I tell her I write to discover the God I don’t believe in and she says that it must be a lot like trying to find a good avocado in Maine, the kind you can turn into guacamole the day you buy it without setting it on the window sill where it sometimes get punky instead of ripe, the kind where the pulp comes off the rind in even hunks, the kind that are soft to the touch even when the skin is still a little nubby like the ends of Kiwi fruit.
I refill her glass and tell her that life is a Gnostic duality and she says that it sounds like getting your first period even if you know it’s going to come and understand why it’s coming, because you wait and want it and it comes but then you get crampy and have to deal with all the shit that goes with it and you’re sure that if your boyfriend even touches you that you’ll get pregnant and no one will believe you’re a virgin. Like that, she says, or like something so awful you only imagine it like in a movie, or falling in a nightmare, or did I mean like freezing your tongue to a railing and realizing that it will be unbearable to yank it off because you’ll take some flesh with it and talk funny for a week, and I say no.
She asks me what else I believe and by the time I’ve given her the crash course in Hinayana, the Nag Hammadi codices, and explain what evil shits Tertullian, Origen, and Ireneaus were and how the Sufis are really feminists at heart and she believes that I believe, her wine-sweet tongue is dancing with mine around a ritual fire.
Up for air, I can’t resist, even though I hear Leah, my ex, saying Paul you’ve made the sale give it a rest. I lock my fingers along the cool terminus of her spine and recite into her stunned eyes that it’s like the razor-honed blade in your untrembling hand under the sentence of The Word, searing sun stabbing your face, the light through your tears making little prisms on your son’s wind-burnished skin, hearing the ram’s terror in the thicket, and God saying spare the boy and she says that’s way fucking deep, like something in a poem they did in high school. And I know I am what I am and how this night will end, and I do not fear the emptiness of Onan.
Bruce Pratt was nominated in 2008 for a Pushcart Award in fiction, and his poetry collection Boreal is available from Antrim House Books (www.antrimhousebooks.com). His fiction, poetry, essays, and plays have appeared in more than forty literary magazines and journals in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and Wales. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA at The University of Southern Maine, where he teaches undergraduate creative writing, Pratt lives with his wife, Janet, in Eddington, Maine.