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short story

Cheryl Diane Kidder

Objects in Limbo

by Cheryl Diane Kidder

 

 

George and Doris were in the backyard having coffee at the picnic table. The weather had just warmed up enough for them to take their breakfast outside before George headed out to work.

“What was that?” George heard it first.

Doris looked up from her English muffin and sniffed the air a bit. “I didn’t hear anything.” She looked at the back fence, expecting another sound, maybe those coyotes trying to get in the yard. Good thing they didn’t have a small dog. “If it’s those coyotes again, I say we get the shotgun.”

“Wasn’t coyotes,” George said.

They sat very still on the two opposing redwood benches, the morning warming up around them. It was too early for Mrs. Betts next door to be out and about yet and the young couple on the other side were late risers as well. The sound had either come from directly behind their house, or where?

“Sounds like somebody threw a TV out the window,” George suggested, pushing the bench aside.

“Oh, you’re not going out there are you? We don’t need to get involved, whatever the hell it is.” Doris tried to keep her seat but she was up on her feet and right behind George.

The two of them tiptoed through their own house, both silently making their way to the living room. Luckily, Doris hadn’t opened the blinds yet so they were both able to walk right up to the window then carefully fold back one vertical blind, Doris on one side of the window and George at the other. They had to experiment a minute before each found a blind that gave them good access to the drama unfolding across the street.

“Good God, what have they done over there?” Doris said.

“Maybe I should call the police?” George suggested but made no move away from the blinds.

“Yes, I think you should. Someone could be hurt over there.”

“It looks like he drove straight through the garage door,” George said, still not believing it.

“Yeah it does. But where is she? Can you see him? Is that a body slumped over the wheel?”

“Ok, I’m calling the police.” George still didn’t move.

All the drapes were open across the street. Doris could see directly into the house, but she saw no movement at all.

“Do you think the children are still in there?” Doris said.

George didn’t answer. He found the cord to the blinds and yanked it hard. Doris let out a little scream. “What are you doing?” she whispered.

“I can’t see properly. If I’m going to call the police, I want to be sure what I’m reporting.”

They stood in their robes and pajamas in the picture window staring across the street. The garage door was certainly in pieces and the little navy blue Saturn Mr. Mulligan drove to work every day was sitting in the middle of the pile of wrecked lumber. She just couldn’t tell if anybody was in the car.

“Can you see in the car?” Doris asked.

“No, can you see anything?”

“Nothing at all. But now we know what that sound was.”

They stood at their window. Doris pulled her robe tighter around her body.

“Well, are you going to call the police, or what?” she asked George.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe it’s none of our business.”

“If it was me, I’d want somebody to call the police for me.”

“Well that’s fine but it would never be you. I’d never drive through the garage door.”

“Yes, but that’s not the point.”

They looked back across the street. Two people had just walked through the front room very fast. Then their front door opened and Mr. Mulligan appeared.

“Quick, close the blinds, George. For heaven’s sake.” And she jumped back behind the drape.

“They’re not looking over here. Let’s just see what happens.”

Doris peeked out from behind the drape. Mrs. Mulligan appeared at the front door, hands on her hips. She was in her nightgown and her hair was fuzzy and ratted out.

“She’s yelling at him,” George said.

“Can you hear anything?”

“No. But I think he’s just going to get in the car and drive off.”

“How can he do that? He just wrecked his house. His wife is standing in the front door yelling at him.”

They watched as Mr. Mulligan got into his blue Saturn and pulled fast out of the driveway. Planks and pieces of board fell off the car as he backed out. Mrs. Mullligan started running down the front walkway.

“She’s going to try to stop him.”

“I can see that, Doris.”

They watched Mrs. Mulligan run down the sidewalk after the disappearing Saturn. She didn’t get much past her own driveway though and stopped. She hung her head, turned around and walked back to her front door, stepped in and closed it behind her. George and Doris waited a moment and then kept watching as, very slowly, the drapes were pulled shut.

“Well, that’s that.” Doris said.

“I’m glad I didn’t call the police.”

“You might have to one day. I still didn’t see the children.”

“Doris,” George had grabbed the rope pulleys of the blinds and let the blinds fall back into place, “you’re just too nosey. It’s none of our business.”

