Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (best short novels .txt) 📗

do not have trees like this, in America. It is a cousin of the fig. Its flower isn’t soft and inviting …” Here, his finger traced all the way down to my hips, where they met my thighs, lingered there, then made its way back up. “Its flower is hard and standoffish. It is called a ‘shield flower.’ Its face looks like a wall of stone. But when you look more closely, you see the flower is made up of a hundred little blossoms, all closed off tight.” He had reached my shoulders again, spread out his hands, felt the strength of my back.

“Why do you tell me these things now?” I asked. “You do not speak like a lover.” I at least felt calm enough to tease.

“Because as my wife,” he said, “there will be a whole new knowledge to learn, to aid me, and we may as well begin now.”

His voice was light, so I opened my eyes and saw the shape of him roll above me, before I closed them again, still cowed by the waves.

“But what if I am too sick to remember?”

“I’m not speaking to you. The lessons are not for you. They’re for your body. She will remember.” And then I felt his hand again, in the middle of my back, drawing, I suppose, the flowers that made up the shield of a Dorstenia.

He touched me until his fingers trembled. I shut my eyes even tighter, pressed myself into the hay mattress of the berth. His fingers lifted, and then I felt him turn over, onto his own back. He breathed hard and heavy, as if he was at a gallop, and the sheet that covered us began to shake.

I opened my eyes, sat up on my elbows, and watched him.

A man touching himself is a peculiar thing. My mother had told me about women’s bodies but not men’s. I’d seen male members on barnyard cats before, and sometimes rude and red on a stray dog. I remembered, once, glimpsing one, folded over on itself in a nest of gray hair, between the legs of an old man whom Mama helped to dying. I’d been six or seven then, and Mama had had to ask me three times to hand her her bag, before she’d looked up and followed my gaze. She’d pursed her lips, pulled the man’s cloak over him, and said, “You shouldn’t make patients uncomfortable with staring, Libertie.”

At Cunningham, in anatomy class, they had asked me to leave the room during the lessons on glands. I’d leaned against the side of the building, staring out into the unfinished green, listening to the muffled voice of the professor calling out the body parts. When the class was done, the men had left and I returned to the room, alone, to the lesson written on the chalkboard, to name the parts to myself. Since no one was in the room with me, I’d practiced saying them in different voices—high-pitched, like a superior lady’s, or low and growly, like a cat’s.

I watched my husband’s hand move faster. In the dark of the cabin, his skin was so dim—like a gray stone glimpsed at the bottom of a well. His breath shuddered. The whole cabin, so close, became nearly unbearably hot. And then he groaned—like a body taking its last breath—and shuddered one more time and was quiet.

I looked at him. He was staring glassily at the beams of the ship. “I’m sorry, my love,” he said. When he reached to touch my cheek, his hand was damp.

I did not leave my bed the next day. I tried to stand in the cabin, but the roll of the ship nearly forced me to my knees, so I crawled back into the berth and shut my eyes.

Emmanuel left me to walk on the deck. Above the groan of the ship as it moved through the water, I heard his high shout or some of his laughter.

The ship was a trading one that sold only a few berths to travelers. In the morning, he pulled me out of our bed to walk the deck with him. He said, “You cannot lie down forever. It will make everything worse.” My legs did not feel like my own. I was scared, and I took just a few steps before going back down. I did not know if there were any other women on board, or if there were, if those women were colored. And in my sickness, I did not have the will to ask him.

That night, he did not even have to ask me to lie down. I did so gladly, eager to feel something besides the waves.

“Plumeria,” he said, “are beautiful flowers. Long and thin and white. They look almost like stars, or maybe the legs of jellyfish. They could be as at home beneath the water as on land. They smell strongest at night.” Here, he leaned over and smelled my lap.

“The smell is beautiful,” he said. “So beautiful that three hundred years ago an Italian count stole it from the isles and made it into a perfume. The flowers make it to lure in sphinx moths, to do their pollinating for them. The moths are driven mad by the scent, looking everywhere for nectar, but the flowers are a flirt. Like my Libertie sometimes is. They have no nectar, but they’ve convinced the moths to do their propagating for them.”

And here, his fingers stopped trailing on my spine and swept down, and his whole hand grabbed my behind.

He was already touching himself. I turned over, and he knew I would watch him, so he looked into my eyes, his face looking first furious, then frightened, and then so melancholy I worried he would weep. He finally closed his eyes. His shoulders shuddered, he groaned again, like the ship in the ocean, and then he was still.

I was determined to walk the whole ship the next morning. I did so on my husband’s arm—he took me