The Distance Between My Wives
Jon Savage I’m thinking of a moment that hasn’t happened yet: when we roll and duck under the blanket to avoid the merciless sunlight that tears through our window; when the embers of the morning blow into our lives, like the distant fury of mushroom clouds above a desert; when, in your negotiation between the exile of your dreams and the horrors of daytime, you turn towards the wall; when your body becomes any other body; when you subtract and disjoin, painting yourself into a landscape across the bed—blank, erupting mountains in the wall’s ocean of egg-shell white; when I graze your neck’s nape where hair meets skin and I watch the slow palsy of your breathing. There, you could be anybody. You could be her. It will be a moment like so many before. It will be a story I told you about my childhood. A time when my mother stood straight, and it was philosophy that halved the moon. It will be the pins and needles I felt, walking barefoot across the midday asphalt to a house not my own. I had no need for sinful thoughts because in the afternoon of that Summer Hellfire, I condemned myself underneath a windowpane, keeping a drawn-out expression because I watched in exile, poorborn and shoeless. She was nothing but a body, an earth stripped and still in a porcelain downpour. Cicadas buzzed above me like the Sun above them. The world’s small, murderous humming. I watched the hot steam rise over her, and her nakedness shined in bursts of fleshtone. It will be the guttural rejection I felt before everything was finished, before my future fell in the dirt before me to burn whitehot in the sun. It will be the words I said over and again, speaking to the ignorant ears of a girl who would never see me as I saw her. It will be the failed repetition of my voice, almost silent under the day’s blue and faultless void, saying I’m gonna marry that girl. I’m gonna marry her. |
About the author:
Jon Savage is a recent graduate of the University of North Texas and the recipient of a nationally-distinguished Graduate Arts Scholarship from the Jack Kent Foundation. He currently lives and writes in Fort Worth, Texas. |
