Cherry
“Come here.”
She had a perfect, late-summer cherry between her teeth and when she broke its skin an impossible red ran over her tongue, between the seam of her lips. She spat out the core and the fruit along with it, looking like some boxer on television who’d just been punched in the jaw and worked up a gob of blood and pulp. She kept only her mouthful of juice and stained the ground with the rest.
The air was blue and early over the meadows, the world tucked away, new and untouched. Him and her. Their little secret. The orchard folded over them, encrusted with dew and the spilled guts of devoured fruit, dampening the parched grass and cooling their bare toes. When she pulled him to her, he could taste the sweetness lingering on her lips until she bit him hard enough to draw blood.
He’d met her while the early-May light was still reaching the world in watery beams, while the tulips were disintegrating and teachers were still droning away at their blackboards. She was leaning on the wall three lockers down from him, bruised knees showing under the hem of her dress. He’d watched her before, strawberry hair always in a tangle, gaze never still enough to hold. Until now. When he asked for her name, she reached out a hand with nails bitten raw.
“Cherry,” she said, cutting off his circulation. “Cherry Stritter.”
Summer had come on fast that year, and his pulse had quickened with it. Everything else was long and slow. The sun dragged across the endless days and the two of them disappeared into the meadows, into acres and acres of land once kept as a public park and now left to run wild, to swallow up those who didn’t want to be found.
In the mornings it was cool enough to wander under the fruit trees, to climb for high-up cherries and dance around the early-dropped plums coating the bleached dirt and stubby yellow grass. At midday, the sun left no shade and he watched from the bank of the steadily shrinking pond below the orchard as Cherry waded in. In the afternoon, the light cast wiry shadows from the trees they sprawled under, sweating away the most sweltering hours, the hours that Cherry said turned piss to steam before it could hit the dirt.
The sun was plotting to reach them with its slanting fingers, shimmering on the thicket of high grass surrounding the bald patch beneath their tree. Cherry was on her back, hair dragging in the dust, feet propped on the knobby roots snaking beneath them. She tossed one in the air, let it fall. Her fingers dug up a clot of dirt, the closest thing to a pebble she would ever find out there, and tossed it in his direction without looking.
She got up and wandered off and he followed.
The land was flat and sun-beaten. Cherry moving across it was a rebellion, a refusal to acknowledge the feverish heat pressing down on them, thieving the moisture from their skin and the strength from their bodies.
She wove through the tall grasses ahead of him, the path whispering closed behind her so that he had to repart it at every step. He caught flickers of her between the wispy golden stalks, like a daylight ghost dancing on the dead air. A mirage, always out of reach. Impossible to act on, impossible to hold down.
The twisting cherry trees solidified first, artificially bright leaves hanging limp under the heat-lamp sky, the shorter plum branches burdened low and heavy beneath bruise-colored fruit. The grass fell to his shoulder, his knee, then to chopped-off stubs poking through the dirt. They pricked the soles of his feet as he wove through the trunks and after Cherry, avoiding sun-baked pulp as he went.
The dropped plums seemed to have doubled since the morning, when their rot was still disguised under a veil of silvery damp. Exposed, they were blackened and bursting with their own insides, bleeding a sweet, necrotic ooze. Greedy, fatted flies bobbed through the air, diving for the fruit before resuming their drunken flight. He watched as one paused, probed, drank deeply, looking like a blood vessel about to burst. He wondered if it could taste what it was taking, if it liked it or was too starved to care.
Cherry was ahead of him, sizing up a tree. She hiked her leg up the trunk and he saw bruises on her shins and knees and stretching up to paint her thighs, set off by the old scratches of thorn tendrils and the newly inflamed cross-hatching where the plum bark scraped at her skin. She looked wild, marked-up, as if the world had taken hold of her and dragged her around a little instead of merely allowing her to trip through it like everybody else.
She hoisted herself higher and flopped onto a sturdy, half-shaded branch, panting and wetting her cracked lips. Her legs dangled in front of him as he followed her up. She swung one at him and missed. The hem of her dress was stained with pond water; he watched the cotton edge of her underthings beneath it and wanted to run his hand up her skin.
