Blood

These are the nights. Hot like Viet Nam, and muggy, the heat heavy and wet like a blanket drenched in lilac mead. The smell of butterflies. The box fan screaming I’m Trying! plowing hot air, me next to you, salty as the ocean, butt-ass-naked, spooned. Saltwater sweat rolling downward, behind the knees, down the neck, between the breasts and in the hairline, dripping onto the mattress, like crying.

Salt-lick for mosquitoes and, every now and then, a cottony moth that ends up in the corner of the ceiling, shadow like the ghost of a dying angel, wings slow like time ticking. A bat — or a hundred — beat outward from a hole in the oak tree toward mosquitoes, me sensing it, sixthly, and they me, you groaning in your sleep like a drunken child.

My heart thumps in my body like an earthworm’s several, until you show up at the head of the tent, peering in, whispering my name…

It is 1978.

“You awake?”
“’Course I am. Are you?”
“Come out here…”
You smell like purple.
I do. Of course, I do. Been waiting all my fifteen years of life to do so. My brothers fake at sleeping; their own crew on their way.

Outside, the world is a terrarium. Humid and still, the opposite of winter’s brittle and shattering, time like a clock. Lawns have sprinklers rainbowing tapwater, the music rising and falling in pentuplets: chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka-chick…..
The moon shines, beckoning. I can’t help myself, point upward.
“Would…