And now George was back pretending to prune her apricot tree. Doris walked out onto the front porch. She could tell George was watching the Mulligan house again, just like before.

“Just come in now, George. Nothing’s happening anyway.”

George pulled the sheers back from the apricot tree and let them hang at his side. He looked down at the cut limbs on his lawn and regretted that he’d now have to pull the garbage can around to the front and break up the wood.

Doris was at his side. She took the sheers out of his hands. He let her. He was late for work anyway.

“I know what you were doing out there, George.” Doris gave him a bad look as he headed for the car. He took the sack lunch she held out to him.

“Yeah, well, you never know what goes on in another person’s house, do you?” He was a little sad. He probably should have called the police before the Mulligans had the garage door repaired. Now he’s most likely missed his chance.

“You better jump, mister. Coming in late every day isn’t going to get the bills paid.” She put her hand on his back as he turned away.

“I should have retired last year. Then I could prune the trees anytime I like. What’s for lunch,” he asked, opening the door to the garage.

“Tuna sandwich and strawberries.” She closed the door behind him. Sometimes she found it hard to believe he was a civil engineer. She imagined he was a good enough civil engineer, but when he’d brought up retiring last year she had to set him straight.

“We are in no position to retire from anything, George,” she told him. He made her promise that they could discuss retiring next year. They were both past retirement age but every time George tried to bring it up, Doris poo-pooed him.

“What would you do with yourself all day? Might as well keep bringing a paycheck home if we’re still able to.”

George scrunched up his face at her and walked away. He could think of a few things he’d like to be doing.

That night they watched an old movie on TV instead of the usual talk shows. Doris loved the old movies. They reminded her of when she was a kid, rather of when her mother was a kid. Her mother was always telling her about movies she’d seen. Doris had grown up watching Shirley Temple movies and then musicals. Her mother would buy the entire score of her favorite musicals and learn how to play them on their old Steinway. She wasn’t a great piano player but she could read music and once you got the melody line you could sing the words. Doris knew the words to more songs than anybody she’d ever met.

Every night when she turned the bedside lamp off she looked down at the framed picture of her mother on the bedside table. The picture was taken when her parents were courting. Her mother is young and slim, her head is thrown back and she’s laughing wildly. Doris thinks if she looks at the picture long enough she can conjure up a memory of her mother like this, but it hadn’t happened yet. She remembers her mother very differently, but loves the picture just the same.

George seemed tired and not thrilled with a movie, and once he laid down and shut his eyes, he was out. Sometimes Doris saw this as a betrayal or an abandonment. She hates not being the first one asleep, but more and more George falls asleep first and Doris must make do with the company of the TV. On this night, she stayed up late after watching an old Ethel Merman musical with Jimmy Durante and then watched The Thin Man. Mostly she loved watching Asta, their little dog. She had always wanted a little dog but George would always nix the idea so she became a connoisseur of film dogs.

Halfway through The Thin Man, George started snoring like crazy. She pushed his shoulder, he turned over and stopped. Her last thought was, “I should turn off the TV.”

Next thing she knew her eyes were open, the TV was still on, some guy trying to sell exercise equipment. She reached over for the remote and saw the other side of the bed was empty. She patted the empty space just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things.

“George?” she called out, then got out of bed, put on her slippers and tiptoed out into the hall. She looked in the bathroom, nothing. She walked into the kitchen, no lights on. She flipped on the light switch. The refrigerator was humming as usual, but no George. She flipped the light off and walked into the front room. She turned on the little lamp at the side of the couch, just enough light to see by. Nope, no George. Then she heard it. The snipping again, just like this morning. She went to the blinds. There was George, out in the light of the moon, snipping at her apricot tree again. She went to the front door, yanked it open and walked right out onto the front lawn, “George Johanson, what in god’s name are you doing out here? Do you have any idea what time it is?”

She put her hand on his arm to stop the snipping and looked into his face. He turned his face to her. His eyes were wide open but he wasn’t there. She took the sheers out of his hands and threw them on the ground a few feet away.

“George?” She shook him a little. “George, are you awake?”

George looked at her and said, “Mali con nomey, burn a bunny.”

“What?” she shook him again. “Wake up. Wake up.” She pushed the hair off his forehead.

