Thrust: A Novel

The statue did turn color over the years.

No other girl appeared.

Sometimes I found myself checking the level of the water.

David and I…

I can see the head of the statue over David’s shoulder through the window of our loft. The room is not large, but the windows stretch out for an entire wall. She’s something like a secular angel, crowned and stern, our labor inside her forever.

David stirs but does not wake. A light rain whispers morning.

Bless his exquisite form.

The story of workers is buried under the weight of every monument to progress or power. Our labor never reaches the height of the sacred. No one ever tells the story of how beautiful we were. How the body of us moved. How we lifted entire epochs.

May our story survive the rise of this city.

The Apple

Cunt.”

The air in the room vibrates.

“Say it.” Aurora looks down at me kneeling beneath her on the carpet. “Say, ‘My cunt.’ ”

I do.

“Hold still,” she says.

I do.

Between her thighs, between the folds of her labia majora, is an apple. Most of the apple is visible. The rest of the fruit is nested inside her.

A quivering apple.

Her legs are neither pressed together nor apart; the space that exists between her legs is the width of the small red world.

This room and every object and texture in it — the lushness of the indigo carpet, the cherrywood tables and chairs, the deep-green velvet curtains skirting the floor like a woman’s dress, the mahogany bed layered in linens and satins of red and umber and black and blue, gold and orange and bone white — the hues of the body’s internal truths — makes a pocket for my soul in a way that life does not.

On my knees, in the Room of Kneelings, my hands bound behind my back with an intricate weave of rope braided from human hair, head and neck and spine already aching from looking up and up at the colossus of her, my face less than an inch from her cleft, I can see her labia and the hot wet seeping sap of her already making a kind of halo around the apple.

Between her legs… oh, but I can never see her legs as legs.

One of her legs, yes, is a leg. It stands her upright from beneath red and black velvet waves of skirt, spliced up the middle and pinned back like open curtains.

The other leg — there is no other leg. Where the other leg should be, to my right, is the leg I built for her. Rosewood inlaid with gold-leaf roses from ankle to hip, its hinged knee patterned after the Salem Leg but modified to mirror the fullness of a woman’s thigh, its slender foot painted with delicate red toenails.

The apple, deep red with a bit of yellow at the top curve — that yellow is somehow maddening; any painter would agree — is situated so close to Aurora’s cleft that it seems to convulse as she pleasures herself. I try to look past the apple, up toward her head, her eyes. It hurts to try too hard to see up the length of her. My mouth is as open as I can make a mouth, as she requested. My jaw torques, the apple suspended between my lips and the gaping mouth-sex of my cousin.

From this angle, she looks larger than life.

“Hold still, Frédéric,” she admonishes in a whisper, “or else.” Her fingers making tiny furious circles around her bulging and rouge-red clitoris. Her hips move in waves almost imperceptibly, making the motion all the more painfully ecstatic. My hands, bound behind my back, writhe like fat little hungry snakes.

An apple, the world.

I can smell the sweet inside the apple. I can smell her sweat and sex, a tang, a madness.

I don’t know how much longer my cock can take the waiting. I grind myself against air, careful not to make contact with Aurora lest she arrest her motion, wishing for some other body weight to meet the ache of mine, something, anything in the world, to push back against my anguished hips and purpled cock even if it kills me. It would be an acceptable way to die. But no weight comes.

As much as I can make myself a statue, I do not move. I see the heave of her breasts bound up in a slate-gray satin corset above me as her breathing cocks like the moment before a gunshot.

“Don’t breathe,” she commands. Our eyes lock.

It makes me feel a little insane to hold my mouth open while simultaneously holding my breath and staring hard enough at Aurora’s eyes — not the apple, not her sex — that my skull feels ready to break open. My bound thoughts my bound hands my stretched neck and spine now shrieking.

I want to bite more than I want to be alive.

Then sound.

Aurora’s moans animate the entire room. Her head rocks back. Her breasts spill from her corset. Two dangerous eyes.

She tightens her cleft around the apple, and for a moment, it looks as if the apple will be swallowed by the other mouth of her.

Then and only then does she come, hard enough to flood the apple, to send it into the waiting mouth of me. I catch it in a perfect bite. I come now too, in a full body spasm. I don’t recognize the sound I make.

Something feels final about this.

I surrender my body to her thrust.

The Water Girl Carrying