all about the girl - dedicated to Brian Tucker

*SPECIAL NOTE: I dedicate this blogpost to Brian Tucker. A very good soul, a lover of the arts and a very fine man indeed. Thank you Brian for your support of good writing and the arts.*



She had orchestrated the whole thing.

He was her boyfriend's brother and I could see the appeal. So many complications and her at the center of it all with her hands clean and smelling of sweet bath oils. She had a way of making things happen without even touching them.

One time she went out to shop for food. We were broke. We had both lost our jobs on the same day a few weeks before. We were living off lentils. I was performing the loaves and fishes with the last of the starvation food in the back of the pantry. We sipped free coffee from the cafe where we used to work and bemoaned the lack of employment without actually looking for something new. She thought the universe would provide and told me so. I wanted to roll my eyes, but that would mean taking them off her for a moment. She was luminous.

She told him that I would sleep with him, knowing that if she wanted it then it would be so. He smelled of garlic and chai tea and patchouli and he needed a shower. He was her boyfriend's brother. I thought about that, me and the brother, her and his brother. All of this made it possible.

That day in her bedroom was a surprise. She liked to watch him with me. I let him touch me in front of her because she wanted it. He had crazy eyes and he made no sense with his yoga-talk and health food and his denials of the flesh. He could talk with her for hours and the words they used were phrases from "The Living Game" a kind of capitalist commune that they both had an interest in. They talked about the Universe as if it were a conscious being. They talked about mantras and affirmations and choosing your disease to teach you universal lessons.

I watched her talk and there were her lips and I watched them, thinking about the waxy scent of her lipstick and the powdery texture of her skin. I was all touch and scent and taste in those days and the prickling irritation of their conversation was easy to ignore.


She settled down onto her pillow, lifting the golden mane of hair into her delicate fingers, leaning on her palm and watching. She wanted to watch us. We knew this and he unzipped my skirt and showed my body to her and entered it quickly, all of this for her. She did nothing. She did everything. We heard her little murmurs, the only sign of her pleasure, just a breathy cooing that encouraged us.

I'm not sure who touched her first, but somehow our fingers were slick with her. I remember lifting the damp white cotton of her pants and then I was in side her, he was inside her. Our fingers had fused and they worked in the same rhythm that his hips had found. Her lover's brother, her female lover and her, at the juicy apex of it all.

I remember her orgasm as a soft tightening around our fingers, a sucking fish that hauled my whole body through her. She barely moved, but I bucked uncontrollably against his pelvic bone, rubbing and pushing as if I might tear through his body and into hers.

I thought I was in love, but perhaps it was just the irresistible succulence of the girl.

The boy rolled away and I wanted him to disappear, to leave us, me still reaching inside her, my fingers shaking and flexing and reaching, as if cracking the salty shell of an oyster and peeling back the flesh to find a pearl.