Free The Heaven of Mercury by Brad Watson

gather around them for their company. He took the robe off and stood there a long moment with his eyes closed.
    -I love you, he said to her. -You have to know that.
    He began to cry a little, his eyes welled up. He had loved her and he hadn’t even known it. He began to be flooded by memories of her. He’d seen her eating by herself or with a couple of almost equally silent girlfriends in the school cafeteria. He’d seen her sitting on a bench beside the stadium reading a book and eating an apple one day. She wore a sweater and a tartan skirt and penny loafers. He imagined her helping him remove them, one by one, the light sweater, the skirt and shoes and socks off her feet, her underwear and a little brasiere there more for modesty than support.
    The table hardly creaked when he climbed atop it and lay in the narrow space beside her. -I do love you, he whispered. He had hardly to push apart her thin legs, she was in the attitude to receive him already. At her neck, and behind her ears, in her hair, the musty sweet-and-sour smell of a week’s neglect in her bed. He could hardly hear the sounds he made for the louder sound of the blood rushing behind his eyes.
    As he laid his weight upon her, her lips parted and an almost imperceptible exhalation escaped them, the odor of something strange and familiar too, an animal’s breath, and rotten flowers, the scum of an iron-rich creek near the swamps, the odor of richly decaying life, life in death, the dying always overtaking the living so the richness of the roots of life must push up unevolved from the earth and into an almost instant decomposition. She was thick and solid in her tissue, hard in parts of protruding bone like stones beneath a mat of firm moss, and cool but dry. Inside her was thick and cool and close but not entirely unyielding, his hard prick like a rigid fetus inside a cold womb. He moved himself deeper, slowly, with a wild restraint born of his barely contained respect and love for her, which fought within each second in his mind with a violent lust. He gripped the delicate knobs of her shoulders, which fit snugly into the palms of his own small, childlike hands. His mouth was at her ear, and into it he whispered desperate declarations of his passion, her beauty, oh how she was giving more of herself to him each moment. Some heated current ran its hot millipede fingers up his spine, shocked through his brain and out his scalp, his follicles pure heat valves, his jaw thrown open as if to eject his own heart, some shout must have rolled out of his diaphram though he could no more distinguish sound from some other force than if it had occurred in a world yet to know any living, breathing thing, his drool on her neck making a wet spot he could see, when he could see again, spreading beside her lank dark hair on the table beneath them.
    He closed his eyes and lay there, his breath returning slowly to normal, his heart returning to a dreaded calm, when he heard the little noise that made him open his eyes again. It was a sound like the first little cheep you hear sometimes outside your window at dawn when a bird wakes up in its nest. And when he looked he saw first her mouth move, the lips press together, and then her narrow brow furrow over her thick dark eyebrows. His own breath caught in him like he’d been delivered a blow just as she caught her own, and her eyes opened like those of a child who’s been sleeping long and hard and he was up and off her still thumping gently with the last of what he’d done, and standing there watching her.
    She lay there blinking for a long moment, then sat up.
    -Mama?
    Her voice small and crusty, weak. A thick gray cloud in her eyes, clearing.
    -Where am I?
    Parnell had retreated further away from her into a darker corner. Now she was blinking her eyes and looking at him.
    -Where am I?
    He couldn’t move. She stared at him a moment, then felt on her right shoulder where Parnell had drooled,