Fingertipped in Wait
She has the sauce pot on a low, low flame; the extra virgin olive oil, a thin layer just glazing the bottom of the brown burnt pot, expires before it sizzles. That perfume, the smell of expiring olives, compels her to slit the garlic clove with her sharpest blade.
He sits over in the dining room, at the head of her table; she’s all over the stove for him. She’s making him her pasta-and-sauce. She’s spent days grating her parmesan cheese to top it off, preparing it with all the bits and pieces of her love for him. The glass jar brims underneath the lid with all the soft yellowed shavings.
She’d made this pasta-and-sauce before for her other loves. The last time had been for Dave. Dave didn’t get it. He had piled himself on top of her like lumps of sugar in black coffee—it only coated the bitter taste, slippery and poignant. He had left her with that taste. And he said she’d chased him away, right after eating her pasta-and-sauce.
That hurt. She’d just shared herself with him, and he had spat it out, her DNA, right there onto the table. It was the nail clipping that had done it for him.
That’s why this time she’d make sure not one nail shard got into her pasta-and-sauce. Because that had stung. That nail clipping Dave spat out caught right in her eye, so that even now she can feel that itch every time she blinks.
She grips the rim of the sauce pot and tilts it so the oil spills into a pool in its curve. She drops in the garlic. The runny oil catches it fervently, spurting ecstatically; the clove bathes in its embrace. If it could sink anymore into it, it would.
The garlic sizzling, the olive oil sizzling, their breaths marry into one delicious, long, shuddering exhale.
The heat condenses around her face, budding right on the button of her frigid nose. The olive oil squirts against her cheeks in fast-fading stings. She pets them into her face, tsking. She’s let things heat up too much. She can’t let it burn and spoil her extra virgin olive oil.
Like Dave did. He just pulled up in her, in her driveway, house, and bed last year. He had pulled in all too fast and cleaned it all out. He left not one hair in the drain, on the pillowcases, in between couch cushions, not one lick of dead skin, not one flake of dandruff; he had gone bald while he was with her. Because of his fast-falling hair and splintering scalp, he got sick in the head and shaved it all off. If only he had grasped her at all, he’d have seen that she loved him, hair shedding and all. She ate it up.
Dave left her with nothing left behind at all. Except that bitter, slick taste like the thick-smelling garlic pushing up in her nostrils right now, not that she’d let things heat up too much.
Cringing, she takes the pot off the burner, setting it on the metal corner of the sink. How could she have ever called him a love? Forking out the gold-branded garlic, she tosses the used-up clove into the garbage bag hanging limply from the lower cabinet door.
Her sights shift over to him, her love. He’s waiting for her, his gaze gnawing at her. Her lips quirk, spreading. He’s gnawing his nails like his eyes gnaw—and will gnaw—her whole body.
I’d let you eat me up, she’s whispering under her breath. I swear, Love, but not yet. Wait there patiently; this pasta-and-sauce is only a condiment to what this all really means. Trust, Love, trust.
She pours the carton of tomato purée into the pot. The oil hisses, spitting as the tomato purée cools it out. Easing the pot back on the burner, she stirs the two fruity excretions together.
He catches a whiff. He smirks. He gets it.
They got it together the other week in the car. The windows wept all around them. She nibbled at the dead skin on his lips, got it right between her front teeth, peeled, and swallowed. Now, he always wears his lips chapped for her because she loves him that way. The way he wears them chapped—licking them dry at the table, even now—signaled to her that he really got how she loved, especially how she loved him.
Since the first time she laid her eyes on him the other month, she had a strong sense he’d get it. His lip was between his teeth when their gazes met. That’s when she gathered how much he truly understood the value of his skin. That’s why he chewed his lips and nails; he kept it all inside of him, storing it up to finally release to her, in her, when they’d get it together in the car, in bed, in the kitchen, and, soon, at the table.
She plucks the lid from the drying rack and leaves it half open over the sauce so the oil and tomato can ruminate. Then, taking the pasta pot from the rack, she fills it three-quarters with tap water and puts it on the highest flame beside the sauce.
Leaning back on the counter, she watches for the water to boil, but her eyes keep flickering over onto him, her love. Each time their eyes meet she fights the urge to get more of a taste of them—to get her tongue tip right between the grooves in those deep brown, rippling irises.
But, of course, she couldn’t do that. She didn’t want to bleed them dry, she didn’t crave the iron-tinted aftertaste of fresh-left blood at all; Dave had taught her that. His lips had always been too soft so that when her teeth caught on them, they broke his skin and he’d bleed.