“I’m awake.” He said simply.

“Well, what are you doing out here?”

“Money come happy, cars. Doors.” He said sincerely to her and looked across the street.

“Oh, no you don’t. No more cars or doors. You have to come into the house right now.” She took his arm and pulled him a little at first. Then he followed her until they got to the front door. He tripped over the front step.

“There you go.” Doris pulled his legs back up onto the bed and then pulled the covers over him. He put his head on his pillow and smiled up at her.

“Vinnie con tuo.” He nodded at her and closed his eyes.

She got back into her side of the bed and stared at him, afraid at first to not sit up and watch him, afraid he might do that again. He could have been hurt, anything could have happened. She sat there watching George, the light of the TV illuminating the room. She picked up the remote and turned the sound up a little bit. It wouldn’t hurt her to make sure he got back to sleep soundly. She surfed around until she found My Man Godfrey, another William Powell movie,then sat back against her pillows. George hadn’t sleepwalked in years. The doings over at the Mulligans must have upset him more than she realized.

* * *

That night George dreamed about when he was a boy and had wanted to get away from his parents and seven brothers and sisters. He’d gone down to the lake, not the end of the lake where all the boats were tied up and where all the tourists go every summer, but the complete opposite end of the lake. It wasn’t easy to get to either. He happened upon it by chance one summer when the whole family had driven down for a short weekend vacation.

The cabin his parents had rented was only two rooms, parents in one room, his three sisters in the other bedroom and George and his brothers sacked out in the living room in sleeping bags. The price difference between the two-bedroom and the three-bedroom probably would have put his father too much in the hole so instead of not going at all, the boys agreed to rough it by sleeping on the floor.

Well, George had about had it with roughing it after the first Friday night. Mikey kept rolling over and kicking him in the face and he wasn’t asleep at the time either. George was the second youngest so Kevin and Patrick were always picking on him and Mikey could only pick on George when they weren’t at home and he knew George wouldn’t hit him back or cuss him. George did his best to keep the peace. It wasn’t always easy.

So, since he was wide awake anyway, he got up in the pitch black, put on his jeans and grabbed an apple and his pack with his fishing gear and took off in the complete opposite direction of all the people and all the family and everything that had any mark of civilization on it.

For a couple hours he really thought he’d gotten lost. He’d lost all sight of the lake but could still smell it. The dawn came up early which was good. He tried to get his bearings by the sun, but the trees were so high and so dense that it was tough to do. He cussed himself out for leaving the compass behind. He knew it was right there in Kevin’s pack too. But soon he came upon a small trail that led him straight to the water’s edge.

Once he got back to the water he followed it along until he couldn’t go any further. A sandy beach opened up and he set his pack down. The sun was at his back. The campsite and cabins were directly across the lake. All he could hear was an owl sometimes, far off. Even the birds had quieted down. The clear lake water lapped gently on the sand and then retreated. It had its own business and wanted nothing from him. It wouldn’t kick him in the head or punch him in the arm. He lay back and set his head on his pack and looked up at the sky. There were clouds whisping about, nothing much and a little breeze. He closed his eyes.

When he woke up the sun was directly in his eyes, heading fast down the opposite end of the lake, behind the tall pines. It looked like he’d slept all day. He sat up and looked around. There weren’t any boats on the lake, none that he could see or hear. The water was just as clear and calm as when he’d fallen asleep. After his initial panic he started wondering what his hurry was. He was pretty sure his parents might not even notice he was gone so he headed back, but he headed back slow.

He hadn’t been back to his beach in probably more than twenty years. Although he visited it every time he took a family trip there and a couple times when he was in college he took a drive by himself and hiked out to his beach and sat there watching the sun set. He never wanted to take anybody else there. It wasn’t a large beach, really only enough room for one person to comfortably sit or lie down anyway. He never saw any footprints on the sand. And there were always the most beautifully colored, sand-polished stones just at the edge of the beach, just under the water. He never picked one up. He tried to memorize their position once to see if anyone had moved them the next time he visited. If he had a paper and pencil right now he could still map them out just as they were then: two round blue stones, six multi-colored in a rectangular formation and one flat stone with a red hue to it. If he concentrated on the colors of the stones and the sound of the water breaking over them, even now, he could hear the water falling between the stones, onto the beach, almost up to his bare feet.

