Sapphic Voices Young Adult

Parted Lips

Shayna was a little bit clumsy; the realization was comforting. She held fast to that and to the image of herself as a little girl, shining in the sun, blue and gold with happiness, although the end of civilization, for all the drama of the high school, might be impinging, and she walked as slowly as she needed to go her next class.

Lost in her thoughts, the tile floors of the school seemed to vanish. Shayna noticed hardly anything—the routine strut of blue hair and incongruous piercings soon meshed together into one long continuum—until she passed the Chemistry teacher. Abruptly, the heat reflecting off the bangs hanging in her face seemed embarrassingly feral and her abdomen contracted at the sudden, sharp knowledge that this was a woman.

She could not forget the flash that that notice had inspired, but nevertheless Shayna’s pleasure was overshadowed by a film of doubt, like clouds covering the sun. She wondered why the contraction was as painful as it had been until, hunched over her lunch that afternoon, she realized that she would never be able to tell a woman how she felt.

The physical reaction alone was a shock: she sat up; her lips parted as though to voice some unborn protest, or as if in response to an invisible lover. Already, the future’s accumulated pains—the loneliness of watching and the emptiness of never being known—were settling in the muscles that banded her stomach. There would be no one. She understood for a moment that that was all there would ever be, that emptiness, and that it could be horribly disfiguring; time would leave a void in the place of the little girl who shone with light which would be there forever, lurking, at the very least, in the background. Having parted lips was different if there was no one to kiss them.

If you have enjoyed A. B. Reel's "Parted Lips", then please be certain to e-mail her at  rainbowsinthedark[at]juno.com  and thank her for posting this Story.

Click here for a list of all of A. B. Reel's  Stories and Poetry at  Sapphic Voices Authoresses.