Breaching by
Alexe van Beuren
It wasn’t her first time, or their first time, but as always, it made
her think of her actual first time– but you cannot start there, you have
to backtrack through the years, back to middle school when she was small and
pale and fat, like a tiny plump whale the children had said, a baby of a whale
with a mother on her fourth marriage, who went from the sailor to the vet to
the lawyer to the trust fund because she could; also, the father, on his third
marriage, which she guesses will stick because this one likes the river house
so much that she puts up with the rages and the silence over dinner– but
those are just the parents’ stories, her own she also knows by heart,
a string of small sore pearls that she fingers over and over again, but always
in order: she, the little white whale, who knelt before boys, who put their
hands in her dark hair and afterwards, afterwards she felt so proud, because
look, after all, look at what she could do– and then she’d met
the tall skinny boy, with big ears; they had stood under pine trees and kissed
many nights, but that night, that particular night, they had been kissing and
touching and she could see that he was almost out of his mind with desire;
her skin seemed to expand, her heart grew big, and she felt like the first
woman created as she thought, “I could give him this,” and so she
gave it to him, and of course he took, but after it was over, pine needles
stiff in her hair, the air so suddenly empty between them, she had regretted
it, like watching something you love fall down a drain and knowing clearly
that you shouldn’t have taken it off and laid it on the slippery sink
in the first place– in other words, it was no one’s fault but her
own, and so she resigned herself to emptiness, to giving and then regretting,
and there had been years of black underwear that didn’t make her feel
sexy and more years of just figuring that she was a frigid person, a small
white whale doomed to wander polar waters, but then she’d met him, her
North Star, and when they made love for the first time she felt that she had
followed him back to tropical waters– she likes to give to him, but for
the first time, she takes, and takes, and on this particular Monday morning,
it is a federal holiday, a special day in a stream of days that she can swim
in until death do us part– they have left the windows open with the light
streaming through, and their bed is white and the light gilds the curve of
his shoulder as he gives, and gives, and she arcs her plump white body in the
air and the light catches it, so that she can see her own skin gleaming.
Alexe van Beuren
I grew up on seventy acres in rural Virginia with my mother, my sister, and
a plethora of female animals plus one male neutered cat. I attended Vanderbilt
University, where I played rugby, joined a sorority, and adopted my shepherd/lab
mix. After graduating with a B.A. in Economics and History with a creative
writing minor, I moved to D.C. and married my sweetheart, Kagan Coughlin.
We now live in the suburbs with our two dogs and scheme about how to get
back to the country.
