Curiosity (XL).

Whitfill, Patrick

    I once dated a girl who lived in Zambia for
   a year, teaching the tribe there how to sustain
   clean water supplies. They taught her how to
   avoid hippopotami. Take for a few minutes
   the Corporal I met the other day who wanted
   everything in his life to go back to the kiss.
   And he said it like that, The Kiss.
 I can only
   assume he wanted to go back to that one he
   remembered as the epitome of all kisses, not
   the first one, exactly, but the first one that
   mattered. This was before the intervention of
   anti-matter in the nebulae. This was before
   matter mattered. I spent a few nights at Erin's
   place and she showed me the revolver her
   father bought for her and taught her how to
   use, and I knew then that I would remember
   more of her revolver than of her kiss, though
   both clicked against my teeth. That Corporal
   wasn't a Corporal but a Sergeant and a sniper.
   But the kiss he wanted to remember
   was a kiss, the kind of kiss a swallow gives to
   a chimney line. Everything should have
   a chimney. In a better version of our future, it
   comes back to a more invested understanding
   of frictionless movement, Erin, I mean, water-
   based education. Yesterday, I read that
   China's space program has already launched
   the first taikonaut into Low Earth Orbit, and,
   somehow, I expected myself not to reconsider
   love when I heard the word taikonaut,
 to know
   that I exist in the same universe as taikonaut,
   in the same general vicinity when seen from,
   say, Jupiter's carousel of moons and comets.
   Dear Erin: do you remember the night you
   said you think of me when you shower? Even
   though I know how volatile friction is, I will
   not stop fiddling with it. This is before anyone
   discovers our monuments dedicated to touch
   and kiss.
 I do. I remember because I thought
   that meant I became the soap in your shower,
   the shampoo and the water and the sound of
   the water pooling in your crossed-over-your-breasts
   armspace. Go ahead and say it. Say
   taikonaut
 and tell me you don't think about
   the first time you touched a thigh not your
   own and not on accident. When the other one
   wanted their thigh touched. But I had told
   you earlier, Erin, how ninety percent of all
   American women no longer touch their own
   skin in the shower. They use a lufa. They use
   a screen. If I would have known how to say
   taikonaut
 that night, I would have taken you
   home, Erin, put you in orbit around your
   shower in that one bedroom, where you keep
   your revolver, where you keep all of
   the taikonauts
 in your revolver, where I
   reached over one night and tried to kiss you
   the way the wind tries, and even though you
   wouldn't let me, it felt like getting into orbit
   with nothing but a gunshot to ride up there.