“Maybe I should meet your father,” he said.
She sat up as he reached her, in his face.
“No.”
She dropped her damp cheek against his shoulder and bit his collarbone. All at once he wanted to shove her. Away. Down. On her back. He didn’t know. He wanted to grab her leg and pull, to send her plummeting through the branches, to watch her hit the ground like the gnawed-on pits they’d thrown that morning. He wanted to bite her calf, her thigh, higher. He wanted to disappear into the tall grasses, to escape her hungry, searching mouth.
She was always biting. Grazing his ear, teasing his finger. Sometimes, he hated her.
Once, they’d been lying by the pond, limbs splayed over the cracked mud, crushing a flat, boy-and-girl-shaped patch among the tall grass, when without warning, she’d rolled up on her side and sunk her teeth into his bicep, keeping them fixed there as he yelped and she stared up at him with a trance in her eyes. Usually, she bit him while they were stuck together with their own salt, when she would nuzzle under his chin or find the tender flesh beneath his ear, as if she was trying to bury herself in the layers of his skin. He’d feel her sweet breath, a prick of canines; finding her mark, burrowing in.
“He wouldn’t want to meet you,” she said, unfastening her teeth.
There was a fresh mark on her knee. He watched as the joint bent and stretched beneath pinkish skin.
“Hey.”
“Really.”
“I’m not so bad.”
“Exactly.” She kept her cheek against his shoulder and wove her fingers through his, like grasses tangled together in the sweeping, lifeless wind.
Cherry was late, the sun nearly at its summit by the time she emerged through the field, fresh scratches on her knees from the greedy, groping thorn thickets above the orchard. She held a battered milk jug filled with some dark liquid, runnels of dried-up purple cutting lines down the plastic. She grinned, holding the jug aloft, and her eyeteeth seemed to wink at him.
“What is it?”
“Plum wine,” she said, squatting and unscrewing the cap.
“Your father’s?”
“Not anymore.”
She looked away, and he wondered if she was afraid. He watched her throat bob as she pulled a long swallow from the grimy plastic and then passed it to him.
He abandoned his usual noontime post on the bank and they waded through the pond for hours, tossing the jug back and forth and throwing mucky water in each other’s shrieking faces until Cherry’s shoulders and cheeks grew bright with sunburn and she left him for the shade of a pond-side tree. He lingered, standing thigh-deep in the stirred-up water, watching mud swirl from its bed to stain his fingertips. He thought of Cherry’s spattered dress, of her bruised thighs, of her bare, blistered shoulders.
He staggered from the pond and cut a crooked path toward her.
“You’re drunk as a skunk.” Her grin was lazy, her eyes unfocused.
He nodded, standing over her, knowing something she didn’t: he had already been drunk. On the hot air and endless skies, on the middle of nowhereness, on the whispering grasses and the maw of the depleted pond bed. He was drunk on the girl in front of him.
His skin was trapping heat, pooling it. He was too full of her, too full of ideas, bloated and stupid with them. He felt nauseous, as if he would be sick if he didn’t touch her, and it was only ever going to get worse.
Cherry slouched low against the bark in front of him, her hair caught up in the rough seams above her head, forming a mangled, gingery halo. He lowered himself unsteadily into her lap, resting heavy in the junction of her broken-doll legs. He let his chin fall against her navel. Stared up at her. Said nothing. Felt like he was begging. Fermented plum stained her lips. A rivulet of wine trailed over her jaw. He licked it. She giggled and licked him back, leaving a sour film over his mouth. She took another gulp from the jug and fell back against the tree.
He was dreaming, hallucinating. She was right in front of him—beneath him—but somehow distant and untouchable, slippery and blush-bright and full of teeth. When she bit him, at least, he knew she was real, that they existed on the same corporeal plane. But she wasn’t biting him now, only sitting quietly, watching some faraway wisp of grass or bit of dust as she let her fingers fall absently through his matted hair.
