I just wanted to leave a comment, because though I wrote it flippantly, on a whim, this is a story that is very close to me. The experience is very much real, the family is very much mine. The second part isn't real obviously, but isn't complete imagination either, not quite the black-and-white movie I try to make it out to be. It's a combination of whispered gossip always humming around these towns, real-life stories and comments about removed relatives, neighbours, friends. Foreign yet me, the influence is undeniable. (Update: OK I just realised that this was filled with typos, how embarrassing… Think I fixed them up now.)
Oh I don’t know. Bah. I want to leave all behind sometimes, move to a farm sometimes, a farm by the sea. I knew a place like that once, a place close to the one I’ve described before. But this is another town, my wandering uncle’s town for a short while, though he could never stray very far from this area, once he had had a taste.
The buxom guileless neighbour would bring the milk from her cow to drink after a boil. It tasted so damn heavy and cloying, you would skim off the skin of cream, the best part, everyone would admonish, and still that animal taste. And the breakfast butter always white as yogurt, tasted fermented like it too. But there would be the smell of salt in the rough cool walls of those stone houses, the uneven stairs, the shade of the gnarly olive trees outside where we tied the hammock and piled ourselves in as children, giggling, swinging too hard. There would be dinners of man-grilled fish and cheese and crusty bread. String beans soured and spiced with garlic and olive oil and the juice of completely unripe grapes. Acid pounded out from those tart crunchy berries in a brass mortar and pestle, garlic smashed into liquid in a rhythmic clang the same way. And then tomatoes, always tomatoes on the side, freshly- picked just-sliced (holding it in their hands with the knife curving round) bright-red fleshy-firm dripping-pink tomatoes, eaten outside on summer nights, and countless other side dishes in small plates to pass around and devour too. Don't start eating until eight, the sun still up. Don't stop eating until ten, when the stars come out, no light but for the light from your house and the guileless neighbour's. Don’t stop eating past eleven, which is when the watermelon would come out, cooled with a rinse of cold water if they forgot to put it in the fridge before cutting open to reveal its magenta chill. You liked the crispy yellower not-as-sweet part near the rind, after all the other parts had been eaten out, after everyone had reached from across the table for their own trapezoid chunk. It would be agreed that this had been a good watermelon, the one who had tapped and prodded and chosen it from the watermelon truck that came round would nod in smug satisfaction. But you liked to trace your spoon bluntly over the discarded part in strokes, until all the sugary pale pinkish water came out, and then you would slurp it up with that spoon, and then when the spoon got to be too much work, you would hold it up to your mouth and tongue, the whole half-boat of it. Do it, do it, they would urge, so you would, shyly, greedily, careful not to drip it down your shirt. Aunts and uncles and grandparents alike would be there with their cloudy licorice drinks poured out in tall narrow glasses. Pouring the clear pungent liquor carefully a quarter (or so) of the way, the schlieren threads wisping and smoking as soon as the ice-cold water was dumped in, turning the whole glass into milky frost, magic. Don't get up to clear the table past midnight, maybe a few dishes here and there ushered in by the women. Not usually your mom because she was too busy rambling a stern idea out to a rapt face or two over that long unsteady table, cigarette smoke never-ending, shoes resting and shifting dustily in dusty fertile ground. And then afterwards, boiling water for the dishes, you did not cook girls, so you must clean. You do not have any boy cousins, though you're sure they would not have to do this, your brother does not, they are shocked when he takes his plate and other plates to the kitchen, and your mom shushes them and tells him to. He would even wash too, even your dad would at home, gladly enough, but your mom knows when, in front of whom, to pick her battles. So you are filling the basin from a kettle, washing glasses first, then dishes, then cutlery, greasy platters and pots and pans last, handing to your cousin to rinse, singing a random song, some random gossip, always some random thing to have a hysterical laughing fit over, you are young and dumb after all, your back aching from standing over the sink for so long, until the other sitting cousin steps up and you sit for a bit, you were such a big crowd. Your skin smelling like soap as you sit and grin at them- the creamy white slab of soap- bigger than your hand- awkward with its sharp corners- basin after basin of lukewarm water sloshed over your head during that wash after your last swim, the beach rocky and deep so that you would have to throw yourself from a crooked splintering platform into the cold splashing water all at once, water that always quickly warmed of course, once you got in, and in those parts, the water was a heavy navy blue, and then turned crystal and buoyant around your always last-to-tan legs.
And maybe I could have me that quintessential Mediterranean lover with a careless callous tanned body. Simple-minded, the son of the guileless farmer’s widow, you understand. She could come round to my mom's only brother's house to ask for my hand, since there is no one else to ask, no man left in that farm's family to get permission from mine. There would be dissent of course, like in any good black-and-white movie. Education, what is education, useless ideas written on the paper that we put in our furnaces to heat the water for our sons' baths after their swims. (Our daughters do not know how to swim.) Me, I have no daughter, my only son, he is a good boy, he says he wants your daughter, you must understand. Maybe it is Willed. And though no one would understand, and no one would agree to it, we are too different after all, they would have to in the end, wouldn’t they, when they found us, we would have to be married, the ragged red ribbon of (already ripped) chastity still placed around my waist by my dad, the wet muddy henna still slapped and bound on my hands to dry and dye as they sobbed for the life I was leaving behind, and there is always a life you are leaving behind. I could scrub the stone floors of his house, make our always messy bed, would anyone recognize me after a while, in baggy rolled up clothes so I could go milk the cow, the guileless cow lady passed away, sometimes I'm pregnant again, sometimes the cow. I’d still go for dips in dark seawater though, half-naked, scandalous. Though not too much of anyone around to bother us maybe, they would accept me maybe, this town that's barely a town, and he'd turn out to be a good boy after all maybe, never raise a hand to me or the children, knowing little, except that I'd probably raise that hand right back. This is what happens when you take an educated girl, son, her guileless ghost would tell him in his dreams, she does not worship like us, son, what can you do? He could kiss and worship me, fuck me hard and soft at my will, on shaky tables, under gnarly olive trees, in freshly laundered bed, have him never understand any of this, any of me, just a need for soft buttery body, for my dripping-pink cunt wet so he could curve it in slices, swath it around his cock, pound me liquid and tart, the angles of my olive body massaged under his grimy hands, held firm in his dusty hands by the in-dip of my creamy waist, my soapy legs shaking. To be fucked out of pure love for my arched doorway hips, like X in a way, putting an earnest cock in me in a perpetual promise of swinging hammock pleasure, cumming into me with a tiny grunt, fermented and fertile, resting then, past midnight, until time to clean-up, looking into eyes like vapid stars, seeing me from head to toe as his, nothing more, his girl in the farm by the sea.
Yeah I know. I’d be miserable.
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