* * *

“George, get away from that window, I’m serious.”

“Shut off the light, would you?”

“I will not shut off the light. You get away from that window and put down those binoculars. I swear. You’d think you were eight years old.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a little healthy curiosity.”

“Your curiosity has been the death of my apricot tree.”

“That tree was on its last legs.”

“It was in better shape before you took the pruning sheers to it.”

“Every tree needs a little pruning now and then.”

“George, you’ve pruned that tree every day for a month. There’s nothing left but a stump. It’ll never grow back. You know I got a book out of the library that says you’re not supposed to trim fruit trees down to the stump. You just do that for roses.”

“Maybe I’ll buy you some rose bushes tomorrow.”

“What, so you can prune those for me? No thanks. Why don’t you buy a nice evergreen that we don’t have to do anything to but water.”

“Too boring, too predictable. I want something that might die immediately but for the care I give it.”

“We could always get a dog, George.”

“Dog’s are messy and they die on you. No, a dog’s no good.”

“Ok, then a cat? A parakeet, a hamster, anything. I’d love to have another living thing in the house.”

“No, no rodents. I refuse to share my house with rodents. Hell, we pay people to come get rid of pests like that.”

“Cats aren’t pests, George.”

“They are to me.”

“Now give me those binoculars.”

“No, wait, I think I see a light on.”

“There’s nothing to see there George. Let’s go to bed.”

“You go on ahead, I’ll be there in a minute.”

“I’ve heard that same thing for a month George and every morning I wake up and another bush or tree has been pruned to the point that I’m going to have to take them out.”

“Well, we need some new landscaping anyway.”

“Come to bed, George.”

“In a minute.”

“I’m not going in without you this time. I’m waiting right here so you might as well finish up. There’ll be no pruning tonight.”

“God, you won’t let me have any fun at all. You know at my age, fun becomes very difficult.”

“Spying on the neighbors isn’t fun, George. It’s probably criminal. You could go to jail if they reported you.”

“The only person going to jail is you for forcing me to give up the only pleasurable thing I have.”

“I can wait all night, George.”

“I’m almost done.”

“Hand over the binoculars.”

“In a minute.”

“Hand them over, George.”

“All right fine. Here.”

“That’s better. Now let’s go to bed.”

George followed Doris reluctantly out of the living room. Never want anything you just can’t do without, he reminded himself.

* * *

Doris refused to go to Wal-Mart. At first it was a political thing, the way they would always build them right on the outskirts of poor communities, forcing all the downtown mom-and-pop stores out of business. She read in the paper about how Wal-Mart was the biggest employer in the US and she just figured that was wrong.

But more than that was that awful smell of old popcorn. George loved it. They’d hand out miniature bags of popcorn, red and white striped bags with ruffled edges, overflowing with yellow popcorn. Yellow from all the fake butter and George would munch on it as he walked down all the hardware aisles. First Doris would go with him and just wander off by herself into kitchenwares and usually pick up a few different size Tupperware containers. But then she put her foot down.

“I’m not going to Wal-Mart any more,” she told George as he dangled the keys in front of her.

“Why not?”

“I just don’t like the way they do business.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever. I always felt this way but I just didn’t think about making a big deal out of it but now, now I think I found my principles after all.”

George thought it over for a minute. “Well, will you go to K-mart then?”

Doris thought back to the last time she was in K-mart. No popcorn smell. The aisles were wider, not so many poor families with snotty nose kids hanging off of the shopping carts.

“Yeah, K-mart’s OK. Target would be better.”

“You just like Target because it’s in that ritzy neighborhood.”

“Nothing wrong with that. I like looking at the big houses.”

George grumbled to himself all the way out to the car, his face all creased up like he was thinking about some math problem but what he was thinking was that Doris was wanting a bigger house, a bigger yard, a different neighborhood. He wasn’t going to bring it up, but every time Doris even got close to suggesting that some other house was so nice, or maybe they could spend Sunday morning some time driving around looking at model homes, George crinkled up his face and Doris immediately dropped the idea.

“What’s so bad about dreaming big, George?” she’d asked him once after he’d nixed a Sunday outing.

