Lipshine #18 Champagne Gold

Abstract

Lipshine #18 Champagne Gold Val Rigodon (bio) We could watch the moonrise from the pool, float on our backs, and count the silver spacecrafts puttering across the water-color sky, striping it with seafoam-colored chemtrails, but you roll your eyes. Your sharp triangle teeth pop black bubblegum, the special promotional kind they stopped making years ago but which I still find littering the bottom of your coat pockets. You shake sand out of your sneakers and break another choker. You’ve got a dozen replacements downstairs in that scallop shell you stole from your older sister. You jog out of the house: my mauve mermaid girl with feathers on her eyelashes, ears rotten from cheap silver. You sold your legs to stalk about the sandy shore, to wrap around some devil’s red roaring motorcycle. Your band of rowdy angels will be waiting for you at the new-old-revamped-reopened multiplex at the mall, where you loiter after curfew. Everyone wonders how you got your gang to plummet from the pearlescent heavens, to stuff their cotton-soft feet into beat-up sneakers and walk the speckled concrete—but me, I already know. We were from the deepest, coldest depths of the black-green sea. We were mermaid girls with diamonds in our teeth. You swam around like you owned the place, and maybe you did. But you traded it all away like bottle caps in coral reef. You sold your jellyfish hair that once streamed behind you in luminescent pink and orange, and now you stay shaved, pushing rose thorns from your head. You wanted gravity and feathers and asteroids. I had never imagined the sun; I only wanted to be your shadow. I followed you up here, but I should have known better. “Kiss me,” I begged when we were bending in the wind, scalps exposed to the ultraviolet. You turned away and stared into your yellow clamshell mirror. You had a hundred layers of waterproof eyeliner to apply. “Nah, your breath smells like fish.” [End Page 105] Then you ran, already an expert, already the lean-legged king of the forest. You took my voice with you like a piece of mint floss wrapped around a wiggly tooth and a brassy doorknob. I was always the fool. My breath never bothered you before, but up here in the air you were putting on airs. Now I sit on your bed while you’re gone and wait for you to come home, red hot and sweating and wanting comfort from the unrelenting ground. We don’t know how to swim anymore. I try on your gold lip-gloss, taste your mouth there, and stamp kisses on the back of my hand. I wrap myself in towels and sit on the roof and let the wind dry my hair until it is a salt-crusted curtain. I stare up at the sky and watch the speedcrafts weave down the nebula highway, dodging stars all by myself. I separate my tail into two long, oak-tan legs and pretend I know what roots are. I pretend that walking is the coolest, chicest thing a mermaid girl can do. And I don’t think of the savage sea, where girls like us hunt squids and crash ships and pierce our noses with stolen fishhooks and hide gold in deep, black, hot places and don’t wear lipgloss. Nah, I don’t think of those things at all. [End Page 106] Val Rigodon VAL RIGODON is a creative writer and attorney. She was a 2019 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow and a storyteller for The Moth. You can find more of her work on the Internet and, someday, in a bookstore. She one day hopes to live in a house by the sea. I have loved fairy tales ever since I was a young child. I especially sought out revisions and retellings. My favorite stories to write and read include whimsy, magic, and love. I’ve never been able to resist adding a touch of magic to everything I write. Copyright © 2023 Wayne State University Press