Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [41]
“You the butter-tongued one it seems to me.”
I leaned forward until my face was close to hers. She turned the joint around, tucked the lit end in her mouth, and kissed me so that the smoke shotgunned into my lungs. I melted into her ribs, pushing my hips against her thighs. She kept pushing smoke into me until the room seemed to rock unsteadily and my hands started to roam over her bunched and shaking shoulders.
Toni hadn’t seemed to draw a breath through all that long speech, but when I slid into her arms she was breathless, and so was I.
“Do me.” The words came out in a grating whisper. “Do me right.”
“Oh, girl!” Her voice was hoarse. Her teeth raked my neck, and her fingernails tore at my ribs. My hands started shaking so bad I couldn’t get my jeans unzipped. She grabbed my wrists and pulled my hands behind my back, holding them there with one hand while she used the other to rip the snaps of my blouse open and unzip my jeans slowly. I wanted to scream, “Hurry,” but clamped my teeth instead. If I said a word, she would just slow down and tease me more ruthlessly. I heard my sobs like they were echoes in a wind tunnel. She inched my jeans down over my butt until I was whining like a monkey strapped to a metal table.
“Oh, fuck me. Goddamn it! Fuck me!” I begged. Toni slid me to the edge of the table until my head hung off and my hair swept the floor. When her fingers opened my cunt and her teeth found my breast, I started to scream and the monkeys in the wall cages screamed with me. I jerked and pushed against her, wanting to fight, wanting to give in, wanting the world to stop and wait while I did it all. When I finally started to come, I swung my head until the cages blurred and the monkeys became red and brown shimmering cartoons. Toni climbed over me and put her naked belly against mine, and I began to cry the deepest aching sobs. It felt as if my skin itself were trying to absorb her, soak up the peace and silence inside her. I wanted to stuff myself with her until I was all cotton-battened, dark and still.
“Love,” Toni whispered.
“Sex,” I told myself, inside my vast quiet open body. “Sex, sex, just sex.”
I was bitten as a child by a monkey—a dirty-furred, gray-faced creature kept caged by the lake where my stepfather would go on Sunday to try for a catfish dinner. That monkey was so mean she was famous for it. She had an old red collar with a bell on it, and I always wondered how anyone got close enough to her to put it on. When we’d tried to feed her sugar water from my sister’s baby bottle, she’d jumped for the wire mesh walls of her cage and shrieked into my sister’s terrified face. Then she’d grabbed the nipple off the bottle before any of us could pull it away, chewed it into little pieces and spit them out, swung down and grabbed handfuls of sand and fish scales from the bottom of the cage and thrown them at us. In stunned slow motion, my little sister started to blink and cry, and the monkey came up like an avenging angel to catch her long blond hair and try to pull her through the wire mesh.
It happened so fast, I couldn’t think. I put one hand flat against the cage, grabbed my sister’s hair close to her scalp, and set myself to fight the monkey for her. But the monkey was faster—faster and smarter. She dropped the hair and sprang against the mesh, curled little monkey claws around my wrist, and began to happily chew off my little finger while grinning up into my eyes. The man who managed the fishing camp ran over with a string of dead fish and used them to beat the monkey off. I got my hand back with a web of fine toothy slices ridging my knuckles and wrist.
The curious thing was that after that, I loved that monkey. When we’d go back to the fishing camp, I’d show off my gouged and dented fingers to the other kids and boast.
“See. She ate a piece of me.”
All the kids in the camp would come to see, then go over to toss fish heads and stones into her cage. They were awed and fascinated, and more