The Lava in My Bones by Barry Webster Page A

get beyond her power.
    Jimmy shyly asked me if he could wipe his finger along my collarbone. I nodded. He wanted a honey drop from the hollow below my ankle, and I said yes. He asked for some sweetness from the space between my breasts, just visible in the V-cut of my shirt. I let him have that too. As he peered at the golden thread hanging from his fingertip, I wondered if I could make myself desire a boy. It was probably interesting to want— really want—another person. How fascinating and unusual it’d be to find someone attractive and completely enjoy his or her presence.
    A wind blew that rattled the tree branches and brought the scent of faraway forests, pine sap, juniper flowers—a smell part-piquant, part-sour. The wind woke an excitement in my body. It made every pore in my skin open wide and caused my backbone to straighten so completely that I was sitting more erect than ever before. The mouths of my ears gaped, and my eardrums became as still as the water on a lake so distant and hidden that no wind had ever rippled its surface, a lake that had waited an eternity for something even remotely resembling weather. What was I listening for?
    To my surprise, Jimmy brought the honeyed fingers of his hand together and shoved them into his mouth. His large tongue swirled out and round in a long, luxuriant movement, licking the liquid off both sides of his fingers. Drops glimmered on his lips. He stared me straight in the eyes as he loudly and definitively swallowed. His Adam’s apple leapt forward once.
    A strange expression came over his face. His cheeks slowlyreddened and his eyes grew larger, bulging forward like egg yolks. His chest had stopped moving.
    â€œJimmy?” I said. “Jimmy? Are you all right?”
    Flapping his hands in the air, he raced out of the trembling bushes just in time for the home team to score its final goal. The spiralling football descended through the posts and struck him square in the face. He fell to the earth and, his mouth puckering, thrashed on the ground like a fish pulled from water.
    I charged out into the blinding sunshine. The spectators in the stands turned toward me. “Dr Merton!” I cried. “Somebody call Dr Merton!”
    When the ambulance arrived, everyone was on the field shaking hands with the winning players. Only Estelle noticed me, her shaggy pom-pom fronds dangling from her hands like tentacles. She eyed me for what seemed an eternity, her head a stuck weathercock, the corners of her mouth upturned. On the front of her cheerleader uniform, below her right breast, a circle of sweat bloomed like a flower.
    Jimmy remained in the hospital all night.
    The next morning, I learned that my honey had caused the sides of his throat to adhere. Although he recovered, his desk at school remained empty for a month. This wasn’t altogether unusual. I assumed he was in the woods helping his father cut open metal traps. It was September and the hunting season was in full swing.
    Still, the other students grew wary of me. After Jimmy disappeared, the boys stopped asking me to be part of their schoolyard circle. Girls didn’t want me to walk home with them. Whenstudents came upon drops of honey on the school steps or the handle of the water fountain, they regarded them at first with annoyance, then outrage, and finally with pure, unmitigated terror. In gym class no one let me join their squads. Exasperated, Mr Schmidt said, “Kids, you can sit beside Sue. She won’t bite.”
    I noticed Estelle everywhere. She talked constantly, her voice no longer high-pitched and metallic, but husky, full of sly hissing s’s and cruel, explosive p’s and t’s. She spoke at an agonizingly low decibel that everyone but me heard. And she listened to people, one hand on her chin, mentally storing this bit of gossip and that piece of information. She’d become a seamstress stitching together rumours and facts; from myriad ingredients,