SIMONE AND KREE

The following is an excerpt from Daniel Grandbois’ The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir, Green Integer, 2010.

SIMONE’S surrender commingled with the cotton fibers of her panties, staining them with fertility icons and incomprehensible crystalline formations like snow. Oceans can be drawn into glaciers to reveal connections between lands.

Kree lifted her hips and pushed her dress beneath them. When he forced his breath through her panties, something tickled in her, but it seemed bodies away, dinosaur bodies away. The sort of tickling you can never get enough of, yet, if you did, you’d be crushed under the weight of dinosaurs.

He rested his head against her thigh. The nest of her pubic hair showed through her panties. A single hair poked out. Kree toyed with it, then traced the contours of her sex, which gave off heat. He snuck a finger under the fabric.

Simone got an ice cube from the freezer, popped it into her mouth and calved it down.

(Do you see Australopithecus, the first upright man, beating back an advancing glacier with the thighbone of a saber-toothed cat? Or, such a cat burying its tooth bones into the head of such a man and dragging him to a cave, dragging him by the bone? Millions of years later, a Homo sapiens will find the skull with holes in it like a bowling ball and imagine.)

Simone leaned over Kree and put his bone in her mouth.

(In his lifetime, Kree’s balls may produce enough semen to fill an oil tanker. How gung-ho would the American government be to protect a ship like that through the Straits of Hormuz? And what if an enemy blew a hole in her? We could have an unprecedented semen spillage in the Straits of Hormuz. Would it be toxic to the fish and plant life? Maybe the little sperm cells would swim around and fertilize everything in sight. Would the spillage remain a roving blob, or would it solidify to form a new island, a vacation paradise with milk-white beaches, where deluded Christian women could go and upon their return claim they were bearing the children of immaculate conceptions?)

“I’m thinking about our perceptual isolation,” Kree said. “People hear one another as they hear kelp growing in the ocean—”

Simone touched his lips. As if riding a frog’s curled tongue, words sprang from her mouth to catch the flies buzzing in Kree’s ear and give him a wet-willy besides.

He rolled to his side. She hugged him from behind. Her eyelids dripped down her eyes like wax down a candle. She took hold of his penis as she was falling asleep, as if it were the handle on the door to her dreams.

THEY walked to Pearl Street, Boulder’s pedestrian mall, where grew the happy hair of hippies, granolas and deadheads; where foot bags were knee’d and ankle’d to noodling jam music blasting from portable stereos; where jugglers punned and passed the hat; yogis folded themselves into Plexiglas boxes; and mediums mediated via crystals, coins, and cards. Businesspeople and tourists were most numerous, but they didn’t own the place. Members of a makeshift band on the courthouse lawn fiddled with pawnshop guitars and mandolins or beat on bongos or congas, once in a while hitting on a song they all knew. Neil Young’s, “Cortez the Killer,” sputtered to life like Frankenstein’s monster and bade Kree to sit in the grass and close his eyes. He heard his father’s voice guiding him through the desert. As for Simone, the song made a tear evacuate one of her ducts. Pierced by the hot rays of noon, which danced like toothpick puppets on her half-closed lashes, the tear vanished down her cheek.

Later, saying little, Simone and Kree strolled past cartoonish storefronts; hammock, kite and incense shops; art galleries; bookstores; carts studded with handmade jewelry or smothered in floppy hats; and children climbing statues of toads. A four-year-old skipped ahead of her parents, her gait flirting innocently with gravity. Gravity lost control and sent its semen reeling, impregnating the girl’s gait. She fell to the street and scraped her knees. Two fat squirrels chased each other around the limbs of an oak. One kept trying to fuck the other. A cat watched from below with feigned disinterest. A common fly flew by. Simone pinched it. Boulder’s bugs will let you do that. They’ll turn the other cheek if you swat. They’re rag dolls, living beyond the confines of their bodies, beyond the panic of corporeal death.

Simone and Kree sat on a bench. Before them, a man with a saxophone, looking like a sack of dirt on his folding chair, his bald head absorbing the day’s last light. He didn’t care much for finishing songs. He blew a few lines and then stopped and looked around, occasionally nodding to a passerby.

Her head on Kree’s shoulders, Simone imagined preparing a mold from his nose and using it to shape candles.

SIMONE and Kree on a grassy slope, his hand under her blouse. Her nipple hardened at the speed of trees—sentimental sapling to resolute oak. Truth hitched a ride on the transformation.

“Where am I?” Simone asked.

“Where you’ve always been.”

“Good. That’s where I’ll stay. And where are you?”

“Here,” said Kree, “but I’m going.”

His fingers on her breast brought out his sun. It revolved in him now like a slow-turning whale, one caught, perhaps, in a web of golden rope.

Simone pressed him close, wanting her skin to be smothered in Kree. She was new at saying good-bye.

Spinning toward oblivion, Kree forgot his own name. He withdrew from her arms like a ghost.

Simone got up and walked away, a thick honey-tear pushing out of her duct all the Kree that had coursed through her veins.

By Daniel Grandbois