vajont
by Thea Lloyd
Summer is the mealy white pill dissolving under my tongue. She’s floating after me in my top. Seriously, fuck her. The glitter better be clawing into her delicate lupine skin. I think of how my summertime grandmother soaks the lupini beans in water for weeks before preserving them. I watch her refresh the buckets every day so the toxins seep out. Pickled superfoods made her village a blue zone. You remind me it was your grandmother and I realize you’ve been speaking the whole time. Listen to this: you survived the fight, but your scratch-n-sniff skin comes back bruised. I tear you without detaching anything that matters. Out seeps the fragrant ghost of your citrus truth. Your leaves beam a let’s-speed-away-at-the-freshly-turned-light green. My sweet clementine, you survived the fight.
We pretend you need to heal and that the plain is still flooded. Weeks—no, days filled with languor and I’ve grown to hate you and the blackening blood under your fingernails. I’m starting to see you as my sickly dog. More static apples tossed on a wafer-thin plate; will you sharpen the knives yourself after I leave? I come to your couch-bed-fart cemetery and free the curtains to see you shriek like a vampire. Why do I blame you for the person I’ve become? Hey, continue where you left off about the mountains. Conjuring the spectre of our love, I palm your head onto my chest. Your red spur ear brands my nipple and I smell a kiss into your crown. Well, I hated the humid air she used to gift me every summer. Going to Sicily felt like the tuna breath her cat would wake me with. One year, I became convinced that a perpetual fish stank haunted my room. Immediately, I knew it was the cat, and then I realized it was actually the harbour all along. I cleaned and found out it was neither. I was on edge. My mom had started talking to her again. Wait, I thought you loved cats? And Sicily too? You ignored me and continued. Then my mom’s sister died right before we came back. So, we flew north to see her and we left from there. It was my first time meeting her. I hadn’t known her while she was still alive. The sudden change, the dry air, no more fish: it all sharpened me back to normal. We were up high and I kept thinking shit, these are the Alps. No one bothered to know me. I can’t remember why. She came with us too, from Sicily, but ignored my mom and me the whole time as she spoke the crowd's dialect and we only poorly spoke hers.
Were you on Monte Toc or on Salta? Whose slipping rockface was it that pushed a 250-meter wave off the edge of the tallest dam in the world? Erto, Casso, and 80% of Longarone were submerged. 2000 fatalities. It was entirely preventable; reporters, citizens, and activists had all known it would happen. Only two men were found guilty, and just one served a sentence. I drummed off the facts silently in my head and felt embarrassed that it didn’t matter anymore. I stopped listening, but you stopped talking so I think we’re fine. Your eyes are closed now and I’ve been studying you blanching in light this whole time. You’re innocent like a stillborn. Crosshatch copperhead, give me new words to say missing you kills me. That each kiss feels like I’m relearning your taste. What stops me from leaving? I ordain your precum-coated skin a mineral lick. I must love you. How could you ever be my dog when you are a bowl of fruit? Yeşil erik. I’ve stolen this from you too, yet you continue to evade my capture. Greengage (not as juicy), go shower in salt and feed yourself to me.
The sheets parachute over my corpse face and I let out a death-rattle sigh. Okay, now you be Toc and I’ll be Salta… Wait, who’s playing the inland tsunami? Do all three waves count as the same role? Beat me with a bat; I'm being too intense again. Obviously, we’re both the dam. So much death, yet the concrete rises uncracked. We both see ourselves as Longarone: productive legs prone in newly-banked rivers, sexy little martyrs. My metal mouth reminds me to ask if you tasted it on me, too. Oh, your eyes are still closed and I forgot to talk outloud. I finally see you as small. I laugh at you snoring, wetting your pants, ruining the fabric of the couch with your naked body grease. When I fall asleep in 30 minutes, I will have a sex dream about you where I’m so disgusted I can’t cum and you cry until I leave. I think about how I finally have everything I will ever need and that includes you.
Wait, go back to the part about the plum. Can I teethe you? I’ll risk my oven-safe torso just to bite the seeds out of your flesh. Your poison drowses me. I know this sequence already, and I refuse to remember what it tells me about the man in the hallway. There should be an endpoint to remembering. I think of Sicily and I recall the images through your eyes. They’re mine now. You let me take them, so it’s not really stealing. I see the mountain at night, feeling the hot, humid air rise from the desert ground. I’ll never believe it can get cold in the dark. Your north-star glare pinpricks my back straight and I’m following it uphill. I surrender. You are the burning bush whose embers lead me to the peak. To where we both say the wrong thing and one of us falls, squeal, thud, crack. Never in sequential order. Flames cascade off your head as proof. I can see the memory of a trunk in your iris. Charred and still smouldering, you reek of amber and olive. I should wash your bedsheets.
Photo of Thea Lloyd
BIO: Residing in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Thea Lloyd is a writer, teacher, and visual artist. Her art and academic work often focus on memory, queerness, and diaspora. When not writing or teaching French, she’s on a pilgrimage.