Spin the Bottle

Nicole spins, smiles, bites Mark’s lip, and coaxes him from the circle. They make slow, cautious love on the pile of Gore-Tex coats in the den.

RJ spins, slips Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from the shelf and reads aloud. He sobs and sobs and sobs. The room fills with his warm tears until they’re all bobbing in his sorrow like apples, and someone shouts at their host to crack a window before they drown.

Jasmine spins, drags Kevin by the hand onto the balcony, and lights a Parliament. They pass the cigarette back and forth, faintly tasting each other on the filter. Under moonlight, they conduct a dispassionate accounting of their respective sexual escapades, ecstasies, and mistakes. “Were you ever in love, though?” Jasmine asks. “Sure,” he says. “Sure.”

Luca spins, peers through birding binoculars at the tomato farmer’s home across the way, watching, waiting for him to leave to tend his crop. When he does, Luca rushes over and delivers a peck on his daughter’s cheek. She burns a brighter red than her father’s harvest, treasures the intimacy, and never tells a soul.

Alice spins, leans forward and finds Zee’s eager mouth, her tongue. They shimmer and vanish in the space between possibilities, the what is and what could be. When their personal reality flickers back in rhythm with now, they’re older. Gray-haired and worn, faded around the edges. Whatever delight they enjoyed lies broken like a porcelain teacup on the floor.

Kevin spins, strips naked, and lays like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man on dewy grass beneath the majesty of the constellation Cassiopeia. Kevin and Cass finish together in a boom of celestial carnal rapture. Afterward, they make an honest go of it. Kevin stays with her even after her lights dim to a cool white and begin to collapse in on themselves beneath their cosmic gravitational weight. He’s there with her at the heat death of the universe. Kevin and Cass watch finality come rushing at them head-on, hold hands, and kiss.