A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle

Author:Dylin Hardcastle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2024-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

limb one

IT IS LATE afternoon when there’s a knock at my bedroom door. Come in, I say. Caragh walks in, poem in hand. Can I sit down? I smile. Yeah, of course.

I tell her the story, the whole way through. I was fifteen and . . . in the garden shed, kissing my neighbour . . . my best friend. She was really beautiful. She had her hand inside me, and I felt like I was being opened, like I’d been looking backwards my entire life, and now someone was showing me my future. Then my mum opened the door and screamed. By the time my dad arrived, she was gone. I never saw her again . . . I never saw any of them ever again, because my dad dragged me out into the yard, by the throat, and punched me in the face.

Caragh touches her hand to my face, caressing my cheek, softly. She leans over and brushes her lips across my wet skin, and as she kisses the groove beneath my eye, I feel something inside me dislodge. It’s these words, I realise . . . words that I have held for almost ten years, stored deep in muscle . . . And now they are let go. I feel them, dissolving into my blood like ice into ocean.

I tell her how I ran away, how I roamed the streets for days, until Dave walked up to me beside a petrol station and put me in his truck and gave me a bottle of Coke. Caragh grins, and I tell her how he took me down into the bar and introduced me to Johnny and Daphne, and they brought me here. She smiles. Uranian House . . . Do you know why it’s called that? I nod. Daphne says that a sexologist coined the term Uranism to describe patients whose souls did not match their anatomy, and Ruby, who bought this house in the fifties, decided that was who this house was for . . . the Urnings of Uranian House. Caragh takes a drag of my cigarette, then kisses me on the mouth. We taste of salt and damp tobacco. One of Claude Cahun’s first publications was titled Les Jeux Uraniens, she says. Can you guess what it means? I shake my head and she smiles. It means Uranian Games.

In burnt light she lifts my shirt over my head and kisses my belly, her hands cradling my hip bones; she pulls down my shorts, taking my underwear with them. Tenderly, Caragh brushes her lips from the inside of one thigh to the other, teasing. She grins. And then she takes me in her mouth, pulling me into myself. She gently enters my body to make love to me. Like peeling a fruit slowly with bare hands, Caragh turns me inside out. I close my eyes and imagine her running with me to the edge of a cliff. We catch ourselves at its edge and look out to a wide-open ocean, whipped gold and glistening.

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