My body moves roughshod over John's in summer darkness; the absolute stillness of night we wait for to break the heat. With mute and terrified abandon, I knot my fingers around the frayed hem of his shirt and ball the worn cotton into my fists. His eyes shift dim and close again as he sweeps the corners of the room like someone will see. We crash-land in the Greenhouse with dust in our hair, plywood boards clattering the brickwork, like we'd come through the ceiling. Whatever happens now is known only to the wide and glossy leaves which shadow us from the eyes of others.
My body has forgotten the words, and you return them to me in small, unnoticed applications of pressure. Every hanging note of you in the air travels to a tiny chamber in my cells and grows to a venomous longing, and the venom holds the words, which are leached from me when we touch.
I watch you sing to the bees in the morning, your hair loose from sleep and freed from it's styled summer prison. I watch through the pane of turquoise glass that turns the color of your skin weak green, the back of your neck flashing above your collar like moss growing from fresh soil.
Against the same soil in the dark, you lose a fight for balance, not with gravity, but in yourself. You pull me down to meet you so the dry black crumbles warm my shins in your lap when you lift my nightgown away and ponder with careful fingers this hole inside me.
As much as we were Cartwrights, adopted by our parents at an early age, we were also feral children, perhaps left behind at the Hathaway House. I am as much a fox as I am a girl when you find me at night, and I follow you across the lawn, and the shine of the moon on your shoes.
So I wanted to tell you, I know this man you are now taught me to read and write.
