"LONGING"
by Geona Edwards

He bangs in. There is friction of bone and flesh. He reache s heaven, hi s head above the clouds for a pinnacle half-second. Then he falls, lies broken at her side in the bed. The candlelight has painted the walls gray, and the silence burn s his skin. He beats down the urge to move, because he knows the slightest gesture will trigger a landslide of movements, shifting him out of thi s hated space, but, here’s the question, into what?

The two of them have spent the whole day indoors and the result is broken bodies, stale minds and vice-versa. A numbing too-much-ness that repel s him from her, but she is the only identifiable object (within his scope of vision), so he reaches over, touches, instigates. He climbs inside her cave despite a strangling thirst for light. The sun lingers in hi s heart like a dead relative. He is in mourning.

It is twelve, one, two o’clock. They lie in bed and trade little lapping waves of words, inspired by the ceiling. The ceiling is always the last thing they see, a flat, empty plane, an anvil suspended above their heads, and each night it hangs lower. Soon it will graze their noses, then the final crush into two dimensions. His mouth moves: “Carmen, are you awake?” But he himself is not even awake.

He sleeps needlessly and dreams out the text he must read to her: Carmen, remove your body from the road; it’s bottlenecking the traffic of my dreams. Drugged months of courtship are growing moldy in the damp cement bunker of my apartment. What is the world we fear? What war are we waiting out? Some wars you can’t bunker against because they seep inside, or they are already inside; wars against self, where each soldier dies a s he kills. Carmen, fold over me, bend, turn against the wall. I…de…clare…war. I draw my sword, you lay your traps. I’m so in love with you.

“Carmen, want some coffee?” It is late morning and the hibernators are stirring in false hopes of spring, like vain flowers dreaming of skipping over winter and rising again in their vivid prime: “So, what are we going to do today?” As if days could be shaped.

Three hours later they are waking up from an armistice nap and his stomach in its boredom suggests a snack. He hears the water falling over her in the shower, smells the steam as it looks for a way out; but it is trapped and will finally die into the walls. Outside winter is composing its early darkness and his own darkness resonates from within, a s he thinks what a sad and unbearable thing a day is. But the kettle comes to a boil and he’s got the tea mugs ready: the prospect of consumption is a fast-acting balm. She comes out in a pink towel, smiles at the tea and toast on the counter. It’s an upbeat moment, but when they finish eating and sip down their second cup the entire sheet of darkness will have been pulled over everything. The long hours of insanity will lie just ahead, against which they will have to sedate themselves, and each other.

“Carmen, tell me about your hometown.” Beginnings and comparisons. “Carmen, I can’t tell you how much….” Speech by-products of chemical processes. “Carmen, when I was ten I stole a pack of cigarettes and smoked myself sick.” Background check: I’m a person, running deep and far back. I’m a wall and each brick is a composite of past happenings – that’s something we can stand on if the present falls out from under us. They work through the whole gambit of person-to-person fact exchange. Talk burns the hours and the evening seems to go well. But eventually the flame falls low and suffocates. They are still so far away from sleep or eating. Time to gear up the machinery.

But soon his body can do no more, and lies draped across the bed like seaweed sticking to a rock. Carmen, get out of my bed. A you-shaped depression is forming and I’m sure to fall in and break something – or are you bottomless? This bed is just too small for the both of us. Would you please take your pinkie off my thigh? It weighs a fucking ton.

He dresses in a rush amid scarf-tying fiascos, kisses on the cheek and whispered words. He is store-bound and she requests chocolate biscuits and coke. Outside now, walking in winter’s minty sting, he is awake for the first time in thirty-six hours. The store is nearby but he is bent on prolonging the outing. There’s nothing so gloomy as going home to an empty apartment, doubly so when a person, a weighing body, is also there, pretending a contrast to the emptiness.

She will have to make it through the winter alone, unmoor herself from his apartment and its balmy but distorted view of the passage of time. An approaching stranger lift s her face at him and under her knit hat are green eyes and a smile and he feels the surge, painful on the surface of his exhausted flesh but inside the swimming chemicals sing. The girl passes and after a few second s he stops, looks back, watche s her bundled form recede and finally turn a corner. She is going to some apartment, another story of great structural tiering but no content. Cold tears fall a s he thinks of his life’s trajectory: it is looping in winter, and he’s running out of ways to combat the cold.

He can stay with a friend for a few days. Carmen will wait, get angry, worry and call the police. Then she will slowly understand, shaking in the living silence of the place, a ravaged village from which all soldier s have moved on. Goodbye, Carmen. Pick yourself up. You’ve got to try.

He limps into the jungle of his future, using change as a crutch; in a war where every soldier starts wounded, there are no stretcher-bearers.

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Geona grew up in Northern Virginia but managed to escape. He now lives in southern Spain with a girl and a dog. He placed second in the 2003 Fish short story contest and first in the 2004 specficworld.com contest. He has failed to place in many other contests.

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