Print short story: Parchment by D. Travers Scott

Esther was watching her and waiting. Trish noticed this while swimming laps. Oh, ostensibly Esther was on the Lifecycle, but that was only because the stationary bikes looked in on the pool through a glass wall.

Mom had watched her and waited, Trish remembered. The harsh chlorine trickle in her sinuses drew out the memory of Trish's first swimming lesson: Trish had rolled over, coughing, and choking. Red-eyed, she had glimpsed scowling Dad and patient Mom through a splash.

Trish rolled over smoothly into a backstroke. She swam with slow arcs, stretching her arms. She thought of throwing her arms behind her head, Esther taking them at the wrists and slipping on the binds.

Trish wished she could float, that she hadn't ever needed to learn how to swim. She imagined floating with her wrists tied above her head, Esther controlling the rope, pulling her through the water.

One white disc lit the steam room, mounted obliquely in a corner of the ceiling, glowing through mist like the moon. Steam gathered, condensed across the room's overhead arch, beading along the apex of tiles. The wetness collected and swelled, hung heavy in pendulous globes, full of the potential energy of that excruciating, suspenseful second before succumbing to weight and falling.

The steam rose; the drops fell.

The drops snailed down the walls, the tiled ceiling, and the expanses of women's skin. Fields of skin, rolls, reams, scrolls, sheaves. Parchment is the processed skin of sheep, Trish mused. If you could make human skin into leather, you could probably make it into parchment, too. It would make a poor paper, already too heavily inscribed with cuneiform veins, calligraphic hairs, and hieroglyphic wrinkles.

The water added another layer of text. Trish watched beads drip down the field of water-sheen, each drop clearing a swath, forming the first stroke of a character. Another rolled down beside it. Another intersected their paths at a lower angle. The two converged into one and crossed those. The culmination of persistent perspiration and condensation erased the arising language. A language written on the planes of back and legs and across the curving slopes of breasts (punctuated by nipples). Sentences curled down the napes of necks, phrases slipped down insides of thighs, words clung to lips.

Trish felt suffocated in the smothering warmth. There was something in the steam, something in the steam. Some tingly, medicinal vapor adulterated the steam. Menthol-like, the air weighed heavy in her lungs, too corporeal to be real. Trish thought of Zyklon B. Her body panicked feeling the air's mass and texture, assuming something else was displacing the normal air. Smoke or gas or something else that shouldn't be inside her was making her want to choke, cough, gag. Trish fought the panic; she didn't want to bolt from the steam room. She needed to perspire more poisons.

She concentrated on breathing, took her anti-anxiety mental steps, lowered her head, and closed her eyes. She thought of being gagged. A new burst of steam rose; the water dripped and ran. Burning pinpricks danced across Trish's back, and she thought of a riding crop's after-tingle, air on skin scraped raw.

Trish focused, gained control. She stared at the other women's bodies. Old, young. In the steam room, the women come and go. The languid luxury of the steam, the ancient pastime. Trish flashed on that old Malcolm McLaren video for Madame Butterfly--all those drippy models taking a steam. Everyone felt sophisticated like a model in a steam room, like Pompeiian nobility. Then and now, Trish and the strange women here, Trish and her mother back in the Highland Park Health Spa for Ladies, Trish's mother and her grandmother back in Poland.

Trish wanted Esther to see her in the steam room, an MTV Euromodel. Esther never came in the steam room. Said she felt invaded by the moisture.

Trish stared down at the tiles: one-inch squares of white and gray and black. They resembled a Photostat or TV image up close: thousands of little bits of black/gray/white, meaningless until you pulled far enough away to acquire perspective, and an image formed. Or not. Sometimes dots are just bouncing flecks of static on a blank TV channel.

During her girlhood sailing lessons, the surface of Lake Dallas had reminded Trish of TV static. The August sun had glared so mercilessly that the water had looked positively black, with hundreds of white reflection-specks dancing across wave-crests. The water's surface like TV like the steam room floor. Was there an image to be seen, thirty feet above the tiles? Miles above her sailing lesson? Hundreds of miles above the earth's oceans?

