*This is part of an ongoing series by Cecilia Ruvinsky*
Cranberries and pineapples make you taste good, he says, and he strokes her lip as he leans in to kiss her. His tongue twists around hers like a snake, and the words she has saved become his, and then so does she, his forever to fuck and to keep. Isn’t it his conjugal right, to ask her to receive him with legs wide open? And isn’t it her duty to stand still, while he ogles her with dehydrated eyes, as if she was a mirage in the desert? She must smile with freshly bruised lips as he takes x-ray photographs of her, to see his name etched on her bones. And so she loves him with all of her Catholic heart, because that’s what good girls do, her mother said while she tightened the corset on her daughter’s wedding dress – but the delicate wife knows the man who holds her could crack her like an egg, and put her innards to fry with black pepper and salt, so she cries through her love, and doesn’t let him see, because pretty girls don’t cry. It ruins their mascara.
He’s an angel, her friends gush, an angel with a good job and even better posture, but Lucifer was an angel too, she thinks, and he probably loved the taste of cranberries and pineapples as well. He is not her savior, and he is not her hero, but her wedding dress is the rope that binds her to him, and the matching silver bands are the knots. It was ’til death do us part, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Well then, let her make this wedding dress into a noose, and she can meet her maker to tell Him His son is living on Earth, suckling cranberry juice from between the legs of innocent women, and pretending he’s a saint, with wings made of holy intentions. It is ’til death do us part, so she’ll say goodbye to his lips and his tongue, and maybe eventually, after years of sun and storm, his name will erode off her bones, and she can belong to herself once more.