Your Midnight Eyes

This is a summer of creative play, so this week's offering is a piece of flash fiction. I'm eager to hear what you think!

Dear friends,

When you receive this week’s offering I’ll be in Portugal meeting with some lovely friends I’ve met through Substack, Liza Debevec, Imola, Corry MacDonald and Megan Boegman. All four are wonderful writers and humans and Imola, Corry and Megan are poets and have inspired me to try poetry, too, through the gentle, encouraging, expansive Corie Feiner’s BodyLove Poetry Workshop.

This week I am sharing a revision of a prompt that emerged from The Come to Your Senses Writing Retreat in Collioure, France led by Karen Karbo and which I revised with the creative non-fiction group that grew out of Jeannine Ouellette’s Writing in the Dark (thanks Jocelyn Lovelle, Jillian Barnet, Tracey Edelist, PhD and Vanessa Foster).

Photo by Ivan Radulovich on Unsplash

Your Midnight Eyes

You slam the screen door without a word, the grind of the motorcycle engine filling the dead air. Evenings I sit alone at the nicked wooden kitchen table, running my hands across the grooves. A splinter lodges in my thumb and I suck my finger, soothed. I wake to your tongue in my ear, butterfly kisses on my eyelids, warm rough hands sliding down my bare inner thighs, resting on the mound of my stomach. I smell you long after you’re gone, the sweat and dirt and drift of you.

All through the last month of my pregnancy, the August heat thick as soup, I sit on the front porch, crunching ice cubes with my sharp teeth, my hands pressed on the balloon of my belly, and listen for the roar of your motorcycle. At first, a dark blur on the horizon, like a swarm of bees, vaguely threatening but with the promise of nectar. Then I see you, thick black hair lifted slightly in the wind. No helmet. You like living on the edge, on the cusp of things, the dizzying star in my orbit.

The day our baby girl is born I see the lie in your midnight eyes. You hold her in your arms, out from your chest, away from your heart. You look at her scrunched up pink face. She is hours old. All she knows is this dim, cool hospital room and the sanctuary of my body. She has your nose, the cleft of your chin. She cries out, flailing her tiny arms, and you hand her back to me. I breathe her in. Her scent is moist, feral, like a mushroom poking through fresh earth. The room fills with the silence of a million things already said, already promised.

Now there are the two of us, our own constellation. In the hospital bed she nestles on my breast, skin on skin, foraging for my nipple, learning to suckle. You stuff your hands in the pockets of your leather jacket and look out the window. To the air, to some phantom creature that might have been me, you say, “I’m here. Here to stay. I mean it this time.”

LET’S CHAT!

Let me know what you think about this piece of writing in the comments. Are these characters and a situation that intrigue you? Perhaps it’s the start of a short story or novel. You tell me!

THANK YOU for subscribing to Living in 3D. This publication wouldn’t exist without your encouragement and support. When you tell me, through your subscription, that this weekly offering matters, it means the world to me. And if you’d like to listen instead, I personally record each essay. Whether you are a free or paid subscriber, your support means the world to me. If you enjoyed this essay, I’d be grateful if you would hop over to my Substack page and ❤️ this post, leave a comment and share or restack this essay.

For paid subscribers, our monthly community calls are the FIRST TUESDAY OF EVERY MONTH, 12pm ET, 6pm CET. Mark your calendars for Tuesday Aug 4th! Invitations go out to your inbox the week before, with reminders in the subscriber chat. This is an hour for us to find community and connection!