Who Needs It?

I've learned that I'm Yemaya's daughter, but it was hard for me to believe when my messenger told me. How could I be of her when I'd always found love so elusive, and I'd long called Spinster Street home?

I didn't understand that Spinster Street was full of love even though its residents were single. Yemaya, She works in mysterious ways. Even in my loneliness I was making love. It's no wonder that I thought about it all the time.

All I ever wanted was love, even when I thought I was without it. I needed the reach toward love, even when I seemed to fall short of it. Hell yes to stretching into clumsy flirtation or too-soon confessions so those of us who still feel new to this might have higher chances at easy mushy profusion, the sweet teasing drags that turn lovers on at night. There’s a mad science to it. Nothing is possible before there’s a reach and the first lives ever were, I think, side effects of particles shooting their shots. If you wanna know about romance, spend time where I lived, on Spinster Street, where people dance without partners because they’ve tapped the core of romance—they’re often in love and ready for more if it comes.

In September 1998, when New York was getting chilly, I walked through a cloud of it. Fragrant laundry steam from a townhouse basement mistified the exit from Church Ave station and through the blur I spied the silhouette of a suave fellow wearing a jean jacket with the lapels turned up and a smooth ass Bronx accent that seemed to be dyed burgundy. I still smelled like the dive bar I tended—like a drinker and a chainsmoker. Like problems. And there was this calm fellow, blasting hardcore shit on their walkman. I heard the bass of Biggie Smalls' voice through their headphones. Then the fellow smiled at me and I was 42 and they were 39 and I smelled like problems, and we were getting older, and I wasn’t the most lookworthy woman on the street even at that time of night, and I’d never been in love and I’d only had sex once, I was a black sheep with few prospects, and I wasn’t their type and they weren’t mine, but they turned their head and I liked the way they looked at me, and they liked my problems and how I couldn’t walk as fast as them though my legs were longer and how I looked them dead in their face—in this city—though I knew better. And I liked the crow’s feet on the otherwise moonlight smoothness of their face, and the silvers where their teeth had been knocked out in a fight, and their self-conscious chivalry and how nothing they said confused me, and the way they knew I was black and I knew they were white and it didn’t hurt, and the way they pulled down their headphones and slowed their stride to talk to me, and the way they smoothed their thumb across my desert-dry palm before they wrote their number, and their name: Van.

Van and I had waited a long time for each other and I didn’t believe they were here, didn’t believe my lover was gonna be shorter than me with moonlight skin and a blonde bouffant. I made a point, when we met up for late-night springrolls after they got off from the warehouse in December—I made a point, when they blew their warm air on my cold hands sending tremors down my body—I made a point of remarking on how perfectly content I was to never have lived for anyone but myself. Love, who needs it? I’d blurted out, and they said, I do, I need it and I want it too, and they looked up from under their thawing eyelashes, sending a gust through my chest, and as we walked to my place we were both very quiet.

It was easier for Van to sleep over at my place sometimes, less of a commute, trains could be scary that late at night, so they washed up in my bathroom and slept on the couch in their cute tank and boxers, and the light that came through cracks in the blinds would shimmer on their forehead just so, making it look like the moon, and I would kiss a bright spot on their dewy skin while they slept. I didn’t make much of it, I made a point of not making much of it, I just had to do it, kiss their dewy forehead and whisper goodnight, sweet dreams and make the blanket snugger and adjust the pillow so it was supportive, but one night they caught me doing it and they touched their hand to the side of my neck, they blinked their thawed, corn silk eyelashes at me and bit their bottom lip and wanted me in my big t-shirt and my headscarf. And slowly they moved into my apartment and my life and I to their life, which they knew would happen all along.

One night they held me from behind and asked, “Diane, do you know what I am?”

I laughed. “The love of my life?”

They rubbed my back, cueing me to face them. “Do you know how we found each other?”

I laughed again and asked, “Good timing?”

The slow, desirous feeling in the room had changed—acquired a frenetic energy. Their smile flashed at me, silver teeth catching all of the light in an impish fashion.

Then they began glowing rose pink from hair to sole. It took several moments to process. Where they touched me, I felt pink like them.

They murmured:  “I have a reservoir of love inside of me. I am of Aenghus. Of Cupid. The gods of love, they sent us to each other. I’m fae.”

I was fearful. Not because of what Van was, I've since understood, but because of what they recognized in me — expected of me. I never wanted to be distinctive.

Van showed no disappointment, only expectancy. Think about it, they asked. Once again I was made quiet.

Spinster Street. Was I responsible? Was it of my making? Did the lonely not only dance with me but because of me?

Van and I kissed tirelessly, and I licked their silver teeth, every inch of their mouth I could find. They tugged on my lips with their teeth until my skin felt like swollen fruit. An ocean blue shimmered above the brown.

This is what I’d been waiting for. I let Yemaya, Van and Aenghus use my body that night on the comfort of a second-hand mattress.

My head swam deliciously, in the sweet sea of realization.

I learned that I was fluid. Queer is good and bad and neither because, really, it is more of a quality figured by place and person and time, and that was what I had been all along: someone who fell outside the lines of my place and person and time, godly, transtemporal, neither here nor there.

I released my godly hold on Spinster Street that night, freeing residents to remain alone or find each other. Love was ours and it always had been, in single and coupled forms.

© 2023 Liza Wemakor

About the Author

Liza Wemakor writes speculative fiction and nonfiction. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Anathema Magazine, Rabid Oak Journal, Prismatica Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut novella, Loving Safoa, will be published by Neon Hemlock Press in 2023. Since Fall 2021, she’s been a Ph.D. student at UC Riverside.