Beyond Wanting
A short story by Shannon Murphy
She coulda made the moment up of stuff that is 15-year-old-girl-self-spun- dreams made of formless thoughts, feeling-ssss parsed in puzzle pieces; sky sun sand surf. Waves warmth waiting wanting, but wanting what?
Boy! casts a shadow over her; a shadow smiling smiling golden in the bugling sun — golden blonde unbearably Beautiful Boy. Come walk with me, he says. She does.
How then a kiss — what is this, she marvels. A shiver of ice cold rises from the red hot steam, a furnace stoked to blaze beyond everything familiar, tamped down down to a fear of wanting.
She twirls and pirouettes through her 20‘s. Dances and dances barely there from out an un-tethered body. She learns that If you don’t eat, you get hungrier and hungrier, hollowed from the inside — but if you wait — only wait — beyond the want — the hunger evaporates. Willow waif, she flings glass beads across the game board and stares down predators who cannot fathom her — and, barely there, she waits.
In a house so soon to be torn down, he asked how did you find me? She said she called his father and told him that she was an old friend from back in high school daze and so on and on until the father gave her his address — and so there she was — she was.
He comes to her door, sits on her bed. In the morning he asks if she wants him to stay. Stay stay stay? There have been — will be — others — but none so beautiful — so bedazzling.
By 30, she’s a runner on solid legs with pumping lungs, of stout heart and high head, intent on driving down hard miles. She runs for what she cannot place, she runs the coulda woulda shoulda race.
At the finish, there is only her and him; the dazzling sun in the house not yet demolished in her bed in the morning at the end of her last breath at the point beyond wanting.
Shannon Murphy: “I’ve been writing forever, and only when something that I write resonates with a reader on some level, do I presume to call myself a writer.”