“I got all I need right here. There’s no reason for a bigger house. Bigger house just means bigger mortgage and more cleaning and more lawn to mow. More work.”

“But wouldn’t it be fun to move, to experience a different place, maybe meet new neighbors who were more, you know, like us?”

George crinkled up his face. He liked the neighbors just fine. They stayed in their houses and he and Doris stayed in their house. No uncomfortable social sessions out on the sidewalk, no potlucks on weeknights, and no kids riding bikes and skateboards up and down the street. That was a plus.

“I like it fine right where we are. I thought you did too?” He looked over at Doris, with the most agreeable look he could manage and was surprised when she dropped the subject entirely.

K-mart wasn’t like Doris remembered. They walked in together through the automatic doors, the a/c hitting them square in the face. Doris looked up at the mirror and watched George’s bald spot walk away from her toward the hardware section. She stopped for a minute to get her bearings. No popcorn smell. That’s good. Off to her left the cash registers rang. Every sales station had a big line of people in it, their shopping carts bulging with purchases. It made Doris want to go right back outside, maybe drive to a park, take a walk, anything but spend money.

Sighing heavily, she headed off toward housewares, as usual. She got to the head of the aisle with the Tupperware and stopped. She thought back to her cupboards at home that were already chock-full of Tupperware and fake Tupperware. She had Tupperware containers and Tupperware in the shape of Jell-O molds and popsicle molds she’d never even used before. She turned around and headed instead to the lingerie department. It was the one place she was certain she would never spend any money.

When they got back home, George went out to the garage to hang up the new tools he’d bought. Doris took her bag, which she purchased without George’s knowledge, into the bathroom and locked the door. She turned the bag upside down dumping the contents out on the counter then picked up each piece separately and laid it out so she could get a good look at it all.

She’d decided to go all red. A red thong, red push up bra (she guessed at the size, it’d been years since she bought a new bra), a short red nightie and something the sales lady said was the piece de resistance, whatever that meant: a garter belt and of course the red stockings to go with it. She’d never seen so much red lace and polyester before in one place and just looking at it all laid out on the counter made her laugh.

She avoided looking at the garter belt and left the stockings in their package. She held the thong up and could not figure out which end went where even though the sales lady had practically drawn her a map. She hiked up her dress and stepped out of her normal white cotton undies. She laid the thong on the ground trying to get a better look at it but she still couldn’t figure which way it went so she just picked up one side and the other and stepped into it and pulled it up.

She looked in the mirror. “Oh, this just can’t be right.” She said to her reflection.

* * *

The first time George got a look at the red lingerie he’d just turned the TV off and had stood up from the Barcalounger after several hours. Doris walked in all in red and he had to sit right back down.

“What the hell is that?” he asked her, his voice a little loud though he tried not to sound too scared.

“What do you think?” she was smiling. She held out the lacey edges of the red nightie and slowly turned around giving George the full three-sixty.

“That’s a lot of red.” He stretched back into the Barcalounger, not sure he was ever going to get out of it now.

“I thought I’d pick up a little something different,” Doris giggled then caught herself.

“They run out of Tupperware?” George asked hesitantly.

Doris put the sides of her nightie down and stood in her kitten-heeled red silk-like slippers in the middle of the living room, TV off, the lamp over in the corner the only light.

“Is that all you have to say?” she asked him.

“Well, it’s different all right.” He put his hand over his mouth. He just realized what she reminded him of. One Halloween when he was ten or so, Millie Bates down the street had dressed up all in red, from head to toe and put a green felt hat on her head. She claimed her mother had made the outfit and that it was supposed to be an apple and certainly her chubbiness aided the illusion, but now all George could think of was fat Millie Bates in her apple costume carrying a pillowcase asking for candy up and down the street. For a second he forgot himself and laughed out loud. Once he heard the laugh he clamped his hand back over his face hoping Doris hadn’t heard.

“Really, there’s no need to laugh,” Doris hung her head. Her arms hung at her sides.

George leaned forward and squinted. “What’s that you’ve got on underneath there?”

Doris looked up at him. “It’s called a thong and this other contraption’s a garter belt. See?” She lifted her nightie up to reveal the complex web of undergarments, all still red.

George sat back in his chair. “Is it comfortable? Are you going to sleep in all that?”

