our darkness

by Reagan Davenport

I breathed in the pungent air, stale and filled with smoke as we lay together in the dark. I took a long breath through the lit joint and held it in for a moment. I watched Corey and Leena, their silhouettes forming a series of hard lines and blurred shadows through a crack in the doorway between us, really just an old sheet we had tacked up between the main bedroom, and the large walk-in closet Nick and I were laying in. It was a space in the absence of space, a place of mock privacy.

Leena was sleeping soundly with her belly up on the queen mattress, which was loosely covered with a cotton blanket in lieu of a fitted sheet. Her stomach was round for the first time in weeks, her skin exposed just above her waistline from underneath a moth-eaten quilt someone's grandmother made. Leena, always a wisp of a woman, looked reminiscent of the little girl she once was in the moonlight, her face blotchy with her recent tears, her ginger ringlets splayed out around her head like a halo. Each wet corkscrew held the weak shine of a recent wash.

Corey sat and watched her too, searching her sleeping figure with his back pressed against the wall, as resolute as a gargoyle along the top of an old building. While he thought no one was looking, he ran his fingers through her hair at her forehead and smoothed away a stray from her face in a quiet, tender way he reserved only for her. He ignored the long, dark mop that fell across his own face.

I looked away, and felt like an intruder somehow.

I exhaled into the dense air, the last of the smoke reeling and curling into the fog that had already settled there, dissipating into the wall of our consumption. My nose began to run a little, and I found myself sniffling in the dark.

We’d eaten the biggest meal we’d had in weeks, and I felt my stomach bulge against the mattress, strained against a shallow cough. I felt nauseous for a moment, and I could feel the skin around my middle stretch, pulling along my stretch marks. I imagined them as fresh and red as they were when I was full of life.

Hers, and my own.

I looked over at our empty plates on the floor, all bloodied and covered in sauces along the rim of each dish of varying color and size. I looked at our glasses, most empty of liquor and one with the remnants of mashed potatoes that had stubbornly refused to fit on Corey’s undersized plate. I noticed a single pea, a straggler left on a dish, marinating in the leftover fluids of a rare piece of beef in its saucer, and reflexively picked it up with my fingers. I put the pea in my mouth in a flash and split its casing along my tongue. I sucked on it like a hard candy, allowing its cold, grainy texture to melt along the sides of my mouth, allowing the skin of the seed and the meaty insides to become separated, each part producing its own sensation. I chewed the skin until it reconnected with the whole of itself, a warm and bloody paste in my mouth.

I felt my throat muscles tighten around it as I swallowed. The knot of my abused digestive tract revolted, and I had to sit up on my hands and knees to avoid feeling my dinner at the base of my throat.

I sniffled and sat back on my feet, reaching to snuff out what was left burning in my hand. I left the stinger propped up along the side of the lid from an old pasta sauce jar we had been using as an ashtray. I lay back down and leaned into Nick’s bony ribs beside me, so close his chest only expanded to the point my body would allow. He snored lightly in his sleep, his warm torso and cold feet touching my skin, both felt oddly comforting. I shifted and propped against Nick on my side, using his arm as a pillow. As I stared at the frozen condensation on the inside the window, bare and open to the night as Nick wrapped his arm over my body and snuggled into my middle, his warm breath from an open mouth heating my neck.

I fell into a fitful sleep, noticing the beating of my heart through my middle and feeling strangely alone. I dreamed of off-white walls, of metallic tastes and the endless bleating of hospital monitors, of bills and pink slips wallpapering a border around the room, running with huge drips of wet paste. I faded out of the light and noise as I began to sink through the floor and into a true darkness, a comfort in the warmth and quiet of our cocoon. Of our special, private place.

For a moment, I saw nothing, heard nothing, but I felt her moving again inside me. For a moment, we were both alive.

Photo of Reagan Davenport

BIO: Reagan Davenport is a graduate of the Arts and Letters undergraduate program at the University of Maine at Machias. Reagan’s concentration and area of interest is creative writing, primarily fiction. Recent work has been featured in issues of Feels Blind Literary, the Rockvale Review, and the San Antonio Review.