Notes from a small pond: Blood

These are the nights. Hot like Vietnam, and muggy, the heat heavy and wet like a blanket drenched in lilac mead. The smell of butterflies. The box fan screaming I’m Trying! plowing hot air, me next to you, salty as the ocean, spooned. Saltwater sweat rolling downward, behind the knees, down the neck, and in the hairline, dripping onto the mattress, like crying.

Saltlick for mosquitoes and, every now and then, a cottony moth that ends up in the corner of the ceiling, shadow like the ghost of a dying angel, wings slow like time ticking. A bat — or a hundred — beat outward from a hole in the oak tree toward mosquitoes, me sensing it, sixthly, and they me, you groaning in your sleep like a drunken child.

My heart thumps in my body like an earthworm’s several, until you show up at the head of the tent, peering in, whispering my name .…

It is 1978.

“You awake?”

“’Course I am. Are you?”

“Come out here .…”

You smell like purple.

I do. Of course, I do. Been waiting all my 15 years of life to do so. My brothers fake at sleeping, their own crew on their way.

Outside, the world is a terrarium. Humid and still, the opposite of winter’s brittle and shattering, time like a clock. Lawns have sprinklers rainbowing tapwater, the music rising and falling in pentuplets: chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka-chick ….

The moon shines, beckoning. I can’t help myself, point upward.

“Would you go there if you could?”

“Probably not.”

“Probably?” but you miss the hint.

“No, then. No. I wouldn’t.”

“Why the hell not?! I would in a second!”

“What’s wrong with here?” you say then, and your looking at me makes me Get It that I’m the one that missed the hint and very likely the opportunity to kiss you — a million million years evolved, beauty transcendent — a nanosecond away from your fat, chapped lips meeting mine, eyes buried like damp, emerald coals, in my brain, stabbed in.

I get smart. Trying so hard. Then I stop trying and just be.

“Nothing,” I say and kiss you bright on the forehead before you can move off or think about not moving off.

We climb the fence and skinnydip in Pinehurst Pool. Crazily, what I notice is your cheekbones, how they erupt out of tawny, Croatian skin — thin, like baker’s paper over a poached pear, dripping water, your mouth smiling and open, your plain white T-shirt covering absolutely everything, except anything, and a dumb-ish pair of Bemidji State gray shorts and no shoes.

You step on glass.

While your foot bleeds, you keep smiling and something in me tells me you like me and something deeper tells me we might love each other. Forever. My life flashes behind closed eyelids. I drink it. Tastes like Hope. And Mexican Vanilla.

“Am I heavy?”

“You’re a feather.”

“I can walk.”

“You’re not heavy, but you are bleeding. You wanna rest?”

“If you do.”

“Only if you do.”

“Only if you do.”

“Just let me know if you feel woozy or wanna stop.”

“Only if you do.”

I carry you home to your rented place next to the telephone company. I devour all your pudding pops, the only thing in your fridge. Your sister asleep. Your mom, too, exhausted, fudge-colored circles on the top of her cheeks under her eyes.

“Good night.”

“You too.”

“Thanks for stopping over.”

“Thanks for carrying me.”

“My pleasure.” (you couldn’t/can’t possibly have known/know the truth of that).

“Not even bleeding anymore.”

“And it doesn’t hurt?”

“Not anymore.” And your lips break open on teeth like porcelain. You kiss me, not me you. Right on the mouth and long.

“I …”

“Wanna go to Jay Cooke tomorrow?”

“Anything you want.” Still spinning.

Still spinning.

Parnell Thill is a Cloquet-based author and marketing executive. Winner of a Minnesota Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest “Columnist of the Year” award in 2017, his book “Killing the Devil and Other Excellent Tricks” is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local booksellers, the Pine Knot News office and at killingthedevil.com