Cleveland by Masha Stenina (primary phonics books txt) 📕

of her turns her head slowly and gently up and her eyes are yellow like a puma's. The face is older but still glossy and buttery with ancient wide cheekbones and kind soft lips. This woman smiles a sleepy smile and reaches back with the ragged sleeve of her poncho to encompass her knees and pulls her down on the cement slab. She surprises herself with how easily she sinks into the woman's hair, which wafts of licorice and wind. Puma’s fingers begin to carve drawings on the palm of her hand and the woman's yellow eyes return to the sun now hovering over the line between blue and mauve. She looks back to see his reaction, but he is not behind her or on the pier and she pets the camera in her pocket with a pinky and sinks back into the hair.

The rest of the day melts into sweetness. She is led around the beach by her elbows, pulled on both sides by mocha children with soft brown ringlets. They heave her up onto white anemic pieces of driftwood so she may ride them like wild animals and they shriek in delight at the ones that resemble alligators, hippos, or dragons sticking their tops out above Erie. She laughs too, in a way that scares her and causes her to gulp for air. The children's parents watch from the water, bobbing on tires sewn together with ropes and old picnic tables which rock unevenly in the grey water threatening to disappear. The mulatto children grab at her camera and she sees that the tops of their hands are like coffee, while the palms are the color of burn scars and tea rose petals.

As the sun descends and dances its minstrel dance on the line between sky and water helplessly, it floods the air around them with gold, which melts into an angry bruise on the edges. The lovers begin to shiver and run gathering wood for the fire. They still laugh. The trees overhanging the tents swat seagulls towards the darkness. She reluctantly tucks her camera into her sweatshirt and begins to gather wood as well, dragging black-green branches towards the pit in the middle. Finally, a violent spark as a flame is thrown in and the pit explodes in a drumbeat of pops, as the fire swells from the bottom.
The puma woman squats beside her as they all crouch and sprawl, except for the men and women cutting potatoes without peeling their pink skins. They throw them in large tin pots and stir up spices that smell of cardamon, crushed pepper, and some kind of heavy green olive oil.
The vagrants eat violently pushing sandy palms into their maws, crumbling steaming potatoes with callused fingertips. Blowing quick breaths into their cupped hands. She watches as they wash sand, potato, and black pepper flecks away with water from mason jars. Whispers with food breaking up at the corners of their lips as the murk of the evening turns to an earl grey and the last bit of flesh-colored sky fades to black. Creeping from all sides, drumbeats begin hopping towards the flames. Men sitting on washed-up trees begin rhythmically slapping old white pickle buckets and soggy cardboard boxes with torn off flaps. Beats built up into a cacophony, smoothing out into some kind of layered lullaby, which then inflates into a bellowing crescendo. She throws her head pointing her chin at the void of low-sitting sky and laughs hearing herself between her temples, where laughter explodes into something so hysteric that she is startled by it.

A bony frame begins to shake past the drummers. The silhouette hovers in the sizzling air and the edges of his shoulders blur in with the dark. She looks at the hips and finds them beneath the licking flames and they are narrow triangles suspended above the belt line. Even in the darkness his front glows white and comes alive in a way that it takes her many minutes to recognize her misplaced companion. Her eyes widen as she takes him in; shirtless, stretched into unrecognizable lines and slants. Fine grey branches and maple leaves stick up out of his curls like limp deformed hands.
His glowing chest begins to sway and turn shined with a shroud of cold sweat. Like a tribal chief he taps his feet and raises his face to the flares of fire. They all start to clap and slap their ankles and feet, to wave what is left of their shirts in dizzy whirls in the space above their heads. They grab at his ankles, rocking his whole body like a white paper birch and their voices build to a roar. Hands powdered in sand adorn his feet with pieces of gleaming green bottle glass and dry grass. She feels the Puma's crooked nails speed up at her shoulders, drawing new patterns of lines in step with the roaring and the beat of hollow plastic.
A dark young woman rises slowly and gracefully from behind his silhouette and the crowd hums and growls in a sexed frenzy. The indigo woman begins to move her hips side to side sweetly. Thrusts her lower body against him as she rounds his shoulders and the crowd ahhhs. He opens his mouth and swallows bits of fire around him. Figures begin to slither in the way, erasing parts of the mating dance. They are crazed, pushed to their heights by sex and hot food and the dry heat of the fire baking their skins. She arches up to see him again and feels the weakness between her legs as she does, but he is a blur of a halo hovering above the heads of the lovers and she no longer sees his face.

