Our Love is Not Tactile
Elizabeth Morton We only touch by accident. It happens sometimes on the escalator and sometimes in the fruit store. We’ll be holding cantaloupes and figs and yabbering to the grocer about last night’s fork lightning, and feral cats. You brush a thigh bone against my stomach. It’s as simple as that. And we fall in love all over again. Doctor Oz said use tooth-floss and take time out for foreplay. He says culinary foreplay is a great way to bridge the sex-domesticity gap. Split the cantaloupe and spill the syrups over the navel. Poach the figs and position them over the breasts. It’s as simple as that. We were outnumbered in the fruit shop, by the gluten-intolerant and walking dead. In the checkout queue we were bookended by a paleo couple and a man smoking a packet of kale crisps. My collarbone connected with your cheek. It’s as simple as that. You would get pregnant off the smell of an oily rag, I tell you. Three months later I could see the watermelon bulging from your uterus. How did that happen, my pals would ask, incredulous. Artificial pollination? Sometimes I dream of a knickerbocker glory, or an all-you-can-eat dessert bar. Something with fruit. We would lie naked by the bain-maries, spooning or doing the ‘pretzel dip’. Doctor Oz said that’s his favourite of 29 positions. When we watch him on the couch, I can smell the bitter pips on your breath. It is as close as we come to love. I would almost take your hand. Instead, the swelling of your belly tells knock-knock jokes to quench the monotony. Knock knock, it says; the watermelon kicking. Who’s there? Nobody. |
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About the Author: Elizabeth Morton is a New Zealand writer. She has been published in Poetry NZ, PRISM international, Cordite, JAAM, Shot Glass Journal, Landfall, Takahe Magazine, Blackmail Press, Meniscus, Flash Frontier, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Sunday Star Times, Literary Orphans, and in Island Magazine among others. In her free time, she pens bad rap songs and collects obscure words in supermarket bags. Her prose is in the Best Small Fictions 2016.