SALMACIS AND HERMAPHRODITUS - Nina McLaughlin

 SALMACIS AND HERMAPHRODITUS

  S: All the women of the woods they told me. Pick up the bow. Run the paths. Hunt with us. I saw them. Sweaty. Bruised. Snarled hair stuck with burrs. Animal blood below their nails, dried like ashes on the private part of their wrists. No thank you. It’s good to challenge yourself, said the naiads. Rest feels better when you work for it, they said. I worked for it. The women of the woods chased animals. I had a different hunt.

  H: I was fifteen years old.

  S: While they chase boar, deer, rabbit, beaver, bear, while their skin is snagged on prickers, while their muscles burn from crouching silent and unmoving so not to startle a stag, I lounge by my spring. I comb my hair. I touch myself. I wait.

H: I’d never kissed a girl.

  S: I positioned myself in the morning on moss. My robe ate the dew. My breasts are big as beehives, not like the other naiads, who sweat and run all day, who end up with little lemon breasts. Lying on my side, the softness of my belly dropped, the wide roundness of my hip rising as result. My right-hand fingers in my hair, my left-hand fingertips on moss, sunlight through the trees dancing on my body. Pure allure. The birds and small soft creatures look upon me. They don’t get close. The eyes of the squirrels are black. The nervous birds’ bones I could crush in my palm, crack their little twig ribs and mash the air right out. They don’t get close enough. My body rises and falls slowly with my breath. I watch the sky move on the spring.

S: And then he arrived. He came through the trees into the morning sun by the spring, tentative as a fawn, and I liked this. Son of Aphrodite, son of Hermes, are you lost? Let me help you feel at home, beautiful boy. Let me distract you from your fears. I looked at him and oh, this beautiful young man, this meat. All verge. All cusp. Any minute he would fall from the high ledge of boyhood and land in the bristled plain of being man.

And I liked this, too, this almost there but not all the way, this in-between. Long legs with muscle bulge above the knee. The bones of his ankles like arrowheads. The spread of his chest and its smoothness, I imagined no hair yet on this young man. His clavicles across his shoulders like sticks to bang a massive drum. The juicy swell of his lower lip, that bulge, the perfect seagull M of his upper lip. Eyes not black like the squirrels but pristine as my spring, and revealing him right away untouched. Already I was too excited. I needed calm. I smoothed my robe, positioned it off my left shoulder, pulled my long hair over my right. I bit and wet my lower lip.

H: There was a lady at the edge of the water. Her legs were thick, a lot of her beneath a robe. I was seeing too much of her. She did not look like my mother. There was something hungry in her eyes.

  S: Your mother is lucky to have had you inside her, I said.

  H: I don’t remember what that was like.

S: Your brothers and sisters are lucky, too, if you have them, to be able to look upon you as their sibling.

  H: I don’t have them.

  S: And very lucky was the nursemaid whose tits you tongued and sucked, whose breasts you emptied. And here I moved my hand down and absently touched my own, felt my nipple firm against my palm, just the way I wanted it. And I saw his eyes follow my hand, just the way I wanted it.

  H: I don’t remember—

  S: Luckiest of all is your girlfriend or your bride-to-be, because I can only assume you have one. It’s all right. Oh, it’s all right. Don’t worry. We can love each other secretly. No one will know except the birds and the squirrels and the leaves, and they’re voiceless when it comes to this sort of thing, I promise.

  H: This sort of thing?

  S: The blood rose to his cheeks. And I suspected that blood was gathering elsewhere as well. And my stomach dropped into my hips in that expectant throb, that heated pulse that precedes the best thing.

H: I watched my mother butcher a rabbit once. She punched its head to break its neck and the lights went out of its eyes, and then she knifed it open and tugged out all its guts, all those dark wet interior parts. She tossed them to the dogs. They lapped the floor for so long. I didn’t like it. I was seeing more than I should see. I didn’t want to know. I had a queasy feeling. Now I felt this way again.

  S: Here. Don’t worry. Here. Just a small kiss.

  H: I hadn’t seen looks before like the ones she gave. They reached into my guts with fingers on the inside that tickled. It didn’t feel right. And also at the same time it felt like something I’d been approaching, maybe since the beginning, and I had a sense somehow that this is what I faced, this was what was coming for me, this new realm was opening to me, these looks and swells and smells. But I wasn’t ready.

 S: Like this. Here. Just a small kiss. Like a sister or a friend. Like this.

  H: I don’t think I—

  S: Here. Just quiet. You don’t have to worry. Like this.

  H: I took steps back.

