The Prenup
Holly and Radius were married in the Atlantic, on a cold Monday morning in August. They had met three days earlier at Spray, the last big party of the summer. He was a go-go dancer, an Adonis upon a pedestal, and she was a petite pixie who made plant medicines, which she dispensed from her tiny turquoise Mermaid-scale backpack. From his perch, Radius noticed her pollinating the dance floor, and when she dropped a dark green potion under the tongue of his best friend (and former lover), he leapt off the platform to ask her,
“What is that?!”
“This is Persephone,” she told him, letting him sample the alcohol extraction of green flowers mixed with raw honey.
“I named her for the Goddess trapped in the underworld, because she spent a season in my freezer!”
She showed him a salve that soothed the body and the mind, and could be used as lube when melted in the palm. And gifted him a delicious dark and salty chocolate heart, infused with mycelium mama wisdom. He walked away buzzing.
They met again many times that weekend. At the underwear party, at Low Tea and Sip n’ Twirl, at the Pines Club for Sunday’s closing Brunch on the Bay. Radius was dressed as a sexy pilot, and Holly had traded a boy one of her heart-shaped chocolates for the cropped hoodie she now wore.
”Love the underboob,” Radius remarked, beaming.
The heat of summer began to wane that day, and when they awoke on Monday at Viagra Falls, that year’s unofficial staff house, it was almost chilly. They found one another in the kitchen, alive before anyone else, and rejoiced. Some loves are just known to us from the moment we meet them, and this was like that.
Radius brewed a pot of coffee while Holly placed a cocoa heart at the bottom of each of their cups. The party, which for both of them meant the work, was over. It was time to melt a little.
They took their steaming mugs out onto the front deck, and settled into lounge chairs beside the skinny three story waterfall, as it slapped joyfully into the pool. She took down her long, dark hair.
Radius mused how the party feeds us all, materially and otherwise. He danced, so was paid and housed. Holly sold her magical concoctions. Others paid to go to the parties, because they were fed by the beauty and the communion of revelry.
“There is no rest for the wicked,” he said, meaning himself and Holly,
‘Until the party is over!”
But at last it had ended, so they could finally put their feet up and breathe, if only for the moment.
Holly was headed back to the city that day, to care for her two black cats.
“But NOT before I dip my pussy in the ocean!”
Radius decided that he would accompany her. On their way out the gate, Sav, a member of the production team, stepped outside with a spliff. Thus, they became a trio and headed to the ocean.
A pale gray sky glowed against the canopied boardwalk. It ended at a wide empty beach, laid bare to the ravages of the opaque and roaring sea.
The boys hung back by the dunes as Holly approached the shore break with reverence. Before she shed her joggers, she wanted to feel the sea foam on her feet. The rushing water was warmer than the air around her.
Without pausing to question the impulse, she stripped herself nude and dove beneath a silky wave. The feeling of bubbles bursting all over her skin delighted her to no end, and as each wave came crashing down around her, she leapt into it like a baby seal.
Held so joyfully in the churn of the tides, Holly nearly forgot about the beach, her companions, even her own body as anything but a vessel for sensation. Then she opened her eyes to find Radius, bobbing along beside her in the briny dark green Atlantic.
“YASSSS” they both screamed, flinging their naked forms out of the water and splashing back down. They were two breaching dolphins, two slithering sea dragons, two drunk mermaids. They swam until their mouths were as salty as the sea around them, and they were parched.
Sav beckoned to them from the shore. He had been keeping watch like a mother duck. Sparse but icy droplets of rain began to fall, so he herded them back home to Viagra Falls- directly into the hot tub room, advising them not to slip on its shiny black tiles. Radius and Holly were stripped of their wet sandy clothes, then stuck in a bath like children. Sav brought them bottles of water. They made silly faces at themselves in the mirrored walls and ceiling, giggling madly until they were warm again.
Sav found the only clean towels in the house, and dry garments for them to wrap up in. He offered Radius his own deep purple poncho, and for Holly he brought a soft woven blanket, black with gold embroidered elephants.
By then, all the others who worked to make the party happen had begun to stir. A three story wooden house with a 1970’s conversation pit, filled with dozens of go-go dancers and production and sound and lighting people. The energy was groggy and chaotic and thick, though satisfied, since the work was finally over. They were sticky and salty and sandy, all. Except for Holly and Radius, who had already bathed in the Ocean, done their ablutions and prayed.
Everyone was starving.
Someone offered 36 impossible burgers on the altar of the ravenous household.
Radius said, “Let’s grill ‘em all, girl!”
They stepped out on the back deck with a bag of charcoal and Holly’s Cumbia playlist.
“It helps me cook!”
Sav joined them, with coffees and a spliff. “You look like the leaders of a cult I’d want to join,” he told the pair, snapping a photo of them at the grill. “Like your followers call you Mom and Dad.”
They cackled, then Holly said, “I do feel like we’re married now, somehow.”
“Well I’m already Married to Luciano,” Radius replied, “but I feel the same.”
Sav, who had witnessed the ocean ceremony, agreed.
And so it was decided that though Radius was wed to his best friend (and former lover) Luciano on land, he was married to Holly in the Kingdom of the Sea.
That evening, when Holly rode the ferry back to Sayville, then the LIRR to Jamaica, before taking the bus and the M train back to her apartment in Ridgewood, she was bone-tired.
Within her though, she carried a newly ignited spark of vitality, the joy of being truly seen by another.
TO BE CONTINUED
CHAPTER I : A WITCH’S HOLIDAY
The Witches of Fire Island is a forthcomoing novella by Sadie St. Claire. Set on the magical barrier island between the Great South Bay and the Atlantic, it is a tale of friendship, of romance, and what happens when two besties are stranded for a week in the Storm of the Century.
You can listen to Holly’s Cumbia Playlist here.
