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Olives

Lori Sambol Brody

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In our hotel room overlooking Marrakech’s Djemaa el Fna, you feed me olives you bought in the Medina. Reaching into pink plastic bags bulging with fruit. Green olives cured with lemon, olives seasoned with harissa, wrinkled black olives desert-dry, olives tart with vinegar, olives brined to taste of the sea. Last week, on Ibiza, I licked the sea off your skin in the room the hotel called the honeymoon suite, until you turned away and made the mattress between us an infinite waste. Now: your fingers slick with oil, your fingers stained red with chili peppers. You are mine, you say. My lips burn with harissa and part as your fingers near. I do not say: I am yours. My teeth scrape off meat, sucking pits and spitting them into the glass ashtray, into your palm. It is always a feast with you, until it’s famine. More? you ask, and yes, I always want more. How much do I really know about you, the wedding ring sitting new and uneasy on my ring finger; you returned from the bathroom at that club in Ibiza with red lipstick on your collar and said it was mine. The sheets now stained; we will need to leave the maid a large tip. I tell you that I want to go out into the Medina and you hesitate before saying yes, dress warmly because the wind comes down from the hills. I wear a long skirt, slit up to my thigh. The wind whips my hair into my lip gloss, a duller shade than the one still staining your shirt. On the Djamaa el Fna, a man in white robes bewitches a cobra out of a basket with a song. The snake charmer says to me, I will marry you and adorn you with necklaces of venomous snakes. I flash my ring and tell him I’m already married. You glower. Would you string serpents around my neck as jewelry or a noose? We wander through the maze of the souk, and I feel eyes on me, not only yours. A merchant displays mounds of olives in shallow clay bowls. Green and black and brown and even dun red. Mademoiselle, ma gazelle, you will never taste olives as good as mine. Do you want a sample? I close my eyes, open my mouth.

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Lori Sambol Brody lives in the mountains of Southern California. Her short fiction has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Tin House Flash Fridays, New Orleans Review, Craft, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her stories have been chosen for the Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction anthologies, Longform Pick of the Week, and Wigleaf Top 50. She can be found on social media at @LoriSambolBrody and her website is lorisambolbrody.wordpress.com.

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