The Well

“I love you,” I say, to the dark and the black. It does not respond.

“I love you,” I say again, leaning over the ends of my well worn boots to peer into the pitch, “do you love me too?” A taste like static fills my mouth, creeping down the back of my throat in a sweet-iron tang. I smile, press my lips to the tips of my fingers and touch them gently to the stone edge of her answering grin. Someday she would say it back to me, but until then, she kisses so tenderly. I hop off from my perch, kicking motes of dust into the air. The dirt spreads in a perfect circle around her periphery, not even a single blade off grass daring to encroach upon our sanctuary. A terrible, sorrowful sound echoes from deep within her, like wind over the lip of a bottle. I place a gentling hand on her side and she subsides.

“I’ll be back,” I promise her, “where else would I ever return to?”

The static, startlingly cold and burning to the touch, spread first across the backs of my knuckles and leaps, in featherlight pinpricks, up my arm and over my shoulder until she lingers in the hollow of my throat. I laugh at the sensation.

“You old romantic. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The separation is an ache every time. I wind my way through the familiar path between the trees, skipping over broken glass bottles and kicking waterlogged cigarette butts out of my path. My fingers tap a staccato against the faint press of her in my skin, knowing that the spot she kissed will already be blackening. She’s a possessive one, my girl, wants to let all the world know she has me even while she hides away in these woods. I can’t say I’m any different. But the sun is already beginning to touch the horizon, and the forest at night is no place for an old woman like me. She doesn’t understand, but accepts my choice.

I was so young when I first met her, playing in these woods. I was running through the brambles when I stumbled and fell headfirst into a raspberry patch. I tumbled head over heels over that slope until I rolled to a stop at her feet, my skin ripped up something horrible and my hair a rat’s nest of berry juices and leaves. I didn’t cry. I was fascinated. I pulled myself into her lap and stared into the depths of her, not even noticing the blood that smeared her rough-hewn flesh. On that day I heard her voice for the first time, the crystal clear cry of a pebble dropped into deep waters, and she had me hooked.

I arrive at my house just as the sun dipped below the treetops, kicking clods of dirt from my boots and abandoning my coat on the rickety old kitchen chair. I already miss her. I pull a beer from my otherwise empty fridge and snap the door shut with my hip, absentmindedly reaching to pluck a can of some unidentifiable something from the crudely nailed up shelves I consider my pantry. The metal of it is dented and the label ripped off a long time ago, but hey, this shit could outlive the roaches. I rummage in a nearby drawer until the can opener bites my finger with its ungrateful little corkscrew attachment, letting me pry open my dinner while I nurse the wound in my mouth. Ah, beans! A woman could take over the world with a good can of beans in hand, or at any rate, its an improvement over last night’s meal.

I unearth a pot and dump them in, tossing the whole thing to warm up over the stove while I crack open the beer and pull out my laptop. My manuscript is barely half finished. My publisher only seems tired if she even bothers to answer the phone these days, and I know it’s my fault, but I’ll get it done by the deadline. My fingernails are tapping restlessly against the keys to the beat of the cursor, blinking like an accusation, when a harsh rapping of the door rings out in my small house. I groan and slam the already abused machine shut, recognizing both the cadence and the date.

When I open the door, my sister sweeps by me, reeking of aldehydes and roses from the tall white collar of her pristine coat. She hikes her purse further up her shoulder and the takes in the state of the house with a barely concealed wrinkle of her nose.

“Honestly,” she demands, “don’t you ever clean around here? When was the last time you picked up a broom?”

“If you don’t like it, you can leave,” I offer, shutting the door behind her resentfully. Carmine wraps criticism around herself like a shroud.

“You need me here,” she sniffs, taking my now smoking pot of beans off the stove and dumping it in the sink. She floods it with a stream of freezing water, sending a crackle of steam to dissipate with my hopes for a quiet dinner, before pulling a small plastic tub full of peanut noodles and chopped vegetables from her ostentatious purse. She pushes it across the kitchen table with a pointed arch of her brow. I take an equally pointed sip of my beer and ignore it. “Have you even gotten to the next chapter of your manuscript?”

“I’m working on it.”

“I fucking knew it. What are you even doing with all the free time you apparently have?”

“I’m working on it.” 

“Are you visiting that goddamn well again?” She snaps. I freeze, damningly. The black spot burns at my throat. “you’re obsessed with that thing. It was cute as a kid, but you’re almost fifty now. You can’t keep acting like a moody teenager, and I can’t keep helping you pay your rent. Be a writer, sure, but you need to actually write.”