Doris stepped over to the couch and sat down. The nightie blossomed around her like a little red cloud. She kept her knees together and her toes forced into a point due to the shape of the slippers.

“I don’t think this is for sleeping actually,” she said.

“I thought you liked those cotton nightgowns I’ve been buying you all these years.”

“I do like them. This was just something, you know, different, something new.”

“New is not always a good thing.”

“You don’t like it.”

“I like it fine, but do you like it?”

“I kind of like it.” Doris managed a little smile. “Makes me feel, different.”

“Different how?” George’s brow crinkled. This was not like Doris, not like Doris at all.

“Just different. I don’t know how yet. I guess I have to wear it around a little more to see.”

George got up. “Well, I’m going to bed. You coming?” He paused by the lamp, ready to turn it out, not wanting to leave her in the dark.

“I think I’ll just sit here for a while.”

“Now, Doris, come to bed. You know I can’t get to sleep until you come in.”

“I’ll be in. I just want to sit here for a while in my new things.”

“All right then.”

George walked into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. It was no use even putting on his pajamas, he’d be wide awake until she got into bed and if she got into bed in that contraption he might never get to sleep. What was she thinking? All these years, he’d never seen that much red lace in his own house. What was he going to do? Maybe he could make her take it back. But she seemed to really like it.

George remembered the time he’d bought the fishing waders from that Angler’s catalog. They’d taken six months to arrive and when they did he pulled them right out of the box and stepped into them. Granted, they didn’t exactly feel natural but he could totally imagine standing in the middle of some great trout stream in Montana in those babies, cool, dry and comfortable. When Doris had walked in on him and started laughing he had to wait for the explanation.

“You look like you’re about to go get on a motorcycle or something.”

“What do you mean? They’re waders. Aren’t they great?”

“Your butt’s hanging out of the back just like those guys who ride motorcycles.”

“It’s not the same at all,” he’d argued at first.

“And why the camouflage? Are you planning on going to war?” Doris had laughed all the way into the kitchen.

George had thought the camouflage was cool, made it all seem more serious somehow. But he couldn’t stand to be made fun of. He’d gone into the bathroom and stood on top of the toilet seat trying to see what they looked like in the mirror over the sink. He still didn’t think they looked so bad but he’d put them away that night, back into their box and stuffed the box under the bed and had never gotten it back out even though he’d gone fishing just last summer.

Doris sat at the kitchen table idly flipping the pages of the morning paper, trying not to pout. She wriggled her bottom in the plastic seat, trying to get comfortable with the thong. She needed something to take her mind away from her failure to impress George. She never used to read the science section but then the headline “Faded Star Defies Description” grabbed her attention. She unsnapped her garter belt, adjusted the thong again, leaned closer to the table and read further.

“Some stars take, some give. Then there is the tortured relationship in EF Eridanus, where the smaller of two stars gave so much to its larger companion that it reached a dead end, scientists reported. Doomed to orbit its more energetic partner for millions of years, the burned-out star has lost so much mass that it can no longer sustain nuclear fusion at its core and has become a new, indeterminate stellar object.”

 

“A new, indeterminate stellar object,” Doris repeated. Could it be there was something up there that hadn’t been defined, named, labeled? This interested her.

“Now the donor star has reached a dead end – it is far too massive to be considered a super-planet, its composition does not match known brown dwarfs, and it is far too low in mass to be a star. There’s no true category for an object in such limbo.”

 

She had to remember that one, no longer a star, but something new, undefined. In that moment a world opened up to her she hadn’t thought of in a long time. Sure, she took astronomy in high school and she used to study the stars as a kid, but she barely remembered the names of the ones that were labeled, and now this.

She imagined herself all new again and got up from the table. She stretched her legs out in front of her like a ballerina and did a couple of twirls as she walked over to the light switch on the wall. Her red nightie flew around her like an encircling moon or Saturn’s rings. She just might keep this nightie after all.

* * *

The next morning George stepped outside to pick up the morning paper. He left the front door open to let in the breeze and sat on the couch, spreading the paper out in front of him. He flipped the edges until he found the sports page and wriggled it out, sat back into the deep cushions, licked his thumb and opened the pages directly to the fishing section, sounds of Doris in the kitchen slapping pans around for breakfast.