Swimming lessons hadn't been enough, of course. Later years had brought sailing and snorkeling. Sailing had been steady and balanced until the wind came. Then whoever she was crewing with would heel the catamaran as sharply as possible, leaning back over the pontoon's edge as it lifted high out above the water. The other kids at the boat club savored the tension of such moments. Trish tended to freeze.

Snorkeling had been frankly embarrassing. Trish had felt desperately self-conscious of intruding in the fishes' world. They had glared at her like urban bar-fags did now; Trish had known she was in someone else's territory and not appreciated. Some strange recessive gene of European peasant female servility, mutated through Southwest feminine genuflection, had survived in Trish, and it flared up when she snorkeled. Clawing through the water, she had cringed in a wordless apology for her presence.

Sailing and snorkeling had both possessed similar moments Trish did enjoy. In snorkeling, it had been the backwards somersault off the side of the boat. In sailing, it had been forcing the tiny boat to capsize so you could learn to recover it. Both moments had filled Trish with blinding vulnerability--her world upside-downing in a disorienting panic-flash as she broke through wetness into a new world.

Her body free-falling from Father throwing her into the pool.

Esther had Trish down onto their futon in the living room. Diane Sawyer murmured on thoughtfully to a lost audience.

"You looked so sweet swimming there at the gym," Esther breathed into her ear. Trish licked the salty underside of her neck. "I wanted to just throw you down on the tiles beside the pool, right there and take you, in front of everyone."

Trish stared at the ceiling, listening to Esther's low talk.

"You'd like that wouldn't you? You'd love being spread out in front of all those little yuppie women."

Esther bit a nipple. Trish stiffened. Esther slid her fingers out. Trish gasped, shaking. She sat up, curling into Esther's chest.

"Can I try it again now?" Esther whispered.

Trish nodded, eyes still closed. Trish felt underwater in Esther's arms. Esther held her, supported her. Trish draped herself across Esther's arms like an infant, like in her mother's arms. Trish had never curled up in her father's arms. If Trish curled up in his arms, he would toss her out. When Trish floated on her back in the pool, she imagined the water as a gigantic lover similarly cradling her. But if she curled up in the pool, she would sink.

Daddy had thrown Trish into the pool: "She'll figure out how to swim!"

Trish had cried in the chlorine, and she had hated him so. She hadn't needed to learn this way; she could've taken slow and steady lessons. There was no reason for this macho bullshit technique, even a six-year-old could see this, and a six-year-old did. He only did it because he enjoyed it, watching his daughter struggle in pain and terror.

Trish cried in the comforter, and she hated her. Esther always has to push it further, not content with just vanilla sex. Trish knew she didn't need this--what matters is the quality not the cornucopia of perversions. Esther's just got to prove she's butch, Trish thought, and once again you've consented. You know you're never going to like this, but Esther needs so desperately to do it. Trish didn't want to disappoint.

She had been there beside him, quiet, watching for signs Trish was really in trouble. As Trish had floundered into some pathetic dog paddle and struggled her way to the edge of the pool, Trish had watched her mother, not her father. Not he who did this but she who let him.

Her fingers curled white around the edge of the futon. Flat on her back, she gripped the edge for support to balance her one leg thrown up against Esther's chest.

Her fingers had curled desperately around the cement edge of the pool. They scraped raw if she didn't let go of the edge. The cement bottom had scraped Trish's feet if she stayed too much in the shallow end and didn't go out over her head. Daddy had pried them off, lifted her by her bony arms out of the water and thrown her back into the pool.

Trish hated Esther passionately, hated her hand up her ass, hated her persistence and persuasiveness. This is it, she thought, the final straw.

It had been a mind-fuck, mental penetration. He had known her limits and abilities better than she had. He had been inside her mind and body; he had known what went on there. But even if he'd been right, Trish realized as her grip on the futon loosened, it hadn't given him the right.