By Emma Saccomani

The Homily Of Bare Breasts

Lustful fever beaten together by the whisks that keep my forehead boiling with the passion of deep oranges and lucid reds. She’s my Lolita, she’s the slim fingers pointing at my chest, the court gavel and the prison sentence. Rustling of bedsheets in the silence of dawn melted to dusk, our routinely sacrifice of the flesh, eyes closed and lashing at the sin in our minds, reveling in the unavoidable eroticism of it all. He paints me anew, with walls of red peeking through the translucent white. We tumble off of each other in heaves, her ghost leaving its imprints on my wrinkled forehead, in the elastics of the air. I rush to wipe his body off of mine.

Her hair wisps across the frames of my memory, hiding an eye as his climax comes with an unsatisfied grunt; turning over and going to sleep. Saccharine rituals of blood and white into my ovaries, spilling over onto the sheets and tucking me in with a snigger.
The sex we share is compulsory, a lie we keep up even in the darkness of closed curtains because we have to lie, even to ourselves.

The following morning (a bright Sunday,) the sun spills in from the open shades, the slow hypnotic side to side sway of the tilt rod and its slow ticking as it rustles against the blinds stalls me for a moment. I’m dressed nicely, a black dress of cotton and polyester, long and modest. Rather somber church clothes, but I would have even more trouble swallowing the guilt down my throat if I were to wear pinks and whites: a mirage of purity. The clothes burn my skin, scorching them raw and leaving an odor of death behind. I find my seat at a pew, kicking down the kneeler, cross legged. Sin seeps from in between my legs, a leaky faucet: drip, drip, drip. Onto the floor at three, down to my knees at four, kissing her cheeks at five and in between my legs at six.

The priest struts in alongside his two young altar boys, adorned in white gowns and lavish gold crosses held high on candles and thorned roses. The baskets come around, paired with chubby faces and sympathetic smiles that would morph into grotesque frowns if they glanced down and saw my seeping hole, an eye poking into the abysmal crevice of earthquake and soul sewn together in passionate loathing. Eager to please, (don’t look down!) I stuff the wallets of the robes and the popes and the bishops and all the people who know God with a willing smile, happy to serve and kiss their feet. Wash me off with the bill, I beg you!

I think of awful things done without a blouse. I curse Leviticus while he watches me taste the peak of my desires, the one he’ll seethe over, loathe over and sink his bitter teeth into. I let the communion melt in my mouth for a minute before chewing it and spitting it out into a napkin I keep in my snake skin purse. I don’t deserve it.

I never liked driving, but I’ve been obligated to tolerate it for Sunday mass when he’s on a business trip. (The financial investments he decides upon include the groping of young women in skinny jeans and tight tops.) My knuckles glowing white and tightening at a turn, right foot gas and brake, I could nearly close my eyes. My white Cadillac slows, almost by its own volition: I don’t want to go home.
Up the steps, push to the door and clack of the heels.

“I was waiting for you.” A voice that stalls me in my steps, eats at my flesh and kisses my knife of a womb until it shifts out of place and falls out of my ears. Her sharp jaw extends to her soft smile, dimples on either side. A face my finger could trace so delicately; falling asleep in my lap. Beauty that’s placed on a hand and drawn on to fingertips with long smooth locks buried in between. Long hair with little braids, a dozen or so, button nose sewn on to camisoles and packaged and bought. Her beauty is disproportionate and odd, unfitting and rough. But I want to consume her, be in her bones and hang from the string of her ligaments.

Her visit seems misplaced, as she usually only comes here with him. Our interactions are limited to hour long evening talks while he stalks off to watch baseball over bourbon.

“Were you? He’s not home, I’m sorry if you wished to see him.” Head to the floor, I kick my foot to the ground, scratching my scalp off and fixing the parasites to my veins.

“I don’t wish to see him.” She doesn’t embellish her words with futile ideas like ‘I don’t wish to see him today’ or ‘I don’t wish to see him tomorrow’ She weaves her words into a noose, ‘Oops! There that silly thing goes around your neck! My bad! It is quite funny though, watching you die!’

