The Latinx in Publishing Writers Mentorship Showcase series features excerpts by our Class of 2020 mentees from the projects they’ve developed with the guidance of their mentors.
The LxP Writers Mentorship Program is an annual volunteer-based initiative that offers the opportunity for unpublished and/or unagented writers who identify as Latinx (mentees) to strengthen their craft, gain first-hand industry knowledge, and expand their professional connections through work with experienced published authors (mentors).
Below is an excerpt from one of our 2020 mentees in adult fiction, Camille Corbett:
Marina
It was like a demon possessed my senses. Every smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound I encountered drew me to her. Even the gleaming ring on my finger seemed like bright green traffic light telling to go, go, go and soak in her presence.
I imagined her everywhere. I would make love to my husband as the rain crashed against our bedroom window and I would imagine each drop having previously cycled through Marina at some point in her lifetime. Through baths, face washing, swimming pools, even toilets. I desperately wanted her essence to pollute everything that I knew.
She was everywhere. Once, while I was making a late dinner she appeared in the form of a ponytail. As I was searching for the perfect pot, I found a mass of long black hair tied at the ends underneath my sink. It was hers. I still don’t know how she got in or knew that I would be looking there that day. But I didn’t care. I was happy that she thought of me enough to place herself in my life. The next day, she twirled around her apartment showing off her new pixie cut and told me to keep her ponytail for good luck.
I heard somewhere that during the Victorian age people put their loved one’s hair in lockets, or made rings out of their strands. At the time, I would have made a thousand woven bracelets of her ebony locks. However, I didn’t find out about hair being used as jewelry until she was gone and broken. Otherwise, my jewelry box would consist of nothing but a reminder that my heart was once ruled by a consuming obsession for someone who thought shame was a condition that one grew accustomed to.
One hot summer day, we decided to run away together. I was 19 and newly married and she was 26 and newly sober. We packed everything we thought we needed into our backpacks and stole our husbands’ credit cards and hitchhiked all the way from Savannah, Georgia, to Scottsdale, Arizona. I never thought we would ever make it that far. She did. I was young and conceited and I thought that a day wouldn’t pass without my entire family looking for me. Somehow she knew that wasn’t the case. No one came looking for her either. Eventually, we were bored of traveling so we turned around and went back home after living in a motel in Arizona for six weeks.
Being with Marina was like that. She would hype you up for an amazing adventure only to reveal to you some big ugly truth that you could have went all your days without knowing. After our cross-country adventure, my husband banned me from talking to her. He threatened to divorce me. And for a while, I agreed with him. But one day, while he was at work, her signature knock danced on my front door. A surge of joy and excitement went through me at once and I knew that I was trapped in her trance yet again.
She was there to make love to me. She said it had been too long. I agreed with her. But this time, I wanted everything to be on my terms.
“I don’t want you making a fool of me anymore,” I said to her, as her warm slim arms wrapped around my body.
“You know I never meant that to happen. I only wanted us to be happy together.
You know I love you too much to hurt you on purpose,” she whispered in my ear.
Her wet, plump mouth pressed against my pink, thin lips and our tongues slid and tangled and I could taste her insincerity. But I was lost in her smell. Oranges and cocoa butter wafted into my nose reminding me how close our bodies were and how long it had been. Two months. Two months of my husband’s scratchy beard and big rough hands.
Two months without her smooth, soft chest, crushing against my breasts.
I drew one last deep breath before I started drowning in the depths of her chaos, then plunged my hands down her pants. She twisted and turned and I kissed her and sucked every bit of passion I could draw from her.
When we finished, we lay hip to hip on my ugly brown carpet. Her tanned hand teased mine as we looked at the water-stained ceiling before us, contemplating our misfortune.
“We could still run away again. It’s not too late, “ she offered. But both of us were aware that the appeal of that route had perished.
“Yeah, or we could just keep seeing each other in private. I don’t want to jump into a big decision like that again,” I replied. In retrospect, I realize that I was a coward.
In that moment, I thought I was being terribly wise.
On my twentieth birthday, my husband, Sam told me he wanted a divorce. I was expecting a car. I thought it was odd how people can never really tell what you want.
Apparently, he had found someone else. Apparently, they went to that church he never failed to attend. I cried. I started throwing things I knew he worked hard for. Then I moved on to larger appliances. I lodged a golf club on the television. And stuck the toaster in the dishwasher and turned it on.
“Where am I supposed to go?” I screamed, as I slammed a hammer against our new microwave.
“I don’t care where you go. I’ve been patient. I put up with your erratic behavior. I just want to live a quiet life,” he whined.
But I won the argument in the end. He gave me another chance and I lived two years on tiptoes, occasionally gaining pleasure from a flat-footed romp with Marina while Sam was at work. I lived a double life. A part of me was dedicated to domestic perfection. I cooked, cleaned, I comforted, and I produced a child. However, the rest of me was shackled to the stolen moments I had with Marina. A few minutes of caresses left me with enough happiness for a week. Any longer, and I began to fall into a deep depression and annoyed Sam with my apathy.