Skin feels, not blood. Skin carries what her love feels; her touch on him and his touch on her. It’s all in the skin. All the fingertips that had grazed her and gripped her and held her—they were all over her skin, all up in her pores, saturated in her skin-lines and fingerprints, all the touches of her past loves that had left. Especially Dave’s.
She shudders. The thought of that touch arrests her body in a spasm. She whips out the once wedge, now rind of parmesan cheese from the deep pocket of her apron along with a plate and cheese grater from the cabinet. She must channel these feelings into love-making.
She scrapes the cheese against the grater, grazing up and down slowly, slowly, gently letting her fingerprints get caught here and there with the rind. They sprinkle down alongside the parmesan onto the plate. She’s thinking of him, her love, of their love—oh, how she loves him—of love, loving, and how all her other loves didn’t get it like he does.
She breathes: you’re different, Love. You’re more than just my head; you’re my body. The others couldn’t grasp this, but I knew I could make you; not just this, but all of it, all of me; not just my skin—my crevices and curves, like they grasped, dug deeply into when we joined really only a few inches deep—but my flesh underneath, my swollen, gamey heat and soul.
The salt of the parmesan stings the bits of rawness across her fingertips. She lets the rind fall beside the grater and sweeps all of herself from the plate into the jar. She brushes back her hair, some strands clinging to the rawness, desperate to be included; she wraps them around her fingers and snaps them into pieces, sprinkling them into the parmesan.
Her dad would be disgusted; he always insisted on freshly grated parmesan for pasta-and-sauce. But this is her pasta-and-sauce, almost ready for her love.
The timer rings and she drains the pasta, sliding it into a bowl and pouring the bright red sauce all over it. She opens the jar, finally, and holds her breath as she peppers it like snow in small heaps all over the pasta.
She sifts for nail clippings as the yellowed flakes soak into the sauce. Did some slip in? Some nails?
But what if her love didn’t like her hair? Would he spit her out like Dave did? But no, she distinctly recalled that one time, when he cooked pasta and vodka sauce, she could see one of her hairs caught with the spaghetti on his fork. Didn’t he look at his fork, noticing the strand swaying loosely, and then smile and eat it?
Wasn’t that one of the signals that cued her into knowing that he got it?
She hugs the bowl of pasta tightly against her stomach, letting it warm her entrails and heart as she sweeps out of the kitchen. Her skirt licks up her calves like white-hot flames, fizzling against her hips as she plops the bowl of pasta down on the table.
Love, he says, it looks delicious.
Doesn’t it? She scoops the whole top layer, with all the parmesan, onto his plate. It’ll taste even better, dear.
She sits at the other end of the table, plate in front of her for the sake of decorum. Their eyes meet as he takes the first bite. He chews slowly, pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth and letting the sauce suffuse over it; the pasta bits part for the taste of the parmesan to leech through.
His eyes close. There’s not much flavor, he notes. The cheese, I mean.
The memory of the nail clipping stings her eyes. She blinks a small smile at her love. She lifts herself from the table, slips into the kitchen, and grabs the jar. She bites the inner part of her lip, tastes the bitter blood, tastes all her loves who left her. With a stiff gait, she sets down the jar in front of the plate. It’s still halfway full.
She won’t impose on him. She won’t pile herself on top of him. He’ll have to take her as he pleases.
Sitting back down, she watches her love take bite after bite. After bite, after bite.
Her insides burn all the way down; the corner of her lip twinges, watching him consume it all. But will he really accept the hair, the nails, the skin? Will he take her, served up on that plate?
Her heart is bursting from anticipation, from the blood of her past loves, from watching her love. His hand—it reaches out for the jar, stuffing inside, squeezing a handful in between his fingers and palm.
He pulls out, releasing the shavings onto the remaining penne.
Warmth spills over her legs. With haste he eats, forkful at a time, fast yet steady, right to the rhythm of her memories, of the bitter tastes of her loves, of her twisty DNA: in, out, in and out.
He gets it.
Katerina Ronconi is an emerging writer, pursuing her undergraduate degree in Stony Brook’s Creative Writing BFA program. Born in Italy and raised in New York City, her fiction interweaves the diverse aesthetics and daily realities of the city with her own personal experiences of disjointedness, crafting tales that mine the leftovers of people. Raw and unflinching, she toys with the notion of civility and sanctimony deep-seated in all of us.