“Why not?” I say quietly, a stick bug crawling through the dry corners of my cavities and hopping to my breasts, in between my legs.

“Haven’t I told you? Because I wish to see you.” I stumble into a laugh, throwing it around through my teeth until its bitterness morphs into fake vanilla and thyme.
Take a right to the living room down the hall, hand clinging to hers, as if she’ll get lost if I let go, float off and plop down to her knees choking on him again and again and again, and oh how awful it is to watch.
The couches are antique, his choosing, of course. Pastel flowers over a cream colored oblong sofa, dark wooden accents swirling on the arm rests. It’s never been my taste, but in marriage, there are sacrifices. (As they say!)
We sit next to each other, less than an inch apart. I can see her chest, up and down up and down up and down. I kill myself in it.

“I went to church today.” I say. Chatter that betrays everything I feel, church? Nowhere do I belong.

“Ah, I haven’t gone in a while,” she kicks her feet absentmindedly, “maybe I should. It does make me a little uneasy though.” She smirks a crooked smirk, I wish to lick the white of her teeth and live in her arteries, pumping through her blood, coursing through her body when she’s with him, laying on our bed and pulsating through the suffering.

“Why?” I ask, pleading silently for an answer.

“I feel guilty. You know, with the way I am and all.” The way she is. Her bare chest, sex on display for him, panting and begging for spare change from his overflowing, pudgy wallet. Feed her children, feed her children. Her face turns and our eyes meet again, an odd intimacy forming in between us before my eyes quickly flick away.  I know of her affair with my husband, she knows I know. We never speak of it, only through cheap magic tricks conjured up from dusty aces and diamonds up old bell sleeves. The silence forms something in her throat it seems, as against her better judgment, she speaks again.
“You never look at me.” Her eyes are screaming in the silence of the dull lampshades and closed curtains. She’s fixed to the floor, screwed in like a mannequin, moving like a puppet on strings, creaky. Tick, tick of the rolling stick. Her eyes are solemn, holding a torn, sheared fabric of soul that can’t be pieced together anymore.

“What do you mean?” (I know what she means. I just want to talk to her until my throat closes up, spongy, red, and I choke on my last words and rot with my name on her lips.)

“Your eyes are empty. I’ve done this to you, haven’t I? I-” I cut her off quickly for no reason I can explain.

“You have.” I don’t rub her back or tell her it’s alright. I don’t allow myself the luxury. “Don’t reassure me.”

“Okay.”

Illicitly clandestine love fueled by abhorrence for ourselves, a desire for something held between. Slipping from Mother Mary’s bosom and down our backs, staining the seats. Something pulls me forward, ropes me in thawed and frayed and hot and cold. Exiling me from hell to paradise doused in gasoline, burning in hell fires with warm lips on my stomach bubbling up to my surface, vomiting up pure ecstatic screaming suffering pleasure.

Her lips hit mine before I can think another thought.

We rip each other apart. Our waists clash, our bones thudding emptily against each other. She pushes me back to the husband-chosen couch, biting on my lip and drawing blood because she’s angry, but not at me. Spilling over into each other, knotting our veins into a twisted braid until our hearts and our arteries pump together, one in two; blood gushing and spurting out of our eyes. Her lips taste like candy and red lipstick, her teeth of crooked sanity on a grandfather clock with three hands, (counting the milliseconds and the milleniums we fit inside centuries.) It lasts long and it’s repulsive. Two women tumbling on top of each other in their unavoidable depravity. She’s eating at my face and my lips as if she wanted to crawl into my pores and hide, hide far away from him. All the hours we talk screaming together in the manufactured fret of a violin of things we don’t dare say.
She leans into my ear. A whisper, barely.

“I’m sorry.”

She stands. I’m cold. So cold.

She leaves. I don’t stop shivering.

–

Emma Saccomani is an aspiring young author who delves into the human psyche and plays with the human condition to open the eyes of readers to meaningful sorrow and raw emotion.