#149 Less Than the Moon

by Donna D. Vitucci

She sucked a stone like a lozenge, and tasted there the sea and every element of the sea—grit and brine and fish, cousins to fish, snails, kelp, microbes, algae, a universe that swims to reach light. Small things accrued. Tides were pulled. This very beach, and they, had eroded.

She said, “You prepare for assault, when what’s around the corner is change, evolution, love.”

He said, “You make it sound like those are all the same, but two of the three can be violent.”

“Change happens over time, it has to.”

“You don’t know me like you think.”

She knew his temper, she knew that. And she knew marriage was a walking shipwreck.

“Maybe you don’t want to be happy,” she said.

“No, I do want happiness.”

“You seem to avoid its true direction then.”

She tugged his arm to hold him still. When they stopped kissing she ran her fingers along his jaw, pulled his chin down, curled her fingers over his bottom teeth and pressured him to open.

He went to bite her knuckles; instead, she set the stone on his tongue. In the stone he tasted her, tasted the first earth, the first waters, the first angels. He tasted what was cast out, what was saved, her salt, his blood. He tasted the New World and the seas that spanned her globe. He had to have her, the one great secret, the edge of flint cast up and bound to cut.