Free All the Way by Marie Darrieussecq

remembering what happened an hour ago, feverishly remembering—the sky becomes grey in the east and she’s back there, at Milord’s, glued to this unknown body. She has to be back there, not at Milord’s, not with that man, but inside that thing at the centre, right now, that moment when everything’s ablaze.
    The band has stopped playing. The musicians are carrying heavy black cases. A man and a woman are dancing through the silence, hanging off each other. The shutters have come down on the drinks stand and her father is there on a chair. Not in the plane or in Paris but there. A female figure is sitting on his knees. It’s not her mother or the pharmacy woman. It’s the singer who looks like Boy George.
    He tries to stand up but can’t. He yells that he’s dreaming. He yells at her to go to bed and asks in a really loud voice what the fuck she’s still doing there. He yells where’ve you been, what the fuck is she doing out this late, where has she been?
    By midday the next day the world is back to the way it was. Hours have sixty minutes and are marked by the ringing of the church bell, ladle-banging on the Clèves mess tin. A cow moos, the yellow air sticks like jelly. The thermometer reads 32 degrees, the horizontal lines are trembling on the hillsides.
    Monsieur Bihotz came to check on her at eight in the morning; he thought they’d go fishing. ‘He hasn’t noticed that you’re growing up,’ says her mother (on the phone, she’s at the shop). ‘Keep the shutters closed, so the house stays cool.’
    Scratchy lips, those hands, and the touch of a stranger. My first kiss , she repeats it to herself, my first kiss . A little bit of this incredible event settles in these three words, my first kiss, my first kiss. ‘Daydreaming about him, an exquisite shuddering overwhelms her.’ Is that what it is? ‘She got wet like a bitch’, another phrase, heard from the mouth of a man at a carnival or a party or a bar or perhaps Georges.
    She tries again. Yes, the face leans down, the T-shirt with the wolf, and already it’s tight like a fist between her thighs and there’s that whooshing, she leans this man down towards her as far as she can, and all of her, body and head and brain and marrow and skull and bones, everything is alive.
    She drops her bike in the grass, steps over the nettles. It’s that time in summer, the slack time, deep in summer, when the days to come are as long as those that have gone.
    Billie Jean is not my love.
    The river is swollen with green water. Bulging, as if swifter water was surging beneath the surface. The soil is on delayed time, it remains there, dusty, shot through with this other matter, this other possible arrangement of matter. Without the slightest ripple, the whole expanse of water spreads over the muddy beaches. The softness of the silence is horrifying.
    She lies down under the trees, it’s the green from primary school, the green you imagine when you think of green. She could stay there forever, tumbling among the trees with her too-big body sore from bike-riding, sweating, hot—lying down to soothe this stabbing sensation that makes her rush outside, onto the roads, across the countryside, it’s impossible to stay inside—remembering the incredible sequence of gestures and words that led her behind the pillar at Milord’s—with this sun shining for no reason, when Rose and whoever are at the beach or lying around a pool, when towns are pulsating with their nightclubs, which are no doubt different from Milord’s—when, on the disco ball, Paris and New York are pulsating and this village is the only dark spot—she dips her fingers in the water, slowly sinking her hands in up to the wrists.
    The stupidity of this life, that she even needs this stupid body, the bother of it all. She dips her face in her cupped hands, it smells like cold rock and iron, the