The Candleburn (Prose)

She was the first girl who ever brought me candles, the breaths of their wicks caught short by the dressing of our voices across a humid bath drawn for two.  Where once our words were all finger-nudged and cramped still by shy seconds spent in department store parking lots well past 3am, we now fold easily into each other, an undercurrent of thumping heartbeats and the native feel of another woman’s hands polishing promises onto the lotioned backs of each other.

Her body was the first I’d ever kissed in forbidden ways, and once bitten by the soft feel of her sin, I would dive into our nights alone, a whirlwind of coffee lips and the pinched knees of nervousness gone awry.  I was amazed at how close one person could become to the spiritual matter of another, flesh paving the roadway into the barren caverns of all her secret places no one had ever touched.

Some nights were so overwhelming that my emotions would spin me into a frenzy of clamp-jawed lyricism and the frozen kisses that caught my tears in their mouths like open wounds struggling to bloom.  For weeks before the full surrender of loves numb-tongued confession, we would struggle to capture late nights into plastic latte cups and public bathrooms where tiny touches would tug the pull-strings of what we both wanted, yet feared, in the final orchestration of folding skin, dangling promise-ringed fingers.  The shaking voices of love that would finally inhabit us as foreign entity, a pale-faced creature with soft hands, cold to the touch of later winter, this God of Appalachian night air who’d force our touches into a road towards dawn, a tiny stretched finger of heaven my lover would roll her car across as if we had always been this way, as if this weren’t the grand beginning but an extension of something born into the light of the universe eons ago to spin out dust into the void, allowing us to dance back into bright new bodies, into the irresistible fire the flesh would spin of us two into each other.  Our love igniting the fuel of flesh like the starburst shine of a supernova across the dark-hilled corner of a Kentuckian-nowhere.