I know she’s right, but tarry rage begins to bubble in the pit of my stomach anyways. “Are you here for a reason, or did you just decide you needed an excuse to be a bitch today and swung by?” I growl at her. Her red painted lips flatten into a thin, hurt line, but her eyes are pitying when they study me. I resist the urge to bare my teeth at her, and take the silence as an opportunity to drain my can and stalk to the porch to crush it into the recycling. I hear her sigh behind me, and from the corner of my eye her crisp silhouette is framed by my crooked doorway, a bleached patch of designer heels and iron hair among the peeling paint and dust. The spot at my throat burns colder. She’s holding a manila envelope out to me.

“They found mom,” she informs me, businesslike. I take the folder. “She made it all the way to Iowa, made herself a new little family. Overdosed about fifteen years ago. I thought you might like to know.”

The folder contains a couple of grainy photos of someone who is clearly our mother, older than we last saw her and her black hair a fresh bottle blond. Her smile is tired and strained, her arm thrown over the shoulders of two skinny guys with wild looks in their eyes. It also contains a yellowed newspaper for some small town, opened to a page that mentions the busting of some neighborhood cult, her photo listed as one of the recovered corpses left to wither on a shared mattress. I don’t recognize the name, but that’s her, alright. Ran all that way, and didn’t even make the first page.

“I guess some things really never change,” I mutter bitterly. Carmine continues as if she hadn’t heard me.

“The guy I hired still hasn’t found dad, and he isn’t hopeful, but he thinks he found a lead somewhere in Jersey.”

“I don’t care about whatever happened to that bastard.”

“Don’t you?”

I lift my chin defiantly. Of course I do. “if he isn’t rotting, he’s worthless.” It was the best day of my life. Carmine eyes me with something like sadness.

“You know, you could have a normal life if you just tried a bit?” she says softly. “Get a proper job, find some guy to marry you instead of this… Single lesbian thing- you don’t have to love him, but he can be safe, and won’t that be better than all this?” I know she’s thinking of our childhood home, the silence and the splinters. She rose above it all. I guess she thinks she rose above me, too. The sticky, black anger stirs inside me again.

“Get out.”

“I just mean-“

“Get out,” I snarl, “I don’t need your money, I don’t need your fucking pity, mom and dad are ancient news that you need to get over. You need to leave.”

Carmine’s heels click smartly together as she straightens her back. The pity, at least, is now gone from her eyes, replaced only with weary distain. She opens her mouth as if to say something, then closes it and shakes her head. She steps neatly past me- she would never stoop so low as to shove by- and I watch her take her prim, unhurried steps to the car parked by my scraggly front lawn. It’s as clean and gleaming white as she is, but specks of rust fleck the seams of the hood and the doors, a jarring imperfection. She slides in, turns the key, and smoothly peels away. Never once does she look back at me.

That night, I can hear my lover calling out to me from the shadows of the trees. Her voice whistles through the branches, and from my window I reach out to her, though for fear of her seeing me all tangled like this, I keep my knees firmly on the sill.

“My love, I think I made a mistake today,” I sigh. My kissed fingertips press to the mark of her lips. The anger is a friend as old as my beloved, soaking my bones in oily slick until disturbed, and it disturbs so easily. If I imagine the meat of my body it is damp, frothy grey, a choked swamp where all but the anger and my beloved suffocate and die. It was not the first time that grasping black has led me to mistakes, but this one may be unfixable.

My lover sounds so lonely, trapped in those woods, and I am tempted to lean further, press closer to her. I had courted her from that very first day, bringing her berries and mushrooms, pretty rocks and feathers from the endless treasure chest of the forest. She accepted them all, drawing them into the chasm of her chest, but the trifles did nothing to soothe her. But the darkness of her gaze was the first kindness I had known, and so I persisted, until one day I thought she might be lonely, and offered her a small bird. Carmine had found it at the edge of the family farm just the other day, its fragile little wing injured and peeping pitifully. She took it and fed it, until it loved her enough to rub its beak into her fingers for comfort. Nothing beautiful could survive in that house. When our dad found it, she pressed its shoebox to my hands and begged me to bring it somewhere safe, somewhere it could have a fighting chance. Her cheek was already purpling, the imprint of a wedding ring stark beneath her dry eyes. She wouldn’t let me touch it anymore, claiming to be too old to be fussed over. I brought it to the safest place I knew.

She accepted the little creature from me, and the stoop of her crumbling shoulders stood a little straighter that day. The bird was a loyal friend, and I knew then that what she needed was a companion who would not leave her. She needed commitment.

The next morning, I awoke with my face still flat against the windowsill. The paint chips tug at my sweaty cheeks when I pull away, stretching out the ache deep in my neck. I get to my feet and plod to the bathroom, spitting the taste of the night into the sink and regarding my own face in the grimy mirror. Eyes rimmed with thin, purplish skin and harsh lines at the edges of my mouth stare back. I look old. I feel old. There’s grey streaking my temples, and I look away before my dad appears in the shape of my jaw and the set of my brow.

