Maybe it’s time for a story.

This time it’s a stone that does it. I pick it up. It is smooth and wet. Are there only two kinds? Jagged or smooth. Sometimes we say this side or that side, but there are infinite dimensions. To all of us.

Boy or a girl, it makes no matter. But he, he was all man, cracked like the earth just above our receding creek. Was this the urgency?

It was wet, that much is for sure. Everything is wet when these things happen. We all make sure they are. He made sure they were. It was.

He did not control the oceans. Or the lakes. Or our creek, but there we were and he, of course, was tan, and I, of course, was not. A child with slathered sunblock, my skin remained fleshy and white. Fleshy as in chicken skin or the belly of a pig swaying from side to side. Pigs are not graceful, nor was I. But maybe I was able to contain all that ugly farm animal energy. Maybe my rounded girl belly made me God.

I did not find him beautiful, only the rocks, the soil.

It must have been different. Separate maybe. Is this how it’s done? Hold this, this thing you have not seen. This thing you have not touched. Or: look at ours together, this is how yours will become.

Children cannot help but be drawn to the moisture. They still remember resting in their mother’s womb, but my mother’s room was dry.

Put your mouth on it, he said.

They always say this. We all have said this, have we not? Put your mouth on me, I say to my girlfriend. All of me. My hardness, my softness, my every dimension. The cut of my hipbones, the round of my hips and thighs, the stone of my shins.

We say women taste sweet, men taste salty. But I say women taste warm. Like something you need to prepare yourself to eat. And then devour. Men I can swallow whole. Cold or warm. Leftover or fresh.

The bigness of things does not always matter, but the dimension.

I don’t remember the thickness or thinness of him. It changes depending upon how I’d like to remember it to be.

When I am soft and ready, he is thick and his hand has brushed himself with creek water. It is untainted. We are untainted. Until I put my mouth on him, I am innocent. After there is salt. But he is not ocean. Do not drink the sea, my mother told me. You must boil to purify. I turn the faucet all the way to one side, the sink steams. I burn my hands and then the insides of me, but there is no flushing it out, just scarring and as stuck as the fish water in my lungs. And it sits in my stomach, mixing with his juices and he is warm again. I keep him this way.

When I am dry. I am never dry.

Mary Krienke grew up in the Midwest and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s Fiction Program and has been previously published by Midwestern Gothic. Now working at Sterling Lord Literistic, a boutique literary agency, she fits in writing whenever and wherever she can.