S: He took steps back. Though the hunt had begun as soon as he stepped into the clearing, now in earnest it began. They don’t know it, and I don’t tell them, but the naiads’ pleasure in the hunt is the same as mine—tension and the release of it. That’s all I’m ever after. They chase and stalk and aim and shoot and if they do it right, they catch their game and kill it dead. Thrill born out of effort. If in the woods you were to pause on the path and a deer emerged from the trees and instead of leaping away in frighted flight, it walked toward you, brown dew eyes glittering all fearless, and it offered itself to you, displaying its flank in easy range—where would be the challenge? And therefore, the satisfaction? Better to leave the eager deer standing there offering itself and try to find one that will make you earn your pleasure. I’ve never wanted the ones that offer themselves up to me, who beg to touch my beehive breasts, who tell me they want to lose themselves in my soft thick curves. Too easy. No eventual moment of surrender when the fight leaves them and they’re yours. This is what I live for. I do not need a quiver or a bow.

 H: I kept stepping backward away from her touching and kissing.

  S: Those steps back, that resistance, it heated me and made me juiced more than any sort of beauty, more than any sort of sculpted form or shining smile or brains or smell.

  H: She just kept coming.

  S: He stepped back and I felt the wet between my legs. You don’t want it? I will make you want it. Here. Just let me—doesn’t it feel good? There? Doesn’t that feel good? Like this? So gentle, so slow. Let me—

  H: Listen, if you don’t stop I’m going to leave.

  S: Okay, okay, okay. I stepped back.

  H: She stepped back.

  S: It’s all yours. Enjoy the spring. I leave you to it. I slipped away. He thought me gone. He couldn’t see me and that was fine. I crouched like the naiads do, my knees on the leaves, waiting for my meat the way they wait. I opened my robe and felt the weight of my breasts in my hands. I peered between the leaves. He paced the lip of the spring.

  H: I paced the lip of the spring. I tried to calm down. She left. I was glad when she left.

  S: He paused, dipped his foot into the water, I could feel him feel it.

  H: I touched the water with my toes. I wanted to be in it.

  S: He wanted to be in it.

  H: I pulled off my shirt.

  S: He pulled off his shirt and folded it and placed it on a stump. A pimple on his right shoulder, raised and red. Young men, their oils.

  H: I felt the sun on my shoulders. I missed my mother.

  S: He bent and he undid his pants and he slipped out of them and I saw all of him.

  H: I took off my breeches.

  S: My teeth clenched to trap the moan.

  H: I dove in.

  S: He’s in! His whole naked self. Now was the time. I let my robe fall and dashed waterward and slipped in.

  H: There’s a rippling in the water.

  S: I swam quickly.

  H: What’s there?

  S: I wrapped myself around him.

  H: She’s wrapped herself around me. All at once all around me. I didn’t want it. Get away. I tried to get away.

  * * *

  S: He was everywhere against me, and he was trying to get away. I moaned to feel all his muscles tensed against me, fighting me off, trying to swim. I wrapped round tighter. Like this, just still, like this, I’m yours, be calm.

  H: She’s all around me and I felt sick. It’s too animal. I didn’t want to know. It’s as though she’s all tentacles, some massive octopus, some kraken pulling at me, tugging me in toward her, her legs knot themselves around my legs and she opens herself and is rubbing all over me. I don’t want this. STOP.

S: STOP, he said, and I held him tighter. I pressed myself into him. We both breathed heavily. I knew any second would come the surrender. I have to hang on a little longer, a little tighter. I’ve been here before. They always surrender. They always give in. Like this, like this. Just relax. You’re going to like it. I know you’ll really like it. Trust me, you can trust me. Relax, it’s all right. Just give it to me.

  H: No no no no no. Stop. STOP.

  S: I rubbed and rubbed myself on him and I was so close, I was so so close, and his arm was pressed against my breast and trying to push me off and I opened and tightened and all the muscles in my hips were tight and clenching and it was almost I can feel it almost there there there there oh god, I cried out, oh gods of Olympus please, let us be joined forever, please let us never be apart.

  H: What’s happening?

  S: Oh he’s in he’s in. I’m all around him.

 S: Oh he’s in he’s in. I’m all around him.

  H: She’s everywhere.

  S: He’s in. I’m in. He’s entered me I’ve entered him, the gods gave exactly what I’d wanted. We’re swimming in each other now.

  H: I’ve entered her. She’s entered me. Some strange combining.

  S: Entwining.

  H: And entwined.

  S: Our bodies joined in the deepest way.

  H: We’re one.

  S: We’re both.

  H: This changed home, two forms one body. A she becomes me. Becomes him. I a he become her.

  S: We fondle ourselves

  H: Our self

  S: Like this

  H: Wait I like that

  S: Just like this

  H: Touch me

  S: There

  H: Keep touching

  S: My beehive breasts. His waist-down manhood.

  H: We are both,

  S: Blurred and joined,

  H: And neither.

FINIS