Left at the Mango Tree by Stephanie Siciarz Read Free Book Online Page A

his body. She was afraid, impatient, and reluctant at once, suddenly and acutely aware of who her companion was, and steadied herself for the taste of Gustave in her mouth.
    Wilbur, somehow freed now of his pleated matrimonial trousers, finished with the buttons of Edda’s dress. His tongue found her breasts but the cicadas’ vibrations kept her low moan a secret. He licked her neck and her ears. His warm breath on the wet saliva made her shudder. They kissed finally and Edda thought she would suffocate when his mouth overwhelmed hers. She closed her hands around his neck and her legs around his waist, still separated from him by her satin of pale blue.
    Both the beach and the brush had fallen into darkness by this time, though the evening’s curtain was thinned by the moon. It had risen up fully now, exerting its pull and release on the waves that crashed loudly and rolled to shore. Gustave pulled the girl’s head to his face and kissed her, rolling her over so that he lay on top of her. Wilbur ripped the pale blue material, removing the last barrier between him and his wife, and climbed onto Edda.
    The couples grappled, Gustave and the girl under the mango, and Wilbur and Edda in the sand just far enough away, or so they thought. Mouths gasped for air and lips covered lips. Gustave pushed inside the girl. Edda, startled, eased into Wilbur’s rhythms, frightened and aroused. Edda’s hair mingled with the damp sand, the girl’s with the dry twigs of the brush. Hands caressed faces and thighs. Feet caressed feet.
    The mischievous moon smiled down on them all and sent the sea into a violent, enchanted rush, guiding the female contractions that mimicked the waves. Spurred by the sea’s urgency and assisted by the wind, the leaves sang even louder suddenly, in harmony withthe cicadas and the hummingbirds who didn’t know if it was night or day. The song crescendoed to a frantic, fevered buzz; it fell on top of the naked lovers, like a thick blanket that might smother them all.
    They could hear nothing for the noise that filled their ears, the living sound that seemed to populate the air around them. They tried to ignore it, to escape it by closing their eyes. The girl focused on Gustave’s body. Edda rocked hers in time to Wilbur’s, which moved in unison with the island’s quiver.
    The magic moon laughed at the lovers’ struggle. The waves were too agitated, the wind too strong. It ripped the leaves from the very trees that bore them.
    The fracas finally culminated in a guttural human cry that confirmed a superhuman deed, and the moon silenced the waves, calmed the cicadas, and finally closed her eyes. She was placid, the mighty moon, and pleased. Her finger had poked a hole in the soil of an earthly womb and dropped an almond seed into it, stitched together as if from two stolen sides of leaf.
    In the dark, the lovers slept. Tired, sticky-skinned, spent heavy limb on spent heavy limb. The leaves were sleepy, too. They trembled still, and shuddered a broken lullaby, while their shiny sides awaited the sun.

4
    M y grandfather Raoul once read a book with just a line on every page. He thought, maybe one line was enough, enough for the reader to fill in what was missing and write between the lines, as it were, on the blank pages in his (or her) head. Raoul didn’t mind the book. He found it rather bold. But then Raoul knows how to hold his own with fancy raconteurs, even one so clever as to write a whole book without writing a whole book.
    This wasn’t always the case. Time
was
when Raoul had little patience for know-all volumes (and littler still for the folly of fiction) and took things at face value—meaning that what wasn’t as clear as a nose on a face didn’t much interest him. While he simply had no use for books, his wife Emma Patrice devoured them. Every night when he crawled into bed he found her there, rustling pages and shushing him. She told him it was her way of escaping, though he could never imagine