Savage Tongues by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Author:Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358316602
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

7

BY THE TIME I GOT to the building entrance, the fog had lifted. I’d wiped my face, calmed myself down. I looked up at the sky. A few clouds hung above the sun’s round bright face; their bellies glowed with a refracted copper light. It was going to be a sweltering day. The air was humid, heavy. It clung to my skin. I felt clammy, weighed down from the brackish waters that had dried into a white flake on my skin and from walking through air that felt like a bowl of tepid water, from sobbing like an inconsolable child. I couldn’t wait to change my clothes, to dry off. I needed to restart the day.

When I walked in, Ellie was sitting on a towel on the floor. She was leaning against the couch, her legs stretched out under the coffee table. She was eating dates, and there was a pile of pits growing next to her coffee mug. There were pillow marks on her cheek, and her hair was wispy, the curls loose. I could tell she’d slept in. She was wearing a wrinkled black romper and one sock that had the face of a cat on it. She was licking her fingers free of the sticky meat of the dates, staring blissfully at the blue sky beyond the window, at the palms leaning against the sun-washed walls hemming in the old city. In that light, the walls were the color of wheat.

I stared at Ellie as she absentmindedly cleaned her hands. I remembered that she used to have a lip piercing, that she’d had a habit of rotating it with her tongue, tugging at it with her fingers. Her bottom lip was often moist with spittle. I’d once told her that it wasn’t the most flattering of habits, that she should be careful not to do it while she was conducting a reading or teaching a class. It was a nervous tic, if slightly erotic at the same time.

She’d just looked at me with a wide smile and, in the most earnest voice, asked: “It really bothers you?”

“It really does,” I’d said, and she laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world, as if I was the one with the quirk. I never brought it up again.

That was years ago, I thought. Back then, in Amherst, Ellie lived with Sam and their respective partners, partners who tended to come and go, who, despite being queer, couldn’t always grasp Sam and Ellie’s arrangement, a kind of unromantic marriage that required financial, psychological, and emotional commitment from each of them but none of the joys of physical intimacy; it was an arrangement into which Sahar and I also had entered, and for a while, it had felt as if the four of us were all married to one another. The arrangement required that we either live together or next door to one another, a setup that fell so far outside of normal social structures that it required a

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