The Opiate, Winter Vol. 12
Music Rebekah Coxwell
H
e is afraid. They didn’t kiss. But he is still afraid. He is more afraid than when Moanin Desdemona asked if he was experienced and he wasn’t sure if she meant drugs or sex, but he knew at nineteen that the answer to both was, “No.” Until that night, until Moanin Desdemona with the bottom lip a different color, that all the guys joked was because of her amazing blow jobs, took him behind the bleachers. But this girl. Harmony. She stood on her tiptoes. She breathed music into him. Then she kissed his cross. Sacrilege: his mother would have said. Harlot. Coming in, swinging her thing all over the place. That’s what his mother called it. His mother came from a time where a woman’s thing stayed quiet at all times. This girl was something else. She was not loud
18.
and neither was her thing. It and she were hypnotic. He could not imagine what she felt like. He was afraid to guess. She was no Moanin Desdemona and he didn’t want her to be. She was a conductor. He was her baton. Though he was not sure she knew. After she left him, after the music, his body shook. He felt there was an earthquake inside of him. Shaking him from his core. At night his cross started to burn his chest. He would count to counteract it. 1234. 1234.1234. He would count for bars, sheets, whole operas, before finally falling asleep. After a week, Clef sits in his office feeling the burn of his cross that now burns day and night. He counts for an hour. His hands leave sweat prints on his desk. His only solace is his semi private office. He takes off his cross and lays it on his desk. He touches his chest. The moment she kissed his cross, she claimed