“Hello?”

He heard the voice and looked up, the paper shielding his face from the front door.

“Hello?” he answered back.

“It’s me, Sara Mulligan from across the street.”

George dropped the paper. So it was. The very woman he’d had framed in his binoculars day after day. He sat up straight, aware he was in his pajamas, his hair mussed, his teeth unbrushed.

“Ah, please come in?” He had to pause before he stood up. Was he decent? Would he be exposing too much by standing up and stretching out a welcoming hand?

“I don’t want to bother you,” she paused as well just inside the front door.

“No bother at all. We’re just getting up. I mean, we’re just here, reading, early morning, no bother.”

She stared at him. He was sure she was about to cry. Good God, not tears, anything but tears. He jumped up and moved the papers away from the couch, forgetting all thoughts of decorum.

“Please, sit here.” He waved his hand to include the entire couch and backed off a little while she decided what to do.

“I really don’t want to bother you.” She dropped down onto the corner of the couch at the same time dissolving into a mask of tears, her head hung down, hair obscuring her face.

Now is your chance, George. Comfort her, say something, be a friend, a father figure, a brother, a potential lover. No, scratch that. Sit down, say something, touch her hand.

“You have some trouble?” He sat down on the couch next to her, an arm’s length away, and reached out his hand, but he was too far away to touch her.

Her crying had quieted. She nodded her head and looked up at him.

She had the clearest blue eyes he had ever seen, her tears coloring them almost sea green and when she blinked, back to blue. He tried concentrating on her mouth.

“How can I help?” He reached his hand out again and touched the couch near where her knee crooked over the edge. He was aware of how her jeans fit and the soft leather of her boots.

“Do you have any Kleenex?” she asked.

George laughed. “Kleenex? Of course, Kleenex, yes I can get you Kleenex.” He jumped up to run into the half bath off the front hallway and tripped over the coffee table, bashing his knee directly into the corner. He hardly noticed it.

Back, he handed her the box of Kleenex with the crocheted cover. It was pink with a black poodle on it. The poodle had a rhinestone collar. He was instantly embarrassed.

“My wife’s aunt makes those things for Christmas. Have to have them out, you know, if they come over.”

“My husband’s gone,” she said.

George nodded. It didn’t surprise him. Her husband had been leaving for months. He’d watched him leave for days at a time before. How could she be sure this time he was gone for good?

“You think he’s gone for good then?”

She nodded and blew her nose, a dainty and delicate maneuver in her hands. She tucked the used Kleenex under her leg.

“The children?” he asked her. His mind was racing. Why was she here? What did she want him to do about it? Maybe she should be speaking with Doris.

“They’re at his mother’s in Oklahoma.”

“I see,” he told her, though he saw no such thing.

“I think,” she started and then the tears began to flow again. “I think he’s gone there to take them away from me.” She lowered her head, buried her face in her sobs.

George moved closer to her, took a Kleenex out of the crocheted box and touched her chin. She looked up at him. He smoothed her hair back and wiped the tears off her cheeks. He saw how young she was, no long held grief or disappointments showed on her face. He knew just by looking at her that she was someone who dared to ask for things and that things would be given to her. He couldn’t tell her no, he would never tell her no.

She sniffed and looked into his eyes. “You’re very kind.”

He could smell her breath. She’d had some sugary cereal for breakfast, maybe Lucky Charms or Captain Crunch. He caught the sweet smell as she opened her mouth to speak. He leaned closer to her.

At that moment the kitchen door opened and a red nightie-clad Doris came through the door, plate of eggs in one hand, glass of orange juice in the other.

“George?” She stopped midway between the door and the couch when she saw George leaning over the young woman from across the street.

George immediately stood up and faced her. “Doris, this is Sara.” He stood in between the two women, crumpling the wet Kleenex in his hand, surreptitiously pulling his pajama bottoms closer around him. “Sara from across the street.” He looked expectantly to Doris and then really looked at her and saw that she hadn’t changed out of her red ensemble.

“Oh, oh dear.” He turned his back on Doris and stood directly in front of Sara to shield her from seeing Doris in her nightie.

Sara stood up and leaned around George. “I’m so sorry to invade your home like this.” She stepped away from the couch.

