Lot's Wife
When they go to the beach she buries him in the sand up to his neck. He is no longer a man. He is a mouth.
Sometimes, like today, when there is no one else in the cove, she crouches over his face and he reaches for her with his tongue, tastes and glut-strokes and reaches for her again and again. He is something subterranean, a root from which she stops to feed. Sometimes she lets her head fall back in pleasure. Sometimes she cries out. Then she stands and—leaving her husband buried in the sand—she slips into the ocean, sweat curing to saltwater, skin turning to salt.
Eventually, she digs him out and they sit in silence, side by side in low beach chairs. He reads. She reads. She digs her toes into the sand. When she reaches the end of a chapter, she looks up and slowly turns the page.
Gulls rush the tideline, taking tiny steps toward the receding wave, then away from the reaching wave. She looks over at Lot. He is a mystery to her.
The space between his eyebrows pinches together – he is looking at his book, but he isn’t reading. This much she knows.
Later, back at the house, he asks if she has picked up the mail recently. Day before yesterday, she says. She hangs the keys on the hook by the door and takes off her shoes, the slip-ons that wait at the beach house for her all week long. She walks toward their bedroom and he follows her. Are you expecting something? She takes off her cover-up and lies down on the bed. They haven’t done a thing all day and still she’s tired. She tucks her arms beneath her head and looks toward the window. The sky is colorless, shapeless. She notices that the curtains have faded. The curtains were already faded when they’d bought the house, but now the stripes aren’t even stripes. Worst of all, she knows she won’t replace them.
He doesn’t answer. They both know that he expects his past to catch up with him one day, but they don’t say as much. They don’t want to fuck it up, whatever good time they’ve had together this weekend. Tomorrow morning—early—they will drive back to the city and the closer and closer they get to it, the further and further they will be from here...
The air is damp. Her skin is covered in patterns of salt residue that look like tide marks on her dark skin. He doesn’t want the day to end. He doesn’t want the light to leave.
He lies down beside her and, with his hand, lifts her hand. Like to like, their fingers interlace and—oh how he wishes the simplicity of this moment, of them interlaced, could last and be enough and it would be her and him, just her and him against the world—then places her index finger in his mouth. He suckles each finger in turn, licks clean her wrist, her shoulder, her stomach, comes panting and lapping to her. She buries her head in the sand. This time it’s a metaphor.
Let’s not go back, he says, I’ll call in sick. I will.
We should stay, she agrees, but doesn’t much mean it. They are good with halfhearted attempts.
It is their lot in life to hide in language.
The next morning they drive into the city. They drive mostly in darkness, but eventually, they are born into the day. The day cracks open, tenderly at first, then—falling into a rhythm—comes gripping full with force. In the light, they hardly recognize one another. They try. They cross the bridge that will take them to the rest of their lives. She places her hand on his and squeezes.
He turns to look at her. You do know, don’t you? How much I love you?
She smiles; at first, out of habit. They are over the water now. The light falls all over the water. It rushes into the water white and red and yellow and orange — it comes back to them as blue.
Never look back, she says to Lot.
Never look back, he replies.
Brigitte Lewis is a writer born in California Gold Country destined for speculation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Hobart, The Southampton Review, and Foglifter, and she is a founding editor at Utterance Journal. She lives in Bend, OR and can always smell a mixture of juniper and sage in the air.