They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

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185 A I go weeks without reading the news so that when F calls I won’t know what he’s talking about. He’ll get to explain it to me and I won’t have to argue with him. He doesn’t call. I don’t read the news because it doesn’t offer itself to me. I walk past the 7-11, a boy plays a harmonica, his stomach bunched up on his knees, his feet on the bench of a picnic table. I burned my notebooks because I didn’t want them. No, because I was afraid. F ran his hand along my arm, kissed the back of my neck, but he never said. I was always the one to say. Breath after breath and my blood shone with his motion. I didn’t know my voice, I saw the ceiling above me, knew it as the pressure of his fingertips , the ceiling fan still and the curtain skimming the floorboards . If my throat stained red, if my cheek did. You are so quiet, I said to him. 186 So write about it, he might as well have said. I will write a few things, I said. • Write it, A, you said to me, fingers black with newsprint. I pointed my toe at your hip, palm, temple, until I felt my bones soften again, your mouth full of my hair. What is the point? I shook your face in exasperation. I could pile the words up by the side of the bed. But you would turn over to sleep. Never having explained anything—but you always told me, you would say. I love you, you said, and meant it. You mapped me but rolled up what you drew, tucked it where I wouldn’t see it. Let’s live here, you said, tracing an X along the stretch of belly, guarded by the quiet lookout of the hips. As though we had a choice. They have to understand, you said, and I thought you meant the war, but you meant me. We found some buildings we could agree on. Or not. I thought I didn’t know enough about that country—let’s go there, but this was as your lips were pausing on my wrist. You meant where we were together. I must have always misunderstood. I am not alone in this, although I may be alone. Bodies that have spent years in apprenticeship to one another , then noted not that the fit was wrong but that what they’d meant to mold to, each uncompromised plane, they should have broken. I mean, what you wanted me to tell you. Was what you wanted me to write. ...