David Daniel

Iberia

Midnight, I float in slow motion to a shadowed hedge where it lies coiled in untamed ivy. Scaley and grey, it flicks its forked tongue to taste the air, as if it knows I lurk behind it. Alongside me runs the fence of memory, snarled with honeysuckle, a divide where good and bad once met. We had sword fought with sprigs over those chain links, though I took the game too far and lashed you across the face, leaving a red ridge of skin along your pale cheek and the bridge of your brow. But you are long gone, old neighbor, even though my malice lingers. In the coming night, the snake proves right—a new you appears, this time, the one I long for. You waltz in baring your Iberian skin, black locks that fall to the small of your back. I revere your plum-like curves, bikini lines that taper into our taboo tryst. Stock still, you tilt your hip. I tell you what you know is true: that thing we cannot do. Gifting me your nubile smile I hate to love, you saunter over and sidle onto the bed beside me. Come dawn, the fog of lust burns off, as do beads of dew on dry ivy. What remains is family: three kids craving pancakes. Yet my blind urge to rejoin you, twined as vipers in a sweaty caduceus, poisons me as I peer at a sun-dripped sea, eclipsing Iberia.

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David Daniel has current and forthcoming work in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Bodega, Flash Frog, Doubly Mad, BULL, Of the Book, Cloudbank, arc, Ink In Thirds, Within & Without (Editor’s Choice), As Surely As the Sun, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Severance. He is quietly at work on his first novel.

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