Anti Lebanon by Carl Shuker

Author:Carl Shuker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619021990
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

He might have fallen asleep. If anything a sort of half-doze, disturbed by the fizz of insects dying in the candle-flame, and just like fireworks the sporadic shots from afar. She was asleep and he watched her: flat on her back, facing just obliquely away, as it got very late. Her soft sounds, her shifts on the hard, strange bed. She, dreaming, was gasping or kissing, light lip flexes, urgently, testing; twitching, parting into the kiss, and out.

He woke definitively, from a dream of terrible escape, crawling through a construction site, a tunnel that narrowed and aged and clogged with spiderwebs until it was all he could do to part and pull them in order to breathe. It wasn’t dread or panic; what was it? A terrific sadness and waste that this was what he had to do, negotiate this tunnel; he alone, and there was worse to come. He woke in the dark with tears cold on his temples like the arms of cold glasses, to no idea of where he was or why.

It was a strange miracle to roll over to her and to come slowly into the knowledge that she was gentle and meant no harm to him. He watched her through cold-teared eyes and then saw the shine on her cheeks. She was crying in her sleep too. He moved into her, splayed his hand on her stomach. She moaned a terrible shuddering moan as she came out of her dream, and she shuffled back into him like a weary child. He felt her shudder again, and then sigh, and subside.

He used the balls of his knuckles to wipe the tears off her cheeks. She curled up. He felt the soles of her feet on his shins, and rough skin at her heels catching in the hairs of his legs.

Then she made another sound, incidental and unsad; a bare interrogative. She stirred and slowly disappeared underneath the blanket. He felt her hand on his knee, then down to his calf. Then a little hair-sting.

She came up again and murmured, her hand on his hip, then finding his. Taking his hand, pressing it in, a gift, a reminder, from the garden, with a tiny murmur, a burr.

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