Lustoleum
Natalie Parker-Lawrence
you’re not sure about it until it happens twenty more times, the visceral tension from across the room, the kind of smoldering look you think you see. but you looked away the first fifty times, understanding the word smolder for the first time because you are sure that people in between you, even the ones milling around and talking about nothing in clotted conversations about utility bills and recalcitrant children and negligible tax refunds, notice a scarlet wet rise of temperature in the vodkaed room and feel the fingers of heat grabbing across their boredom to you and back to him, despite his being a Republican, his sansabelt pants, his being fifteen years older, his being a geometry teacher, his love of country music, his not being the high school boyfriend. but his eyes, those bluer than black-ice eyes, make you drip and take chance after chance, inventing new ways to move after waffles in their bed, before and after school, after presents of porcelain statues and neck scarves meant for another generation of women, after ice cream, after he fixes your car by just filling up the water tank, after greasy chinese food, after his list of honey-do chores, after night school in parks and in parking lots in neighborhoods that you don’t travel to in daylight hours. his eyes make you forget every yawning sermon, every religion class, every catholic school, every prayer you said for every blurred ambulance, every asian soul in purgatory, every holy card, every sticky scapular, every manufactured sin in confession, every memorized penance.
you scream to and for the stars in his gold chevy pickup, the metal ribs on the floor of its flatbed sticking in your back, bruising tail-bone muscles, teaching you to move your pain toward the screaming that scares the lightening bugs up toward the bigger light like street lamps and down to the smaller and closer flicker of backup tail lights.
above the pain, he screams up at myriad stars while thousands, maybe millions, of mosquitoes dive in and out and eat you alive, you wondering but not caring about malaria, but remembering the first time on the cold formica of the kitchen counter even though the maid from next door, the one with three fingers who could still hold and peel a potato, watches through the barely-curtained window, moving to the cold linoleum floor and then over to the rough gold, brown and tan couch that America issued to everyone in the suburbs that year.
Natalie Parker-Lawrence lives in Memphis, where she teaches beautiful children, writes plays and nonfiction, and is completing her MFA from the University of New Orleans—and yes, she is as spicy as she seems.