The flames hidden amongst the sweat-heavy bodies begin to withdraw their heat and she looks around slowly to see the bodies giving in to gravity of the sand. Still intertwined, fighting their lust lazily while indulging in long, raw strokes of each other's flesh. She looks over her shoulder, but not even the Puma is there, and she wonders if she, with her yellow eyes had been given a white body to rub against.
She crawls until she is no longer part of the mass of lusty bodies and she is cold then. The openness of the beach is a void on all her sides. She sucks her breath and stands up looking back at the lovers. Some are not moving having fallen asleep with the drunkenness of pit fire embers, sex, and dance. She squeezes her camera against her hip and walks briskly towards the brush not looking back. Stops and listens to the cicadas making their electrical vibrations in the brush. Among their strings of song she hears a sharp crunch and stands startled watching the condensation from her mouth reach out into the blackness. The crunch repeats, heavier and longer this time, grinding against the branches to her right.
Without rotating her head she moves her eyes to the side and sees a flicker of white between the leaves. It comes and goes like the tail of a deer, only it is low to the ground. She balances on one arm, pressing the camera into her knee and leans forward until her face is up against a trunk of a young tree. The bark is smooth scales that smell of fish and the foam from the lake. Through the branches are two bodies, both ashen white. She recognizes only the strawberry head, neck, and shoulders. The other white body is sunk beneath him and pressed like a cotton shirt into the ground. She sees smooth hair spread into the sand around the woman's head like strange flippers.
They move as one, pumping and pushing off with their toes, mocking her fear in each beat of stomach against stomach. She thinks of being underwater, of floating behind the seaweed, of watching her predator unable to swim with it. Her camera gasps between shots, shocked at the urgency. She finds herself swallowing anger and lust in big empty gulps as bile sinks to the pit of her stomach and calcifies. Just then, the flattened body beneath him comes up for air, thin careful lips drawing in air over his pale shoulder, chin nestled in its clavicle. The woman turns her head and the smooth hair trembles and slithers on the ground. It is only for a second that she meets her eyes, then a mocking smile creeps across the white woman's mouth as the strawberry head catches its breath above her cruel face.
She begins to run weaving through brush. Feels the thorns ripping through her arms, opening her skin. Panicked. Not by being found, not for the shame that wells in an undefined part of her intestines, but by her own delusion. She checks that the camera is there and feels the weighted straps pumping against her cuts. She weaves onto the beach again and scuttles under a washed up rusty picnic table. Tries to feel herself breathe, but hears the wind howling through her ribs instead and the fevered tears come. They roll so violently that she is hesitant to move. Wraps her arms under her knees, tucks the hood of her sweatshirt under her cold wet cheek and is quickly asleep in her rusty wet hideaway.

The morning is gentle. The sun is a broth that fills the cold sky with mild color and feeds her eyelids until they glide open. She rubs the side of her face where the drawing of the ground is imprinted and her hand instinctively bends at the wrist to feel for her camera.

It isn't there. She sticks her hands in her front pocket. Only feels a sea of moist folds and her fingers move them around shakily. Fuck. The thought releases adrenaline. She jumps out from under the table and shakes her whole body, runs her fingers through her matted down hair.
Nothing.

She begins to comb the beach path with her eyes and forces her soaked feet to trace a path back to the underbrush. The expanse of the shore is transformed by the morning and the harsh light changes everything into ghosts of the previous night's pleasure. She looks off in the distance and sees the haze over the Key Building and the ancient tooth of the unrestored Tower City. One half-moon of the sand over is the charred void of the fire pit with colorful bodies deflated around it, some under dirty tarps, others with their faces half-buried by the ground.
She presses on into the overhang of balding buckeyes and begins to move branches aside. Stiff and stubborn, they fight her, springing back and opening new cuts on her palms. A pain sears through her thumb and she grabs at it. Fuck. Withdraws her hand to see a crooked black thorn lodged in the yellow pad of it. Yanks it straight up to see just a pearl of burgundy rise up and fill the labyrinth of her fingerprint. She wipes it on the shoulder of her sweatshirt and when she looks at it again, the blood is back. This time it is on her forearm above the pulled-up cuff of her sweatshirt and she instinctively brushes it with the opposite hand, but there is no mark beneath it.

Something hits her shoulder with a small empty thud and she turns wanting to see a chestnut or a beetle. Her eyes still swollen from the cold night and they strain to focus on the wet fabric. She watches as a drop of blood soaks into the thick cotton and disappears into the woven squares. Without thinking she follows the invisible path of the droplet up past the ridged grey trunk of the buckeye and into the shedding leaves.

She parts her