We Are Bridges by Cassandra Lane

Author:Cassandra Lane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

MARY, 1903

MARY KNOWS THAT the only way to hold on to a scent is to fold it into the crevices of your skin. First, you have to treat the skin from the inside out. Leola once taught her how to emit oil from flowers to pull out their deepest essences. She taught her how to pluck the best flower from a bush, how to run her finger over its moist petals, and how to separate them from each other before reuniting them in a jar of pre-poured oil.

Mary places her finger in the jar and watches the flower pieces roll into the tunnel her finger creates. She closes the jar with a lid and places it on a shelf to marinate for two weeks. The petals float. The oil listens.

When the flower oil is ready, Mary readies her bath. She opens the jar, and the oil, having become one with the flower, springs forth its perfume. Mary sips a quarter of it. The scent will seep out of her pores later. She pours a small cup of it in her palm, inhales, and then lets it fall from her hand into the tin washtub of water. She slips her body into the tub and opens her legs. She is thinking of Burt. This evening, she will meet him down by the river. They are not married yet, but Mary makes up her mind right then and there, sitting in the tub, that tonight will be their first time. She will not wait. They will not wait to become flower and oil merged.

They are at the river. Burt’s body is over Mary’s body. He smells like grass, and he smells like the earth: sweet, dark. Mary has tasted dirt and grass before, and so he tastes familiar. She is over him now. He places his hands on her hips, not to steer but to hold on, and he wonders at the wild smell of her. It flows from her elbows, her neck, the roots of her hair, and all the places he cannot see.

Mary knows it is better to give flowers to the living.

The river grows black and still, swallowing the sound of every living thing: the cacophony of crickets, the whisper of water over moss, the moaning of man and woman.

In a little while, the world will come for them: the white men with their guns and their pitchfork hearts, the law with its blind eye, will come for them.

But for now, all of those threats are held at bay as this black woman and this black man make love, make life, with the river and the trees and the night covering them.

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