The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Yeah, these people showed up tonight. I know where they live (in my Neverwas Massachusetts, in a harbor town) and what happens to them; and yes, for those who love to find the breadcrumb trail and will someday write the concordance for my fiction, the drowned woman is Finn's wife.

And for those who haven't read my work since the Dread Thesis (groans, calls to cowled minions to burn all copies) ...well.... it's still queer lit, but I think I've put a bit of polish on since then.

Quarry

   "Jump!"
   James hesitated. He had been quarry-diving in Sylacauga every summer since he was twelve; not the wind, the height, or the rock beneath his bare toes frightened him. But this was no long, clean plunge down through still, warm, limpid water. The sea below him was opaque and angry and it moved, always, sharp and white-edged round the jutting black stone. It would be cold. It was cold, standing there in just some cutoff shorts of Rett's. He looked down bewildered at the water, and couldn't see a thing.   
   "Jump, boy!" Lucy's shout behind his right ear made him flinch and squint. He looked at Everett, out there in the water, sculling peacefully with his hands. He steeled himself; two running steps and the jump.
   The water slapped him, and he opened his eyes. The water was green-gold to his sight, thick with bright particles and bits of weed. Not blue, not blue at all, and shockingly cold. James kicked, upward, to break through to the air and the sun, and then thrashed for a moment when he could no longer find up. He broke from the pulse-rhythm of swimming and threw out his hands, for thin empty air, for skin-parting rock. His fingers clutched at water and sharp sand.
   A grip came hard around his wrist. There was a somersaulting second, and then he was out in the light. Salt water streamed down into his eyes; they burned as his lungs were burning. As soon as James had breathed he tried to tread water, to stay upright in the rocking dark waves, and found he did not need to. Everett's arm was braced across his chest, and all of Everett was behind him, treading for them both, sure enough that James could tip his head back and breathe, and breathe, and breathe.
   "You said you could swim." Lucy again, close. James blinked stinging saline until he could see her; she was at Rett's side, taking Rett's weight so Rett could bear his. Her hair, dull bronze, fell across her face as if she had surfaced too quickly to push it back. Her eyes were dark with something more than annoyance, though that was all her voice had held. Her mouth looked ragged.
   James cursed. "I can swim. Not in this. Goddammit."
   "Luce," said Everett, no inflection but effort. James realized that though the water kept moving, pushing at his hands and pulling past his knees, he was being held perfectly still. Rett was swimming for two people, and Lucy for one and a half, or something, and James was frozen and freezing.
  "Open swim is over, kids," Lucy replied, shaking off her hair. Her shoulders were shaking.
   "I'm sorry," Everett repeated, until Lucy threw a wadded towel at his head. "We grew up jumping off that stupid rock. Nothing ever... ever happened before."
   "Nothing happened today." James smiled, though the Atlantic still seared his nose and throat. Some dark-red, curling seaweed was stranded through Rett's dark hair, and he reached and flicked it away. "I'll just use the ladder next time and not the diving board."
   "Next time...?" And Rett smiled back.
   Lucy turned her back on them then, leaving her towel crumpled half on the blanket, half in the sand. She strode out onto the rock, her drenched t-shirt flashed in the sun, and she leaped. The dive was startlingly graceful to James, neat as he would not have expected from Lucy, who moved brusque and heavy-hipped through all the rest of their world. She dove as slim girls dove from the lip of the quarry, as though she fell into nothing but stillness, sun-warmed and perfectly safe.

   "That woman is out of her mind."
   "Muh?" Everett peeled down a layer of blanket, just until he could speak.  "Lucy?"
   "Rett, she's not back yet."
   "Oh, Luce's fine. She does that. The sea loves her, or anyway always spits her out." Everett yawned. "Just don't ever talk to her about it."
   "It?"
   "The ocean." Rett slid over, for James. "She lost somebody. Sometimes I think she came back here just to look... Jesus, I'm too tired to make sense."
   "A girlfriend?" James asked, crouched up on the mattress to pull off his shirt.
   "Sister.Younger," answered Everett. "Luce was asexual from kindergarten to post-doc."
   "God, what happened?"
   "She met a girl..."
   "I meant to the sister."
   "Accident. Two-some years ago. I know you've met her husband, he's in... Slavic, no, Comparative Literature? He'll swear to you the sea just took her back." Everett paused. "And she was a total mermaid, like Luce, so who can say."
   James laughed, nearly, at the thought of Lucy beguiling sailors; thought of her strong shoulders breaking the night-colored line of the waves, and didn't.
   "Come here."
   "I am here. No one's taking me anywhere."
   Everett moved, too fast for him, and against James' shoulder was a fierce heat that might have been a kiss. It occured to him, briefly, that they were in Lucy Ridley's beach house and the walls were made of paper bags, and she might come back any time. And Everett was doing the thing with James' clavicle and his tongue. James might have pulled away, just for a minute, just to stop himself moaning, but Everett held him without room to turn or slip free.
   He remembered to breathe, in the tense fiery second before it felt like he had jumped.
   "Ev'rett." It was the last thing he said, that he could remember. Rett's voice held out a little longer, mostly in low laughter between kisses; there was blurred lamplight and a salt-streaked tangle of limbs, and the sheets pooled under Everett under James.
   "Jamie, Jamie, Christ!"
   It was no more than his name, but Everett's hands were searching in James' hair, and Everett's knee was fitted into the rise of James' spine. It was familiar water closing over him, it was air enough to breathe. He bent his head low to what skin he could kiss, took his weight off his forearms and put himself in Everett's arms, so they fell like that. 

Well. It goes to the Nazgul (I mean, my peers! There just happen to be nine!) tomorrow morning, so I hope it's something. If you read it, do tell me what you think. I may post more here, as long as there's a hard paper copy in the department office first; I'm still so tetchy about that, for all friends of mine do e-zines all the time.