Smack

Chella Courington
· in ,

Meet me @ Aquarium, he texts. By jellyfish, 7. She would perhaps, most likely, but not before researching jellyfish for she knows his habits, the way he likes to make it impossible for her to say no wherever they are.

Adults spawn daily if given enough food and for most, spawning is triggered by dim light so the entire population breeds every day at dawn or dusk, floating through water, dropping eggs and sperm, tentacles (though she preferred tendrils) never touching. While most men she’s known like to roll against her in the morning, he is a night creature. Fortunately, for him, she is not bound by time.

In a few species, the sperm swim into the female’s mouth to fertilize the eggs. She knows he knows she likes him between her teeth and indulges her in a way most men have not. At sixteen her lips took over in the backseat of a baby blue Trans Am and they quivered for days.

She can never open her mouth without thinking of possibility.

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Chella Courington teaches writing and literature at Santa Barbara City College. Her work appears in The Los Angeles Review, Gone Lawn, Gargoyle, The Collagist, and SmokeLong Quarterly. In 2011 Courington published Paper Covers Rock, a flip book of lined poetry; Girls & Women, a chapbook of prose poetry; and Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana, an e-book of linked microfiction.