Morning ablutions soon complete, I head towards my beer fridge and nearly slip on the letter that had been slid under the door. I pick it up as though it were poisonous, put it on the table with the noodles that had been left out overnight and pull out my morning beer. Booting up my laptop, I take a long drought to wet my throat while I slide a nail beneath the glue. It is an eviction notice. The last check to pay my rent bounced. Carmine moves fast. I can’t find it in me to begrudge her for it. Clicking open my browser, I see an email notification that had popped up sometime this morning: my editor, formally letting me know that the publisher had removed me from my contract after my third missed deadline. Third? That couldn’t be possible, I knew I had enough time to finish. I mentally count the days and groaned- Carmine’s visit was arranged for my newly freed time. Well, I can’t begrudge them for it, either. I doubt they were making much money off of me anyways.

I finish my beer, feeling like nothing more than cotton, and consider my future. Thoroughly considered, I place my laptop delicately on the ground and relish in the hearty groan of glass and plastic crunching beneath my heel. I locate my jacket and step into the brisk, overcast autumn. It is time to go visit her.

The air is still blue with the remaining dredges of morning, and the houses around me are beginning to stir. A balding man out walking his dog greets me with distraction, his dog, a yappy little yellow thing with crusted eyes, sniffing suspiciously at my heels. The next gift I gave to her was a dog, not so dissimilar to this one, though bigger and meaner. It did not take long, after the bird, for her air of loneliness to return to her. I thought about the lifespan of a bird and felt sorry I had given her such an impermanent friend, resolving to find her something better. The man next door had a dog, its paws still too big for its body, that lived on his porch and snarled and snapped and every hand that came close. My mom had pointed him out to me, told me to watch how the dog cleared the land of visitors so nobody would trespass upon his human. She told me this was how the dog loved. I watched the man toss scraps of meat out the door that it devoured messily in the mud and weeds, yelling when it asked for more but always ready with a fresh batch the next day. This, too, was love.

My fourteen year old self did not like this man, his breath smelled of sweat and rot when he came over for poker night, his leer stretched across graying teeth and my teenage body. He and my dad roared with laughter at some uncertain joke when I was forced to bring them their greasy foods and let him pretend to paw at me like it was funny. He didn’t deserve the dog’s love, I thought, and the next Friday he arrived with his sweaty fist full of cash and cards in his pocket I stole across our yards with a bag full of my own hoarded scraps. While the dog was busy eating, I cut its rope and coaxed him into the woods with breadcrumb trails of rotting pieces. What my dearest needed was a guardian who loved her like that, who kept away all her curious trespassers in the way I couldn’t. The dog protested mightily, and my arm still bears the scars of its teeth, but that only meant I had made the right decision. She accepted this gift with joy. I watched it vanish into her depths, assured now of her safety. The dog served its duty well, and even the birds refused to fly over the dizzying black of her gaze.

I cut across the intersection on the street, no longer caring of the hurried disgust in the movements of the young mother who moves her child away from me. I know what I looked like, a bedraggled dyke on a mission. The forest looms before me, finally, and the crackle of leaves underfoot feels like a homecoming. There are no more raspberry patches, no more treasures, sliced through with new trails and frequented by travelling hikers blaring bad music on their tinny speakers. Still, its mine. Off the trail, stepping over a sluggish trickle of poisoned water some people still call a stream, and slipping with practiced, adult feet down the side of that same leafy slope and there she was, rising from the ground like a dream.

“Hello, beautiful,” I greet her, and she wraps herself around me with the familiar chill of her embrace. She is lonely again, I realize. I haven’t brought her a gift in a long time. The prickle of static moves across my lips, drawing faint beads of blood to their surface. She is always so eager.

When at last the dog was no longer enough, her loneliness drew me to her side, and she despaired at the bruises that littered my arms. I had done so much for her, haven’t I? Would she not do this one thing in return? I begged her, and she agreed. It would not be enough for her, not for very long, but this, she could do. I provoked my dad with insolent words and a hurl of spit, knowing exactly where the black tar in me came from and exactly how to rouse it. I wrested my wrist from his crushing grip and led him to her, hiding behind the gentle curve of her back. When he came, we took hold of him together, this gift for us both. The crunch of his fingers between my heel and her lip was like birdsong, and finally, she set me free.

I lean my weary body against her feet, resting my cheek on her cool hip and listening to her sing. I had brought her so many gifts over the years. She delights in each of them, but I know what she wants, really, ever since I first met her that fateful day. Her fingers draw goosebumps down my arms, smelling like summer berries and fresh meat. They cup my chin and draw me closer until we stand, eye to eye, twining silkily through my hair. I run mine around her edges in return, feeling every dip and crevice beneath them and smiling at the burn of her kisses at the nape of my neck.

“I love you,” I said, to the dark and the black, “do you love me too?” and I tipped into her bottomless embrace.