Late at night, when my husband would snore and shake beside me, I imagined a life that Marina and I could share with no husbands or children. We could romp around the world and smell each other’s morning breath every single day. She was my little universe and I was her pet.
Finally, we grew sick of our secretive relationship. I longed for more than just our cheap daytime meetings tangled on my carpet. She longed for a life of her own. As she neared thirty, Marina became frightened that she had wasted her life in a cage. So we decided to run away and never return. For months we stole small amounts of cash from our husbands. Our evening meetings evolved from sweaty love making sessions to conversations over mugs of coffee on what we would do when we escaped.
We decided to move to California. We decided not to take our babies with us. We decided to never divorce our husbands. We decided to grow old together. I decided that she was the absolute love my life.
The morning before we were supposed to escape, Marina walked through my door with a big dark bruise splattered against her face.
“It’s nothing,” she exclaimed when I threatened to call the cops on her husband. But it was everything in my small world. I found that out after Marina finally confessed to me why her husband attacked her.
Marina’s husband was a drunk. And like most drunks, he had a very vile temper. So when he discovered a stash of cash tucked away in his wife’s books, he assumed she stole from him (which technically she did) and he slapped her around their tiny apartment until she told him what the money was for. We were found out. I knew by the end of the day our fantasy of a life together would be demolished and our lives would collapse. All of our glorious planning ruined by a drunken mechanic with a GED.
After Marina left I crawled into a ball on my couch and imagined all the horrible possibilities that could occur if Marina’s husband told Sam of our escape plan. I rolled myself into the closest I could be to invisible and sobbed. Marina: ruiner of my life, key to my joy. Sam was going to hate my guts. I thought of the past two years and the few flickers of his hatred that arose from me abandoning him with Marina previously. I knew this time he would never take me back. As the day progressed through my window, I kept expecting Sam to barge through the front door and throw me out of our home. But it never happened. He came home and everything was calm. He saw me rolled up on the couch with no dinner ready and our child still in its diaper from this morning and thought I was simply being difficult.
The next morning I discovered why my life remained in its standard mediocre state. I turned on my television to see Marina’s face plastered on the news. My Marina, my lover, my obsession, was a murderer. When Marina left my home, she snapped. She went back to her cramped apartment and waited for her husband, with a shiny new knife in her hand. According to one of her neighbors, her husband barely got through the door before she charged at him and stabbed and stabbed and slashed him into death. When the police got to the scene, a blood-soaked Marina was in the woods near her apartment building letting a stray dog lick her gory hands.
She went to jail and I remained in mine. Marina never revealed our plans during the trial. I would glean the news religiously for some lesbian motive to appear on the screen. But one never did. I am still not certain if I should feel relieved or hurt. She pleads insanity. Everyone agreed she wasn’t sane. Everyone sympathized that her husband was a drunk and that they were poor and knew that she was wild.
My escape stash became useless. At first, I continued contributing to my escape, despite Marina. But then I realized I didn’t have any reason to leave other than to be with her. Her arrest revealed that my love for her was the only interesting thing about me.
Without her, I was just another dissatisfied housewife with no good reason to leave their husband.
I never visit her. I don’t think she would want to see me. I really think she would still want me to view her as the perfect creature I fell in love with. In a way, she still is. I don’t have the guts to do what she did. She knew it too. She knew I was inferior. I only wish I was there to hold after she killed him. Or even run away with her right then and not care if we got caught because we were together. I think what I’m most angry about is the fact that she never gave me the option to help her. She just assumed that she needed to take on the world by herself. All that planning we did for nothing.
After Sam found out what Marina did, he looked at me different. Like, I might do the same to him. I want to. I would. But what good would that do? Sometimes when I’m lonely, I smell a sweater she lent me. I press my nose against it and it’s like she’s there, holding me and laughing. But after a while, I always get angry. I should probably wash that sweater. Maybe then she’ll stop haunting me. Marina, terror of my dreams.
Used with permission from the author, copyright (c) Camille Corbett 2020.
Camille Corbett
Camille Corbett is an Atlanta native and a queer-identifying, first-generation Jamaican. She is a graduate of University of Alabama and a Fulbright Scholar. She was raised by her Jamaican immigrant mother and her Southern father who is a former NFL player turned motivational speaker. She has traveled to over 18 countries and speaks 3 languages (English, Spanish, Turkish). As part of her Fulbright Grant, she spent a year teaching English at Abant Izzet University in a small town in Turkey. She is currently staffed on the upcoming Jamie Foxx series, DAD, STOP EMBARASSING ME, for Netflix, and has recently written episodes for the Quibi series BREF. Previously, she was the TA for the NBC fellowship Writers on the Verge and Writers' Assistant on ON MY BLOCK. Prior to that, she was a Researcher for THE HOTEL THERESA film; BORN TO FAIL, a TV show in development at Gunpowder & Sky; and THE TERROR for AMC. She’s currently a student at Groundlings and UCB. You can find her tweeting about her exes @TheWittyGirl.
