Anne Valente
Alyssa crawls onto the roof of her sorority house, after her roommate has brought home another muscled bar-room door prize, and after she’s drunk enough on Irish car bombs to feel a haze drone through her brain, one that gives her courage, one that helps her forget. She waits, crouching on shingles, staring up at the October-full moon until Jackie climbs from her bedroom window and perches there next to her, both of them watching the sky, an unspoken, habitual agreement. Jackie moved into the house last spring, and though Alyssa can’t explain it, though she almost forgets this even happens when she wakes up dazed and cottonmouthed weekend mornings, she’s been meeting Jackie up here, after the bars close, after they’ve faltered home without men.
…..Alyssa has never been attracted to girls. She was a self-named stereotype in high school, kinetic cheerleader, dating not the quarterback but the water polo goalkeeper, a flaxen hulk of strapped sinew and cut flesh. She pranked boys in junior high, perfected the ideal blow job in high school, and dances on tables at bars in the shortest of skirts, legs smooth and tanned for the eyes of college men. Alyssa forgets these things on the roof, all of them lost outside an emboldened cocoon of alcohol, leaving only Jackie’s mouth, the soft ring of it on hers.
…..Jackie kisses Alyssa with hunger, and the faint taste of vodka on her breath makes Alyssa want to crawl inside her mouth, sleep there, disintegrate beneath her tongue. Even here, even inside this nested fog, Alyssa knows the ways her brain will misremember, knows the same mechanisms that help her forget everything but this roof will make her erase these tiles, these shingles too. She will awaken against frayed pillows, crumpled sheets, clothes scattered in piles across the floor. She will have no questions, no answers to are you, no blank stares for I am. No tags, no definitions to hold her inside of them, preserved. She will roll over, drink a glass of water with two aspirin, and forget the faintest impression of a pulse, race and skip, the unsounded lightness of Jackie’s mouth on hers, how something so soft could ripple aftershocks to tumble roofs, to raze a house to the gleaming bare ground.
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Anne Valente is the featured writer for Volume 15 of Emprise Review. You can read an interview with Anne or the other two stories featured, Just Beautiful Girls and The First Amendment.
