Scars and Dreams

Scars and Dreams

By

Matt McGuire

You drove up from Jacksonville that February, a long, cold road and a Marine base fading behind you replete with broken vows and one-night memories. You came on a whim, trusting your instincts and the sound of my voice: half-truth promises, cutesy names and quickly-penned sonnets relayed over a long distance connection. I asked you to wear that bra, the Elizabethan one with the red lace and leather straps that looked as if it belonged in a bondage flick instead of a barracks town. You twirled your long, blue-black hair round your fingers a thousand times, your ashen face tilted in reverie while listening to The Cure on shuffle, thinking of me and what waited at the end of the interstate. You were a sensitive girl, an artist and your bad luck in love was only the result of your residence within a fortress brimming with testosterone armaments and Trojan horses. You were a peacetime casualty, decorated with razor marks and a Xanax prescription purple heart. Your affected, avant-garde sensibilities wouldn’t allow you to verbalize it, but you tossed in bed nights, barbituate-weary and dreaming of that white picket, three-child destiny. Your past wouldn’t matter. After your divorce, you’d had two-dozen or so failed attempts at normalcy and commitment with drunken, childish Marines. These miscarriages only made you more determined to land a real man, a kindred soul with whom you might read Wordsworth and sigh indefinitely. As the pre-spring rain fell in sheets, your tires ticking the miles and headlights replacing dusk, you lit another conciliator and rationalized that it was all water under the overpass.

We met at a bed and breakfast at 11, and after a quick meal on takeout Chinese and a preliminary dip in the hot tub, we lay kissing on the California king. I busied myself with a reconnaissance of your breasts, slowly removing your Renaissance brazier while you still dreamed of white pickets and child-laden carousels. Your eyes still hopeful, you searched for soul through my quarter closed, intent lids and found me wanting. I observed the slices lining your upper arms and lower torso with skepticism, but you only pleaded inaudibly for me to discount your salient wounds and focus instead on your present vitality. You became oblivious to your scars and dreams as you hardened, thrills causing your toes to coil and goose bumps to form from your thighs to your eyes as I pinched your nipples with increasing violence. My face became blank steel.

I forced you down on me, you yielded and the more you resigned, the more you wanted to. I slapped you once to see your reaction. You didn’t abate so I did it again, harder and with the back of my hand instead of the palm. You whimpered a little and tears formed in the corners of your painted eyes, your jaw tensing every time my hand raised in mock severity, but still mesmerized, possessed by me, your throat working slowly and then faster, faster as I guided your neck down, down to abstraction. Mercifully I flipped you on your back and became your supplicant, your fluent, silent interpreter. I read your chemistry and listened attentively to your song—white teeth wreathed in red Revlon clinched between gasps, moans, a SCREAM and then release.

I allowed you to relax, and then we repositioned for the final act, the ungentle game rendered en tenebrae for millennia between the sexes. Hard, fast and brutal—your face in the pillow, crying out for the end and hoping for a beginning, another start, love without regard and absolute. We showered together and then I held you through the night, reciting Byron at first, you sleeping soundly and then me watching infomercials, plotting my escape with the coming dawn. We had Mueslix and oranges at a corner place and before you drove away I kissed you, chaste now and with evasive tenderness—another game as old as man, and an experienced girl knows the black yellow signpost well when the sun is shining. Another study in rose-colored chaos, another dead end. A teary, twenty-cigarette drive back to Jacktown laid ahead, a Xanax and a razorblade awaiting your arrival.