The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch Read Free Book Online

couldn’t do it, and when I wanted to suck his cock and he wouldn’t let me wouldn’t let me wouldn’t let me, we met our wounds in each other’s bodies. Guilt in the form of a beautiful gentle man and shame in the form of an angry girl became our sexuality.
    The night he finally let me put my mouth on him we were
listening to “Comfortably Numb,” which he’d played himself first until we got too high. In my mouth his cock made me feel forgiven. I don’t know why. But once I’d turned him, he went anywhere I asked him to go with me.
    There we were that night breaking up in the snow. A still shot of drunken rage looking down on gentle beauty. Well, I went a little wacko, which used to happen a lot back then, and I started a fight with him. I don’t know why. I remember looking at the top of his head and thinking look, it’s an angel, and my very next thought was, spit on his head. I told you, I don’t know why. Why did I eat paper as I kid when I was scared? My panties were sopping and my head was spinning and it was cold and hot at the same time and it was so beautiful there in the snow and flat and quiet and music.
    So I went in for the kill. I mean I snatched it out of the cold dark air as easily as he pulled songs from the sky and wrapped it in displaced rage and vodka breath and hurled it down at the top of his unsuspecting head until his neck nearly snapped. The way women in their twenties who are working out their ouch on everyone they meet do. Open wound girls. Swinging fist girls.
    And we argued - or I did anyway - Phillip sort of ducked and growled - all the way to the car, a puke yellow beater mobile Pinto station wagon with faux wood paneling, and I kept it up inside the car, and he was having to drive with the window rolled down because we were too broke to get the windshield wipers fixed and it was snowing. In between trying to defend himself he had his head in and out of the window to see the road, but that didn’t stop me, did it, I just got louder and bigger and hornier and more horribly chaotically blond. My father’s rage and trespass in my voice and hands, in my very skin.
    Phillip. Which means lover of horses. Or brotherhood. His voice was never meant for yelling.
    That’s when it happened.
    At the crescendo of my rage opera. In the dumb ass Pinto. Near my anger orgasm.

    He fell asleep.
    The car sort of slowed and made a limp arc toward the curb, until it stopped, and his head fell gently forward onto the steering wheel.
    I remember staring at him for a minute, dumbfounded by the moment, seeing - really seeing - how goddamn beautiful his face, his mouth, his long fingered mesmerizing hands … knowing I could never, ever keep a boy like that because the shear velocity of my anger and confusion would eat him alive … and feeling as sad as a girl who will never have a boy like that could feel… crying… a long mile of greenyellowred streetlights blinking us down … and then snapping out of it and yelling at the top of my lungs “WAKE UP MOTHERFUCKER ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! YOU FUCKING FELL ASLEEP YOU COULD HAVE KILLED US!”
    Then I leapt out of the car and slammed the Pinto door and ran down a snow alley behind a stranger’s snow house in my Doc combat boots. Running and running thud-footed how you do in snow and kind of crying so that my Kohl melted down my cheeks and kind of laughing and reaching inside my black leather jacket for my vodka flask and never looking back at him in his beater mobile wood paneled Pinto station wagon, sleeping, or was he singing...
    That’s a great line, isn’t it.
    That’s a great ending.
    But lives aren’t James Taylor songs, and girls like me don’t just run off into the snow and go away.
    I didn’t break up with him that night.
    When we really broke up, well, let’s just say it wasn’t a James Taylor song. And what we made between rage and love and falling asleep - what lived and died between us - haunts me still.
    That dramatic ending was just