It's a tradition to eat twelve grapes for the New Year. For luck, Nick says. Sabi humors him and chews on her first grape.
The cat sits on the sofa, lured by Sabi's feminine aura. She pushes her feet under the cat's furry belly, but the cat turns on their back, denying Sabi their plush warmth. The cat looks at Sabi, eyes half closed, paws bent like limp wrists.
The second grape is the runt of the bunch. It snaps inside Sabi's mouth – the young flesh too tight with little juice to surrender.
Last night, Sabi jumped into the cold ocean at Coney Island. A guy wearing an electric blue Kangol hat and matching puffy jacket spotted her running back out. He offered her his scarf. His name was Nomi. His scarf was long enough to wrap around her wet, fully clothed body. They sat by the shore. For no reason, Sabi told him her father once left her inside a locked car at Hunt's Point while he looked for car parts at the junkyard. She was eight, and it was the first time she saw streetwalkers. Three ladies in hot pants and thigh-high boots. Fluffy wigs and waxy red lips.
Nomi asked her if he could hold her.
Yes, she said, please.
When Nick asks when she got home last night, Sabi doesn't say a guy named Nomi kept her warm in Coney Island.
Swollen green pops inside her mouth. These grapes taste fertile and earthy. She can feel threads of invisible seeds against her tongue. The cruelty of humanity is why there are rules and boundaries. Why it is that we must fall in line. Precise definitions of good and evil, or so we fool ourselves into believing. This system is a fantasy. There are no rules – elaborate dividing lines have crossed and tangled.
Sabi sneezes and jumps up and down. She attempts to shake off the cold she feels in her bones.
Nutrients, iron, and unused life force spread around her in the ocean water last night.
Nick tells her to hurry. "You must eat all your grapes before midnight strikes," he says. He furiously pops and chews the green. Grape juice wets his chin. She tells him it's a tradition to make people buy what they don't need.
But Nick knows how to tug at her Marxist heart. "A good thing for all to enjoy," he says. He bends his tall frame and sucks on her protruding tongue.
She no longer believes in souls. Dust returns to the cosmos. We disappear into dark matter.
Every new second, minute, or hour, Sabi wants to multiply indefinitely. Our purpose is to repopulate the earth, but her biological yearnings go unheeded. Back in college, she had a friend who died from leukemia. They made a pact to get pregnant simultaneously and bring up their babies together. Her friend was nineteen when her childhood cancer returned. Her body died shortly after she relapsed. The dust collects on her books, record player, and the door jam.
One of Sabi's grapes is soft. It tastes like a wilted rose. She wonders when it lost its connection to the stem.
She misses her mother's blessings. Her parents live far away now, but every New Year when she was a kid, her mother did the sign of the cross over her and kissed her forehead. Every year, her mother wished they would live to see the next new year. Her father wished for prosperity. Her sister hoped for a better time at school. Sabi wished for an adventure, another world, another experience. She wanted intimate knowledge of the good and the bad. She was the greedy one.
She shoves the remaining five grapes into her mouth, but Nick stops and kisses her head.
She punched a girl in the nose when she was ten; at fifteen, she shoved a boyfriend out of a moving car. She elbowed a skinhead in the eye when she was seventeen. In her mid-twenties, in the middle of a crowded parking lot, she pulled out a tire iron from the trunk of her father's Oldsmobile and threatened a middle-aged guy who'd cut her off. The other day, a guy in a jeep flashed his brights behind her. She stopped at a red light. He rolled down his window as he pulled up beside her and yelled, "What the fuck are you doing?" He was massive, but when he saw Sabi's face, he looked away first and drove off.
She invites violence and glorifies the exhilaration. There's the power of pure carnality. Pornographic. Visceral. Adrenaline pumping fear and furious bravery. Rational mind suspended, stupefied, stunted, silenced. Bone crunches under her fist.
She stands up and rubs her face against Nick's juice-stained chest. He throws a heavy arm over her shoulder and kisses her neck. His weight soothes and suffocates.
She finds escape once again on the sofa. Folds her feet under the weight of her round thighs, lounging back on the pillows in a voluptuary pose. The cat's belly hangs low and swings side to side as they stop short where Sabi's waist and hip curve. The cat's rump lands against Sabi's side and the rest of the cat's body yields into a tight coil of fur. Maternally, Sabi pulls on the cat's scruff.
No one warned her that their blindness has no cure. We can spend our lives searching, but there is no new year. It's the same year. Nick collapses next to her. The cat jumps off the sofa.
As the last seconds of the old year tick by, Nick savors the last grape – the sweetest one in the bunch – from Sabi's sticky lips.