Kyle Minor
missions week
An excerpt from The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, a novel
Missions Week. In the heat. On the wooden bleachers. The basketball boys lowered a massive white bedsheet and unfurled it, and the P.E. teacher turned on the 16mm film projector. A white man and a Papuan tribesman with a knife. A chieftain sliced both their arms, wrist to elbow ditch, then they pressed them together.
Blood brothers. Kin. That was Monday morning.
Tuesday it was rain—the hoofbeats of a hundred small and quarreling animals on the aluminum roof of the gymnasium, the speaker said—and what was a small thing like rain, a small thing like heat, rain and heat were nothing compared to solitary confinement in the Tirgu-Ocna prison, the se- cret place of the Rumanian Communists, which itself was nothing compared to the clockless hours of torture. Hot pokers, handcuffs with sharp nails on the insides, icebox refrigerator cells, starving rats driven into his cell at night through a pipe. “The Communists were worse than the Nazis if that were possible,” he said. “I say this as a Rumanian Jew converted to the Underground Church, the bright and shining beacon of hope in a country light-blocked by a curtain of iron.”
In memory she had nothing for Wednesday except a faint recollec- tion of a chalk artist who composed in real time on a blacklit stage and manipulated the lights to make the figures appear to move through time from the death of Christ on a skull-shaped hill to his ascension to heaven to the horrors of the Catholic papists who tried to sell vials of milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary to the German monastery where Martin Luther hammered his 95 Theses to the wooden door of a university chapel and started the Protestant Reformation to the trial in Dayton, Tennessee, where William Jennings Bryan bravely fought against the philistines who would tell children that they were nothing but animals, that men were made from monkeys.
She dared not tell her friends from the old school about these things. She was as careful to avoid words such as chapel service or Missions Week as she was to sprint into the house as soon as the bus dropped her off, and change out of the unfashionable uniform of the new school, the dreaded dark blue jumper, the shapeless thing over the white Oxford shirt and the mandatory powder blue bloomers. The few times she’d let slip any of it, that other life at that other school, they’d let loose all the profane words she wasn’t supposed to let inside her anymore. Twat, they’d say. Did it bother her? Cunt. Pussy. As though she didn’t have one, too. As though they knew any more than she knew about how to make boys love them, as though she didn’t look repulsed in the mirror, her celery stick body, wonder what it would take to make her boobs grow bigger, wonder how long it would be until her father grunted out of his chair, the tortured sound out of the half of his face that drooped less than the other half, the grunt-language only the two of them shared. The grunts that meant get me a sandwich, help me out of this chair, I have to urinate, I have to defecate, I hate it that you have to see me like this, that I have to lean on you like this, that you have to wipe me like this, that you chew on your hair like this, why do you twirl your hair around your finger like this, girl? Why do you put it in your mouth like this?
At the old school she was at first the girl who wouldn’t go all the way, the limits girl, the prude. “Did you let him?” “I didn’t let him.” “Not at all?” “Not all the way.” “Not even a little of the way?” “The way was closed to him.” “Not even the top?” “Not even the top.” “Didn’t he beg?” “Don’t they all beg?” “Didn’t you love it when he begged?” “What do you want me to say?” “I want you to say you loved it when he begged.” “I’m not going to say I loved it when he begged.” “That means you loved it when he begged.” “That means I’m not going to say I loved it when he begged.” And what would it mean for her to say she loved it when he begged?
Because she did like it when he begged. But it also terrified her when he begged. Always he was bigger than her, or if he wasn’t bigger than her, he was stronger. Her feeling was that at any moment he could take the position that asking was a mere thing, a politeness. She could grant the favor, but also he could take the favor. So. It was a negotiation but that’s not always what she was thinking at the time, because have you ever been close to a body when two bodies have made their fingers to unbutton all the buttoned buttons? Have you ever taken the slider of a zipper between your fingers and pulled and uncoiled the teeth from the top stops to the bottom stops? Everyone is breathing differently then. Ragged. Shallow. Do you know how wonderful it is to press skin against skin, to put your face close to another person’s skin, to breathe in? She’d learned a word. Musk. Her body announcing no less than his, plus she’d taken from her mother’s medicine cabinet a little lavender, a little eucalyptus, a little rose oil, and whatever was in him was more pleasant in her nose if it had something a little unpleasant in it. What a thing to discover, the body of a boy, the body her own and how everything heightened, so close to the edge of the yes unsaid, the big yes, but still there were all the little yeses, all the questions she demanded which one by one reduced the available oxygen in the room. Here? Yes. Here? Okay. Here? Wait. Now? Wait. Please? I don’t know. But then the exuberant yes. The exuberant little yes. Another yes she wanted to give, and then the thought of the next little yes, the yes a little less little, the yes withheld but not forever, she knew that, surely he knew that or wanted to know it.
And for every little yes withheld then given, the promise of a repeat. Not lips pressing against lips, not yet, but first eyelashes brushing against a flushed cheek. Not lips pressing against lips, not yet, but first lips brush- ing against lips. Not tongue pressing tongue, not yet, but first the flicker of a tongue’s tip against a lip. The barest flicker. Surely he must wonder: Did that happen or did I imagine it happened? Then it happens again, and it’s wonderful, but as soon as it’s happened, it’s happened, and when she thought of it she thought of a picture book she’d seen in the ninth grade on a rich lady’s coffee table. This man had stretched a line of wire across the air separating two skyscrapers in a city somewhere big enough to have skyscrapers, a city the likes of which she’d never seen except in movies or books, and he had a big balancing pole, and it looked like the wind was knocking him around, but it must have been so thrilling to keep stepping forward, foot over foot, death everywhere but wasn’t this some kind of being alive in someone’s bedroom in the afternoon, their parents gone, or in a car, in the front seat, never the back seat, or at night in the park, in the hot night breeze, god bless Florida, among the stick pines and the banyan trees like fortresses and the pale tan trees with the soft bark you could strip away like paper and ink like paper, like parchment.
“Turn around,” she told the boy, and pressed the soft bark to his back. “What are you doing?” “I’m inscribing.” “What?” “The Declaration of In- dependence,” she said, and he listened to her tell him about the trip she’d taken to see the real thing in person in Washington, D.C., with her parents, the last time she’d gone anywhere with her father besides house or hospital, and she told him about that, too, and it felt so good, the way he listened, and it kept feeling good until she heard he’d been bragging. The Park in the Dark with Sexy Sheila. Like it was some kind of three-dollar movie in the bad part of town, some washout thing that didn’t even make it to the good theater. “Did you do him?” “No. I didn’t do him.” “Well, you did something.” “Yes. We did some things.” “What were the things?” “People do the things people do.” “So you did the things people do?” “No. Not all the things.” “Which things?” “Small things,” she told them, “sad, small things.”
You’re going to be the school slut, she all but said to the celery stick in the mirror.
Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk, winner of the 2015 Story Prize Spotlight Award. Other recent stories appear in The Normal School, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Best American Mystery Stories.