by Cole Beauchamp
We know naked. We’ve done naked for a living. But tonight we are washing you. Tonight we are saying goodbye.
We can’t be there tomorrow, on those hard wooden pews, in the church your family chose.
But we can be here tonight, with the women you called sisters.
We share a bowl of water between us. Dip. Squeeze. Wash. Return.
The crusted blood beneath your nose, your mottled neck, the tiny purple dots of petechiae on your eyelids. Did you suffer long?
Your body, broken and empty now you’re not in it.
Naked for the camera’s gaze followed waxing, contouring, fluffing, oiling. Naked for the camera’s gaze was spreading, thrusting, licking and smiling until the director said, Cut!
Then it was our time, steaming mugs of strong tea and ginger biscuits, exchanging tips for chafed nipples, giggling at the new cameraman’s hard on. Then it was pooling our money for this week’s emergency, there was always an emergency. Then it was cheering each other up, because sometimes humor was all we had.
Dip. Squeeze. Wash. Return.
Your wrist, the protruding nub of bone that never healed properly after he broke it. Where were your family then? Where were they when you needed rent, when he broke your heart, when he broke your ribs, when he took you back and kicked you out over and over, when we begged you to leave him?
Your breasts. No conical pink mouse titties. Or nipples covering half the damn territory. Nipples dead center. Mounds of goodness.
This is what remains after a life: a flesh-covered frame of bone and muscle. Stomach. Thighs. Choice cuts, we used to joke.
We dip, squeeze, wash, return. Calculate what we have shared and what we have kept to ourselves. In kissing scenes, never kiss. In food scenes, never eat. But the penetration was real, make no mistake about that.
Remember that warehouse in New Orleans, we say, where we filmed Sex Crazy Cannibals? The claggy, cream-cheese-breath director for Talk Dirty to Me, that yappy dog of his decked out in a red tie? That condemned building on Manhattan’s East side where the crew had to crowbar plyboard off the windows? Your skin looked luminous onscreen, the sloppy, slushy light of winter somehow adding a glow.
Silence when we reach your feet. Painted toenails. Red. Always red.
We wash your feet, return our cloths to the bowl, where they rest on the surface, suspended.
We hold our breath, suspended.
Cole Beauchamp is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Monarch and Best Microfictions. She’s a 2026 Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow and contributing editor of New Flash Fiction Review. She lives with her girlfriend and has two children.
