I Want To Wear You Like A Glove
try me on for size (Greenpoint) - w4w
you were sitting with another girl by the McCarren dog park. most people were watching the dogs and some people were watching her but I noticed you. you look kind of like justin bieber? but cuter lol
your hair looked soft. so did your flannel. well-loved. most people dont keep things long enough to love them.
lets see how long we can keep each other around
do NOT contact me with unsolicited services or offers
post id: 6EQUJ5 posted: 2 days ago
†
You will find us on Missed Connections. A hollow space, filled with loneliness, pulsing with need.
It’s 2011. You’re twenty-four, living in Greenpoint, and totally fucking broke. Worst of all, you suspect that you might be a total fucking dyke. The gravity of your mundane life will draw you here, to the futon, Adra’s legs on yours, faces lit by your laptops’ cold light.
†
don’t know if anyone even reads these. just thought I’d give it a try.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
Hey, are you out there? I hope you’re out there.
this is a long shot this is a long shot this is a long shot
†
Adra’s skin presses against yours. Her sense of personal space is capacious. Your hand is so close to the bones of her ankle, the pulse that thrums at the top of her foot. You’re in Greenpoint because of Adra, broke because of Adra, so you might as well be a total fucking dyke because of Adra, too.
Adra wonders to your face if you’re in love with her. When you fight, she fights dirty, yelling, Why the fuck do you care, what are you fucking in love with me or something?
It shouldn’t change anything; Adra takes it as given that people are in love with her. She would still be your roommate, still your only real friend in New York, and you would still eat her out in dirty bathrooms, dark bedrooms. Only you would be in love with her while you were doing it, and that would be awful.
Adra only lets you tongue her, touch her, in the dark, and you’re not ready for the light. (You will be, in time, and in time Adra will be nothing, only senseless, unmourned meat.) In the meantime, she sits so close to you. In the meantime, your fingers ghost over her thin and tender skin.
Adra nudges her foot into the self-conscious flesh of your stomach. You want to jerk away, and you want to sink into it, and wanting both at once leaves you rigid and trembling while thousands of universes are born and die.
It’s not love. It’s that Adra isn’t a person, but a supermassive black hole. And you aren’t a person yet either, just a celestial body trapped inside her event horizon, slowly, inexorably, drawn into her, slowly, inexorably ceasing to exist.
†
you were reading on the subway // we were lost at sea // you were dying, you were already dying, you were dead //
u were buried beneath centuries and forgotten.
We were friends in high school. We were enemies. You were minding your own business.
you were falling through the void of the universe, an unthinking star.
†
I think this post is about me, you say.
No way, Adra declares. There’s like, thousands of lesbians who look like Justin Bieber. The park’s like…their nesting ground.
Besides, she adds, unthinking and vicious. You’re not even a dyke.
But it is about you. You understand how it happened, the Missed Connection. Most people were watching the dogs and some people were watching her, and you yourself were watching Adra, too, and that’s how you missed it, that’s how you always miss it: the moment that someone notices you.
You check to make sure Adra isn’t looking.
You click Reply.
†
you were wearing a red hoodie. ur hair shown like copper.
You emit no radiation.
sweat soaked ur tanktop I saw ur nipple piercings
You looked happy, you looked awkward, you looked sad. Each of your many arms held a different blade, dripping red. Your legs were perfect, your eyes were perfect. An outside observer can neither become aware of nor be affected by events within your event horizon.
†
Between the badly-lit dick pics and misspelled insinuation, we hear your howl into the void. Your pulses and impulses, your thread of hunger. We will follow that thread. We will eat.
hey… you write (tentative, fingers barely moving on the keys). i think this might be me?
Hands (thick fingered, blown-out knuckles reading BULL DYKE) rest lightly (improbably lightly, imagine how they might light on you, imagine how hard they might squeeze) on a keyboard.
We’ll write: Are you Real?
You respond quickly. Like, am i the right person? should I send a picture?
Desire pools around your message. You are spread open, like a wound. Other hands (thin fingers, nails dark red like liver) take over.
If you want. But that wasn’t the question. Are you Real?
This answer comes even faster: I don’t know.
†
Let’s get ice cream together. Use the sharpest of your knives to take the skin from me and make of it a coat, I will do the same for you. Let’s talk for hours. We are binary stars, we are collapsing, you are the black hole at the center of my spiraling galaxy. I want to choke on your cock, your fingers, your foot, your feelings, the memory of your name in my mouth. I’m just looking for friends. I want to meet your friends. I want you to sit on my face. Come away, O human child, come to me, come on me
†
But none of that has happened yet.
It’s Saturday and you’re in McCarren Park, sticky from Friday’s secret, shameful sex. You’re wearing your favorite flannel and your hair, yes, looks not unlike teen Canadian pop sensation Justin Bieber.
And Adra is lounging beside you, her hair smelling like cinnamon in the sun. Sometimes you hate Adra for being so comfortable. Sometimes you crave that comfort. You want to crawl inside her, reach fingers and arms and shoulders into the hollows of it and fit yourself against it until you’re wearing Adra like a skin. (You can, you must, you will.) So comfortable with everything in her life, except you.
Your hand is right there, palm up, and she won’t take your hand.
†
You’re still you. Only, lonely you. You don’t know yet the violent remaking, the glorious rebirth from you into us. We are the sculptors of wanting, we are its tailors. You will learn to carve the landscape of desire into flesh, to slip beneath the skin of a body that craves occupation. Yours is the hunger. We will teach you how to eat.
You have no idea what you’re capable of.
I’m going to wear you like a glove, you will whisper, fingers on her cunt, and she will pant with desire and then you will, you will, you will. Her cries will become screams as you go deeper, deeper, deeper until you finally sigh, sated, with the muscles of her own beautiful mouth.
You’re not real yet. But you will be.
© 2023 Anneke Schwob
About the Author
Anneke Schwob is a queer writer of queer speculative fiction. They are a member of the Clarion Workshop class of 2023 with work in Strange Horizons. She lives in Montréal with her wife and cats, and can otherwise be found collecting cursed objects, haunting desolate bogs, and online at annekeschwob.info or @ann_per_sand on Twitter.