George & Rue by George Elliott Clarke

as biting as her looks. Her feverish mouth, snatching. She thought Rue swarthy and, therefore, randy. His eyes murderously brilliant, volcanic. There was no membrane of glass dividing them, only stained-glass lust inside Rufus. She seemed cutely ratty, acutely dirty. The colour and taste of vodka and milk. Dark-haired Purity’d fit his narrow bed.
    She say, “I come from two lines of whores, and I’m a whore myself.” Rue was the bull to trample in her garden, kick in her stall, chew on her roses. Fine, fine.
    Their affair had
lust
in it—the remains of
lustre.
Her fingers diddling along his spine reminded Rue of a roach’s legs paddling furiously in Googie’s sink. When they turned up the lamp, yellow light, half-religious, half-sinful, all shames assumed a Renaissance glow—beige, peaceful. The bed cracked and jiggled as they cranked and joggled. Her sluice suckled him.
    “Oh—what—ah.” Fire sat within Purity, burning, burning, in her succinct precincts. Either like a preacher’s abandoned sermon, her skirts’ undone, or like a bad nun’s, with unchaste heart and unbound hair.
    Purity was Rue’s lover under tall pines in Point Pleasant Park, down by the waterfront, in late June, after the shower, pouring rain down her trembling self and gyrating amid the mud and pine needles. Tangy skin, vinegary kisses, sour wet clothes peeled off in all that rain and mud. They’d done it standing in the doorless changing room while slummy water gummed up the dry sand by the black harbour, with cold strawberries and stars and rain-sodden, wind-slurred grass in the nearby hills. The Sunday chill thrilled through June leaves. Rum hammering in Rue’s head hammered him to Purity’s thighs. Then, wet, panting, the lovers sheltered in one of the mouldered caverns of one of the ancient imperial forts. They dressed; Rue hummed. Hedesired the hectic Atlantic spray on their faces. Purity smiled. Rue remembered Easter and brushed away a threatening tear.
    The intimates—inmates of intimacy—rested until an orange moon yellowed toward white; then, they left. Purity’s almost blissful perfume mingled with the salt-and-grease smell of fish ’n’ chips up by the Commons. Drunks lounged and slept on the grass as if it were a divan. The night was sable indigo; their shadows moved black under streetlamps bent over them like sodomite monks.
    Rue dreamt of how nice it’d be to smash flies’ soft bodies against Purity’s hard, sober whiteness, to make it darker, softer. He wondered if Purity, plastered with hundreds of corpses of smeared flies, might seem delectably darker. He dreamt of the little ivory tub she liked to wash her little ivory sex in, while sitting in the lascivious posture of a cedilla. Silk rippling black down white legs.
    In Purity’s eyes, Rue’s a kind of crow, raven, vulture, vampire, as black as rat’s fur. He could half play the piano and pretend to play the rest. When he was in her, in her bed, the air they breathed was like sticky slime.
    They were lying in bed, joined at their hips, on the always-seditious Dominion Day night, with fireworks fluting and bursting seditiously over the usually blacked-out wartime city, when Purity joked about a comical fella who’d tried to get her to carry his child. “His name was Asa. He look like you.”
    With dreadful ice in his heart, Rue knew he was embedded in Asa’s whore. He drilled deeper, harder. Having her was like having revenge, and having it blisteringly cold. He heard Asa giggling in the shadows. He pulled out of Purity’s lap, then hit her. Once, twice, thrice.
    Three slaps to get blood oozing from her lips, and she was yelling, “Blackbastardfuckinblackbastard.” Rue swore he’d bash Purity until she was his colour. He grabbed his belt out hispants. He was gonna whip impure Purity with the silver buckle Easter’d given him. Purity hollered, and Googie burst in: the glass of the door broke in a star-shape. He slugged hard; his fists struck oil with