July Something, Maybe August

We, she and I, sat together across from one another at a wooden table set in the back yard under the big elm. Summer nights had begun and as the gloaming atmosphere blued itself toward another hazy darkness, I took an apricot from the bowl and carefully began to pull its flesh from the hard, dark stone with my mouth. Each bite dissolved into sweet juice as the fruit meat collapsed around my lips, against my tongue.

Moths flew methodical loopings against the lamp over the backdoor; the neighbors' windows trembled a soft television blue through window glass and curtain; I'm sure there was music playing inside our house. Careful, precise, I stripped the apricot seed to reveal it convoluted, shining and carefully I placed it on the table. And just as carefully, she lifted the wet seed of that fruit to her own mouth and carefully placed it within.

I stretched myself out on that table, my cheek cool against the polished wood and her fingers cool again and light against the skin that covers my throat. I could feel each click that apricot pit made as it brushed against her teeth and how each click echoed inside the bones of her skull and through her spine to her rib cage and down the long bones of her arm and through the maze of small bones knit together as her wrist and hand and that echo lingered there at the tips of her fingers, at the point of the lacquered plane of her fingernails, and lost itself in the tangled ropes of my pulse.