She loves our vibe. She loves our cadence, our heart rate, our secret language. She says Damn, you two look good together. One of us is an archer. The other transcribes epics. She loves that. She loves glamour, metallic eye shadow, a plate of salt-fresh oysters. She loves film photography, EDM & bedroom pop. She walks backwards across the ashlar floor as if to never take her eyes off us. You’re so vivid, we tell her, and she beams under the midday sun. You’re so living, we tell her, and she blows us a kiss to share. She spins around the columns as if skimming across ice. Sappho is a girl’s girl: she’ll bring you dairy-free ice cream after a break-up and has a sternum tattoo that says cunt. She drapes ivy from her shoulders, shark teeth from her collarbones. She’s hooked up with celebrities & goddesses, and this makes our eyes plead, but she doesn’t kiss and tell. Okay, this one time I ran into Athena at a burlesque show, she begins, and our hearts leap with the good kind of jealousy. Sappho is a bad bitch: she bathes in starlight and only shoplifts from chain stores. She’s a roller derby champ and can take a corset off with her teeth. But there’s more to me, she says. She has a soft side. She cultivates orchids in her spare time. She loves the romance. Swimming in the phosphorescence with a bottle of white wine, making love at the drive-in theatre—that’s her idea of midnight. Sappho is butch & femme all at once. She’s a genderqueer icon, a pixie and a knight, has a strap-on collection you wouldn’t believe. We’ll be honest, this makes us curious. We thought ours was pretty impressive. She wears gladiator heels and summer dresses. She wears pinstripe suits with flower crowns. She wears doc martens with plate armour. Her hips and shoulders are the perfect broadness to bite into. We’re getting closer to her now; we can smell the clementines on her breath. One inhale is sweet enough to drunken us. The sun makes us woozy; all three of us shimmer like opals. We’ve practically given her the keys already. Sappho has perfect pitch. She sings each night at the agora, recites poetry and plays the kithara more beautifully than a bird. It’s her god-sworn duty, she says, to teach the men how to eat pussy. To redirect them to more positive activities. The village girls all thank her for it. Sappho can make a girl come just by looking her in the eye. She knows what she’s talking about. Still, she doesn’t believe in manners. Eats everything with her hands and only kisses with her mouth open. Sappho is terrible at monogamy. She’s too much of a chick magnet for that, and she’s got the appetite of a beggar. She’s in an on-off poly thing with the harpies. They take turns letting her soar on their wings, low enough to the ocean to graze her fingertips across the water. God, that’ll make you fall in love. Still, and don’t tell them this, Medusa is her favourite ex. They’re still each other’s emergency contacts. They get brunch every other weekend. The love of her life, though, is her pet chimaera, Gretchen. They watch soaps together, braid each other’s hair, exchange the hottest gossip. Can we have some, we ask, which means, we want to be your hottest gossip. We want to be the words in your mouth, the ones that taste like cardamom and summer solstice. Sappho is a love language. She gives us gifts. A phoenix-feather arrow for me; a jar of moonlight ink for my lover. She’s tired of dating apps but she’s so goddamn full of wanting. Our bones have already turned into honey. So, she asks, are you two coming home with me?
Shaelin Bishop lives and writes on unceded Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ land. Their work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Ex-Puritan, The Common, Room, CAROUSEL, Plenitude, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Augur, and elsewhere, and was longlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize. They are currently pursuing their MFA in writing.
