Thrust: A Novel

She felt the pang of her own uselessness. As always, she felt desperate to do something—to punch someone, to stage a breakout, to get that boy out of there, deliver him to freedom, even if it meant risking having his rage flare up again in the process — anything to avoid punishing him into becoming a permanently violent man. That’s why she’d scraped her hand at the detention facility, to keep from feeling helpless and numb; maybe she’d scraped it again, on the brick wall outside the front door of the bar, just to keep things alive. But that was too long a story to tell an innocent stranger, wasn’t it? That was the trouble with her entire existence.

“No. Not a paper cut.”

As she blotted at her hand with the napkin, Lilly stole another glance at the woman. In some ways, she looked like an apparition, some artist’s vision, with her light-gray suit and silver hair and eyes as transparent as water. Or else she’d been dispatched to override all Lilly’s usual choices with an image of something she’d never imagined.

The woman placed her own clenched hand on the bar in front of Lilly. Lilly stared at the woman’s fist. She clearly was holding something. She felt a prickle of curiosity in her shoulders. They eyed each other.

The woman turned her hand over and opened it. In her palm was a coin. “I saw you drop this on the ground before you came into the bar,” the woman said. “I thought you might want it back.”

The fucking penny. Before Lilly could respond, the woman dropped it into the last half-inch of her vodka, swirled the clear liquid around, then fished it out. “This is worth quite a bit of money,” she said. “It’s a Flowing Hair cent. 1793. I don’t think you want to ignore this object. I think you want to keep it.” Now she dropped the coin into Lilly’s drink. “I would know,” the woman said, turning the collar up on her gray suit. “I have one exactly like it.”

Oh god. A fucking geriatric coin collector. “So you collect coins?” Lilly kept her eyes on her drink. Vacant and transparent, like alcohol.

“No,” the woman said. “I don’t have any special interest in coins.” She took a sip of her dirty vodka. “I do however have a collection of certain… objects I’ve procured over the years.”

Lilly felt both attracted and repulsed. Wasn’t there a word for that? She ordered them both another round. They drank in silence, adjacent.

“I love the way that third shot brings your shoulders down away from your ears, don’t you?” the woman said finally, stepping down from her stool. “Opens your chest up to — well, almost anything. You know?” She made ready to leave. Slowly. Ran fingers through her silver hair.

Her magnificent mane of silver hair. Her goddamn beautiful height and broad shoulders when she stood. Lilly kept her eyes on the mirror image, steadying herself. If she looked at her, if she made eye contact…

“Have you ever had opium tea? I have some at my place — I live very near here. It’ll turn the hurt on your hand into nothing.”

Lilly had to admit it: in that moment, there was nothing on the planet she wanted more than this strange woman’s opium tea. She didn’t know why, and she didn’t care. When would she ever be offered opium tea again? Besides, her hand was truly throbbing. So was her clit, a little.

—

The walls of the entryway to the woman’s apartment were covered with images of snakes. Postcards, photographs, paintings, drawings, even some bright-colored snakeskin patches, hundreds of them, all pinned to the wall.

Aurora said nothing as they walked down the hall to the main room.

Lilly held her tongue too. It was as if an agreement had been forged between them in that narrow passage, the hallway spilling out into each of four rooms. Lilly felt the question softly tickling at her—What’s with the snakes? — but she did not ask. She liked the snakes. Instantly. They were not your ordinary welcome.

She still didn’t know the woman’s name. She decided she didn’t care.

The woman went to the kitchen to make the tea. “Have a seat,” she said, gesturing toward the living room, where an enormous turquoise velvet couch took up most of the space. “Transformation,” she said, running the sink water. “Snakes. I like creatures that know how to shed their skins.”

Lilly sat on the plush couch and thought about how many skins a woman must shed in order to survive a lifetime. Something more than attraction spread across her chest. Something like a mutual recognition, which was nothing she’d ever felt in her entire life.

The tea was delicious. A warm slide down the throat, a hint of lavender the woman must have added, a numbing of the lips; then, within half an hour, a rush of endorphins and a giddy painlessness. “Oh my god, I haven’t felt this in so long,” Lilly said. They’d both settled on the enormous couch, arranging their bodies more and more comfortably as time ticked by.

“What this?” the woman asked.

“This calm. This nothingness. This floating. I love it.”