body slump
At twilight, when the earth is settling down for rest, MalKai is turning over inside. The colors of dusk pierce him like a rusty pin breaking skin. Yellow gets him in the gut. Auggghhh. It is the color of his home skies. Orange knocks him in the temple. Hhhhhhh. It is the color of his soil. Rose pushes against his heart. It is, like here, the color of love. MalKai’s spirit groans with aching for home. Nothing can soothe him. He spends his hours speaking the words. He has little use for human languages, but he feels the moan, he understands the feeling she sings about. The wail in that woman’s voice wraps itself around his loneliness and strokes his painful yearning to be among his people. He spends hours speaking the words, but in his own language: shoulder shrug, cheek rub against shoulder, body slump.
The buzzing that had settled in Cori’s ears over the past couple of days was MalKai coming to get him. When the first “zzzzzz” licked his ear drums, Cori had swatted at the air around his newly-pierced ear lobes. A meddlesome mosquito—he imagined—hovering near. He made repeated attempts to shoo it away, but his arms soon grew tired. His shoulder ached from throwing his biceps into repeated attack arcs. His fist grew bored of finding no tender little bug crushed in its grasp. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders and rescinded the attack.
Like any constant noise will, the buzzing eventually disappeared from Cori’s consciousness. Seeing MalKai’s frame draped in a relaxed stance at the base of a huge sycamore brought the “zzzzzz” back into Cori’s awareness. The sound reconstructed itself gradually, like the pieces of a forgotten dream slowly becoming crystal clear. Cori didn’t connect MalKai with the buzzing. He peeked at MalKai’s body out of the corner of his eyes while biting at his lower lip. What Cori discerned through the thick of his lashes was a mass of pulsating energy. Cori felt it radiating from MalKai in waves. It buzzed around MalKai’s form, building a composite of legs, arms, and wings. Wings? Cori flipped his head quickly to face MalKai as though to catch a culprit in the act of thievery. All he saw was MalKai’s brown body swaying back and forth in slow motion like a heavy fruit ready to drop to the earth. No wings. Cori dismissed his vision as a hallucination induced by the sun’s glare. He lifted his hand to his forehead and brought much needed shade to his eyes.
When Cori walked past MalKai, the buzzing exploded in his eardrums with a boom. Cori stopped short. The hair on the back of his legs felt like it was on fire. In the pit of his belly a million atoms danced a nervous rumba. His heart threw itself into convulsions, but he couldn’t look back. He felt if he looked back the zzzzzz would take over his brain and push him into insanity. He put his thumb between his lips, gnawed on his skin, and begged for his legs to unlock so he could walk away.
Though MalKai’s skin might have felt like the brush of a thousand humming wings, it sheathed a strong solid body that could not be crushed with a smack. MalKai’s mouth was used for sucking, but not for sucking blood. The tongue housed in MalKai’s mouth was flat and thick and warm, quite contrary to the mosquito’s hollow tube. And the swell of a mosquito bite?—Negligent when compared to the swelling of the soul triggered by contact with MalKai’s lips.
The soft brush of something against Cori’s skin roused him from his frozen stance. It wasn’t a mosquito that had been flying around Cori’s ears, as he had first imagined; it was a moth. Cori automatically responded to the moth’s flirtatious touch with a shoulder jerk and an ear swat. MalKai, who had been morosely passing time under the sycamore’s shade, straightened and focused when his eyes registered Cori’s motions. Those involuntary movements spoke volumes to MalKai; in MalKai’s language, Cori had just whispered come on in.
Cori had no way of imagining a velvet people who spoke through balletic motions and muscle spasms, arced arms and bent necks. A nation that consisted of beings who were physically similar to humans but biologically distinct. A people who thrived on human nectar.
MalKai did not wait for the ancestors to confirm that he had found his last seduction. When Cori’s motions fully saturated MalKai’s consciousness, his hands flew through the air in a gesture of relief. That he had some nectar to collect before he could return home, seemed a mere formality. MalKai had plans, plans that did not include a lengthy chase. Under the crushing pressure of his homesickness he made no provision for elongated discussions that could discern the safety of his assignment. He did not care to proceed carefully. By whatever renegade tactics he had to employ, MalKai was getting the nectar he came for, completing his last assignment, and going home.
Cori began the seduction. Only he did it in ignorance. Didn’t understand he was parading his openness when he turned to face MalKai and offered up a weak, uncertain smile. Didn’t realize he was making it easy for his seducer when he sat quietly under the shade of the next tree (an oak), close enough to make pursuit unnecessary. Was too ignorant to know it was on when MalKai appeared in front of him with a huge grin plastered across that velvet face. The grin should have told Cori something. It was all teeth, without calculation or hesitation.
It was MalKai whose voice rode the wind first. Cori’s tongue appeared at the corner of his mouth to wet his lips in nervous preparation. He looked over his shoulder, scanning the area that surrounded the oak tree. His search for intruding eyes revealed his anxiety, but it was an unnecessary revelation. His anxiety was visible, he was suffocating in it, and his worried eyes were pounding out an S.O.S. on MalKai’s face. Those paranoid gestures were like spoken confessions. MalKai kneeled and skimmed his fingers over the back of Cori’s hand. Cori glanced up in confusion and found himself caught in MalKai’s brown eyes.
Cori could no longer feel the breeze. MalKai flipped Cori’s hand over and traced a slow circle on the skin of Cori’s palm. When MalKai pushed on Cori’s palm, Cori felt something wrap around him and squeeze out his secrets. He found himself releasing thoughts that had never before crossed his lips. Then somewhere, a little girl screamed, her mother cursed, and Cori blinked. With that blink Cori regained something like consciousness and jerked away. Heart first, then hand flying away from its resting place in MalKai’s firm grasp. Cori looked down at his hand, eyes clouded with disbelief. He could almost make out a trail of wildfire where the kiss of MalKai’s finger had seared his flesh.
The second his hand was free, Cori’s mind started buzzing. His mind buzzed all the way through chatty introductions, appraising glances, and MalKai’s smooth descent into a seated position beside him. The buzzing of Cori’s mind was nothing like the buzzing that MalKai had sent to sit in Cori’s ears. Cori’s buzzing was visual. It was composed of images of large square men tottering on tiny angular spiked heels. A television clip of a pedophilic priest and jagged pages from porno magazines displasying studs in ripped overalls.
The blood vessels in Cori’s hands were so strained he felt they would burst. He stared at his shaking palm, and his fluttering life line gave way to images of his and his cousin’s blurred bodies as his cousin chased him though his adult-empty house, of their nude bodies pressing together in his parents’ big empty bed, of their tingling bodies working together to achieve that sweet, sweet release. MalKai’s fingers crossed Cori’s fluttering life line and
