And then she climbed on top of me, slid me in, and then fucked me.
Sometimes the stories were hard to listen to. Some were sad, and sometimes I wondered if she were lying to me. She told me once, and this was when she was about six, her father was a drunk then, a violent drunk, and he would come home in the middle of the night on an absolute rampage, breaking things, screaming, and he would terrorize them, hitting the wall above their heads, and sometimes them, and this one night, she said, "he had come home real angry, and her older brother (seventeen maybe), stood in the doorway to their room, and when her father came down the hall he saw him standing there in front of the door with these bloodshot eyes and smelling thick of whiskey, and he says to him, 'not tonight,' and in the morning there was blood on the walls, on the carpet and on their door." Her father had beaten the shit out of him because, 'he was a real tough guy, a Marine, with these faded tattoos and he knew how to kill people. Probably the only thing he was ever good at."
She would take turns sleeping in our beds at night when we weren't at the Quarry, usually sneaking her in through our bedroom windows, and she would stay until the morning and then she would disappear. In many ways she was like a ghost, or a dream, real, but not quite real, and actually, more like a dream is fleeting. She was fleeting, that's what I remember most.
But we all loved her and shared her and she shared her love between us, and maybe I do resent her now, because towards the end of summer, some cool night in August with the cicadas droning on in the weeds, she made love to me for the last time in the Quarry, in the water, and she squeezed her thighs around my hips and said, "Come inside me." and I did. We fell asleep next to the campfire, next to Sean and Toby and Jared and the next morning she was gone and we never saw her again.
'Where's Julie?' someone asked.
'She must have left,' someone said, 'Must have gone back home,' wherever home was.
It wasn't quite the same afterwards, but in truth, nothing really changed. School came as well, and so did winter, and we didn't go to the Quarry very often and by the next summer we had all but forgotten her, at least everyone else did.
I would dream about her from time to time, floating next to me in the Quarry, or lying next to me in my bed, naked, sometimes patting my stomach, sometimes telling me stories.
It wasn't till a couple years later I found out that she had gone home, back to Tennessee I think, and she must have hitchhiked, or maybe she had taken some money from Toby (he was always 'losing' money) and caught a greyhound bus. And I found out that she left Tennessee, and I can't be sure where she went, maybe to California, because she was always talking about going there, but it doesn't really matter. I like to think she's happy now, and I still find myself thinking and dreaming about her, and hoping that she'll sneak in through my window one night and maybe will still be there in the morning, but probably not, because she was always like a dream, real, but not quite real. Fleeting.
User Reviews
Submitted by RoadSong (user info) at 2009-03-19 02:59:26 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
You never know what might slither in that open window...
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2009-03-18 13:09:49 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by kovalevmk (user info) at 2009-03-18 09:37:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Shlongy (user info) at 2009-03-17 21:34:35 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
Oh yeah... I remember you.
You hate -2's and you're gonna fuck Shlongy up somehow. I stumbled across your "threatening" reviews to me lately.
Submitted by SgtHartman (user info) at 2009-03-17 17:51:29 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
A for awesome
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2009-03-17 17:46:43 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Yozz (user info) at 2009-03-17 17:33:35 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
WTFINRAT
Submitted by simple_catalyst (user info) at 2009-03-17 17:33:20 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
"E" for effort.
Submitted by GodChicken (user info) at 2009-03-17 17:27:39 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
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