The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia

Author:Aurora Mattia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nightboat Books

But before I was Aurora, I was a woman on an August night. Waiting for a man to arrive. Waiting in my bedroom, what I called my cave, because its window faced directly onto a brick wall and admitted nearly no light and because I was going to sleep later and later, until, in August, I began sleeping from nine to five, by which I mean I went to bed at 9 a.m. and woke at 5 p.m. So I was awake (good morning, midnight!) and in the kitchen Noel was making pasta with Stella, who was, on that night, sleeping over for the first time at our apartment, for which reason, to distract myself from jealousy, from its taste of bitter rust, from the thousand and one needles of needless reverie, I invited a stranger to share my bed, a man from Tinder, a bartender and rockclimber whose name doesn’t matter.

As soon as he stepped into our fairy realm, I felt a flood of shame. He was a man in a flannel buttondown and a beard, some attempt at approximating a lumberjack, six feet four inches tall, flipflopping down the hall in his Tevas while Noel and Stella made pasta, glimpsing. As if they were the impossibility whose inversion I was inviting into my bedroom. As if they were confecting potions or perfumes in vials, made from soil, sap, petal and musk. As if they were watching from within strawberry bushes.

My pussy opens me to the world. It says come and see, says: this is a way. But it is not a tunnel. Not a cavern either. As pink as coral and as smooth as a jellyfish, call it a grotto—my pussy is for prayer, not for passing through.

The man was talking. I don’t remember about what. After a moment he rose and, bearing the metal and wire instruments of his steampunk-adjacent bartending kit delicately before him, stumbled awkwardly back to the kitchen, hesitating at the threshold, doublefisting cocktail shakers, muscular but insecure, lowering his eyes, interrupting the Fairy Pair, “if you wouldn’t mind…”

But interrupting more than their presence: interrupting their silence, because they spoke so quietly in their whispering gauzes, with heads tilted, gazes and gestures pointing or suggesting at strange angles in the steamy golden glow, like in icons of saints: they spoke at the volume of the last reverberations of the chorus of angels praying in the Palace of Clouds, where god is nothing more than the emanation of a song, the visible resonance of their euphonic labor. (The angels keep god alive by singing—and when they cease, god ceases.)

The man, standing nonsensically between the fairies and the sink, was shaking our cocktails. The noise was like automatonic cicadas. Less an interruption than a shredding apart of the silence. He did not make sense. I had brought him down on our household like a curse. My own private Icelandic Saga.

We drank in the grotto. We drank deeply and looked at one another over the rims of our glasses.

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