Blue Manifesto Letter from the Editor
Playlist
Not Full Enough
Henri Bergson on Possibility and Creation
Spin, Measure, Cut
Molly Pepper Steemson
It always starts the same way: at a Turkish restaurant in North London, with two of her oldest friends. The women eat their dinner with their hands. They’re dressed for a party.
She—Maya—sits facing out, facing them. They sit facing in, her. She’s watching people take long strides down the neon-lit high street outside the window. A keen crack runs across the corner of the glass.
It’s the same conversation every time: how this party will be like all the other parties, which were, in turn, like the parties before them. Maya’s friends hope something will happen. Maya hopes something will happen to her.
It’s best to arrive at a party with friends, and without expectations. It’s what her mother used to say. She says it out loud to remind herself.
Maya likes these women, her old friends. She likes going out with them—arriving together then shrugging them off, leaving them with her jacket in the front room to take an unencumbered lap of the house. She’ll find them later on, outside the bathroom, or pressed into the hall, where they’ll spin stories of what they’ve seen. They don’t like to interfere with her idle games and sharp flirtations. They like to watch the party unfurl—they like to take its measure.
For now she works alone. She can go to the kitchen, open a beer, take a look around. Furtive drug-sniffers slip upstairs. The dancers are in the study, the smokers in the garden.
In the kitchen, posh men loom their shadowy faces over small woman writers in little leather shoes. The party hasn’t been going for long enough, yet. The air is still heavy with nervous conversation.
Who are you?
He has a soft, American accent. It catches her off guard.
I’m Maya.
And where are you going, Maya? He speaks slowly.
I’m not sure.
Upstairs?
No—she fights against his suggestion as a test of her own will—the study.
And although she hadn’t wanted to go to the study, and nor had he, and she doesn’t know him, nor he her, and although she had decided that tonight she would be a different type of woman, who was more aloof, and cool, and harder to pursue, she submits to follow his lead—pulled by her wrist—into the large, book-lined room, where he pulls her close to him, and they dance.
Her friends saw it from the top of the stairs: her white dress, the top of his rough blond head, the power of his coarse hand’s grip. She spun like silk behind him.
And as they dance, they talk closely: him stooped, with his mouth right up against her ear; she ever so slightly on tiptoe, cheek pressed against his jaw. She likes the shapes his warm words make as they land on her neck. He likes her replies, which seem passive, but contain all sorts of traps. She is elegant, spider-like. She coils her arms around him.
Cigarette? he asks into her hair.
They wind their way back down the corridor, through the kitchen, and out into the garden. They sit on a small bench that bows in the middle and plunges them together. Ralph—his name is Ralph—opens two beers that she doesn’t remember him picking up. Someone calls her name but she doesn’t reply. She’s watching his hands.
He has huge hands—fingers that don’t taper and fat white palms which the bottle caps disappear into as he removes them—and when he hands her a brown bottle the caps fall, ringing as they hit the floor.
Her friends watched as the pair melted together. They listened to the warm flow of have you heard of— and did you read— and oh I love that— and I can’t believe you love it, too. Of course they can believe it. They flirt with fate.
The first thing he knew about her was that he wanted to kiss her. He’d left a conversation without saying sorry or goodbye to follow the tress of hair that had stolen into the kitchen. He was so certain of her. And he was right. She was exactly as he’d imagined her to be. Clever, quick. He glows with the satisfaction of competent conviction.
But it’s not time just yet; he keeps talking. Still talking. Still talking but distracted by her beauty and that chip in her tooth and the way that she picks so delicately at the skin around her nails. His words run endlessly, he can’t stop them, and she doesn’t want them to stop. His confidence is boyish—it lacks control or embarrassment. He talks and stares at her wet lower lip. An opening.
She plays: goads and teases. She tells him stories about her friends and how they watch her, and how they can be so annoying, and prying, and how they are often, always, right. He devours the most intimate details—childhood illness, her parents’ divorce. He offers her his own. There’s a pink dollhouse that his mother gave him as a child, and a recurring dream in which he is a fly, trapped in a glass on a cold metal surface. She laughs, and when she takes a breath he rushes to say I hope I see more of you after tonight, and she agrees.
Now the pace changes, something slows, voices lower. It’s unclear who has decided that they should go inside because they move together, make decisions together. He gets caught in the throng at the door and loses her, just for a moment, before her dark hair flashes behind someone else’s shoulder. He follows her. She follows him. They draw smaller and smaller circles around one another until they’re dizzy. She holds tightly to a handful of his shirt. He clamps one hand to her neck, two. Each can feel the other’s blood simmering below the skin. Anticipation is ecstatic fizz. He exhales, her face falls towards his. They’re pressed so hard together that they only have one breath to pass between them, and he takes it.
They abandon conversation, filling their mouths with neck cheek tongue. He licks along the ridge of her ear and she loses her surroundings. She holds tighter. She bites where his cheek and ear meet, to leave a mark.
Somewhere quiet.
The quietest part of the house is a small attic room. They lie on the bed in the eaves, eyes half closed, hands tracing, pawing, pinching.
Keep telling that story.
About watching his grandmother skin rabbits on her porch. The porch on the old house in Vermont, in the woods, with Delft tiles around the wood-burning stove. Long summers there, Christmas, Thanksgiving. He can feel the weight of her body relaxing. It’s his house, now, and when he moves there at the end of the year, he’ll—
Her friends weren’t concerned by her absence, but bored by it. They were ready to draw her into their night, to listen to tall tales of other people’s troubles.
The words wake her.
They smash through all her imaginations and she lies stiff in their shards. And she didn’t know! She didn’t know that this wild rush was the limitless possibility of all their potential lives together, lives he just snatched away from her. She was grasping, trying to claw him back. It was August, he’d be gone by December, or January, the end of the year was unclear. She rushed, counting backwards. Start dating now, serious couple—October? Could she persuade him to stay if she were his girlfriend by October? She could move—go with him, if she—what in god’s fucking name—the thought jolts her upright and furrows her brow.
She pushes herself away, up, out, leaving all the possibilities on that bed in the attic with him, and—on a splintered board—a thread of fine cotton string from the loose weave of her light dress gets caught. It pulls, and pulls, and her flight down stair after stair winds it down, around the bannister, the back of her dress fraying fast and look, and there they are, her oldest friends, almost at the door themselves.
Not without me—
One closed the door, the other snapped the thread.
Molly Pepper Steemson is from London. She writes about drunkenness and desire in short, long, and critical forms.