“D’you ever just want…” Her words slurred and she trailed off. A minute passed before she picked up again, as if she’d rediscovered the thought while rifling through some attic of her mind, dusted it off, and stuck it back in her mouth. “D’you ever want a soft sort of world?”
“What?” He was watching her lips, feeling her heat. His brain felt like the steam of breath on glass, fuzzy and barely there.
“Dunno.” She stretched a hand up in front of them. There was a shadowy stripe over her knuckles. “Just sit with me, I guess. Please.”
He felt like there was a current leaping beneath his skin. He didn’t want to sit. He wanted to roll her over in the dust, to squeeze her hard enough that he could keep himself from bursting, from cracking open and spilling out.
He tried to pull himself up, to reach for her, but she drew back and slid from beneath him and disappeared into the fizzing, static-filled hum of the grass. He stared up at the sky, his entire body heated and aching and too heavy to find her. The abandoned jug lay beside him, caked with pond scum and holding the last of their sun-spoiled wine.
It was days before he saw her again. He waited, watching the mornings disappear under the plum trees. She was not there to wade through the pond at noon and so he stayed in the orchards to watch the flies wade instead, through sour nectar and decaying fruit flesh. He stayed even when his head began to ache with thirst, even when the flies landed on him and lapped at his sweat. Only in the evenings did he rise and go to the water, sitting defeated along its edge, filling the stolen jug and soothing his throbbing skull.
Nearly a week had passed when she appeared in the night, across the water, like a will-o’-the-wisp come to lead him astray. Instead she crossed to him, circling the bank to his perch on the cooling mud. The moon was full and high and its light gave the pond the sharp shine of a knife’s edge, the water somehow alive as it never was during the long, flat days.
“Hey there,” she whispered, unsteady.
He rose to meet her and she slipped her hand into his. He pulled back. She moved forward, trapping him in the cage of her arms, and she must have felt his stiffness but she hid her face in his neck anyways and softly bit the skin there.
The blow came like a crack of summer lightning, the impact snapping her head back and radiating up his hand. He had never been sure before if her father hit her, but he was now. He could see it in the way she was quiet, in the way her eyes met his with an unexpectant dullness, even though he was still humming with the shock of the strike. It was in the way her lips formed around his name, even as her cheek bloomed dark as rotted, bloody plums. He turned to leave and she reached for him. Sealed them together like hot wax over a note, like a pact of sliced and oozing palms, like the saccharine, sticky death of an insect on honey. Her lips were coppery with blood; something inside her mouth was broken open and it flowed over his tongue. He sunk her low in the high, spindling grasses. The ground was cool against her back, against his palms as he leaned over her. Her hand was knotted in his hair. There was a cut over the height of her cheekbone, fresh shades of red and purple flowing out from it like the rings of the drying pond. She twisted her fist painfully against the nape of his neck and kissed him as if she were drinking from him, as if he was the one belly-up in the dirt.
Beneath the night, beneath the grass, beneath him, she solidified. She could be touched, she could be hurt. She could be had.
Her eyes were wide, wild, staring up at him. Afraid. Something barbed and weedy unfurled in his chest, something hateful. He forced her head back to bite the soft, sweet flesh of her throat, and she yelped.
The moon was sinking, carving a line down the night. Cherry’s dress was ripped and lying in the dirt somewhere above their heads. Her wrists were bruised, her throat littered with the imprint of his teeth. Her hands curled against his chest, fragile and transient as droplets tipping early-morning grass before they were scorched away. Instead of a soft love-blush, her cheek showed a deepening bruise. Dark patches marred the pale skin over her ribs and her left hip-bone, marks that he had not put there.
He held her tight, but thought about letting go, about tossing her into the mud and making her crawl back to him. But he would keep her, he thought, in the end. He would keep her where he wanted her, because she needed it, because he wanted it, because he could hurt what had been taught to hurt.
The moon abandoned them. As he watched, silver fingers tore open the sky, flooding the meadows, the orchards, the high grasses and the pond, pouring over the mass of their spilled and tangled bodies, all of it razor-bright and bristling with dew.