Doris stepped over to the coffee table and set the eggs down. “Your eggs, George.” Then she took a couple of swigs of the orange juice herself.

“It’s quite all right,” Doris sank down onto the opposite end of the couch. “I always knew it would come down to this.”

“What?” George was jumbled by the vision of Doris all in red and the woman he had so long watched being in the same room, the one on his left hand the other on his right, only a couch separating them.

“I knew I couldn’t hold onto him any longer. I’ve known it for a long time.” She looked sadly out the front window. “Look at what lengths,” she held out the corner of her red nightie, “I’ve gone to. Made a clown of myself and for what?” She laughed. “It happened any way.”

“George?” Sara Mulligan looked to George for guidance.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Doris.” George said.

“That’s all right.” She got up and ran her hands through her hair to straighten it. “I’ll pack my bags and be out by lunch time.”

“What?” George fell back onto the couch, both hands on his head.

Sara stood immediately and took a step toward the front door. “I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood,” she said.

“Doris, Sara’s husband’s left her.”

Doris turned around, a wise smile on her face. “Well, that will make it all the easier for you two.”

“Doris, Sara’s afraid her husband has taken their children and she came over here for advice.”

Doris stopped walking to the bedroom and turned around again. “But he’s left you many times in the past.”

Sara shook her head vehemently. “No, he’s never left us. Never. We’ve had some quarrels, some disagreements, but this is different.” She teared up again.

“You’re not here to run away with George then?” Doris asked her.

“Doris,” George said, trying to stop the words before she said them.

Sara looked over at George. “George has been kind enough to listen to my troubles. You see, I don’t have any family here and you two always seemed so perfect in your perfectly kept up house, perfectly manicured yard.”

George looked over at Doris and raised his eyebrows. Doris frowned at him.

“So you’re not here to take George away?” Doris repeated, unclear how an over-pruned yard could be mistaken for a perfectly manicured one.

“No, no of course not,” Sara answered her. “I’m here for help. Any help. I don’t know what to do. Can you help me?”

Doris walked back over to the couch and sat down next to George taking his hand. She took a big breath, looked at Sara, looked at George. George smiled at her sheepishly.

“Well, I guess we could give her the name of our lawyer?” She looked at George, willing herself not to cry.

George looked at his wife, at her soft brown eyes, the face he knew so well, and pushed back her hair letting his hand brush her cheek for a moment. Doris smiled up at him.

* * *

Later that day they drove out to the Garden Center just beyond the interstate and walked down the rows of star jasmine, pyracantha and fruit trees until Doris found a medium sized elm she liked the looks of. George bought it for her and they planted it just outside their big front picture window.

The light filtered through the leaves and hit their front curtains that they generally kept closed at all times except of course when the new family moved in across the street. Then George had to hunt through the hall closet to find his old set of binoculars as well as Doris’s new set. Doris moved the two armchairs next to the window and pulled the curtains open just enough for the two of them.

“Flat screen TV,” George was the first to notice.

“Two dogs,” Doris yelled.

“Oh god, not dogs, anything but dogs.”

 

BIO

Cheryl Diane Kidder has a B.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her work, nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared or is forthcoming in: Able Muse, CutThroat Journal of the Arts, Weber – The Contemporary West, Pembroke Magazine, decomP Magazine, Tinge Magazine, Brevity Magazine, Brain,Child, Identity Theory, In Posse Review, and elsewhere.

For a full listing see: Truewest – http://cheryldkidder.blogspot.com.

Jessie Aufiery

Diabolo Menthe

by Jessie Aufiery

 

He took the metro to the Place de l’Etoile, and walked from there to the Centre de Yoga Iyengar. Today an old man was in the back corner sweating through Trikonasana and Downward Facing Dog, his knobby limbs creaking and straining through the postures, a miracle of determination, however futile. A dark-haired girl with smooth thighs and yellow shorts looked to be in her mid twenties: at least a decade younger than Ludo. Acrid fingers of cigarette smoke floated through the open window along with traffic’s beeps and quick accelerations and the steady chug of diesel engines. Sweat poured from his brow. As usual he had to marshal the sum of his physical and mental forces just to keep up with Jean-Luc’s barked commands. The slight man was a barefoot Napoleon, dark eyes flashing as they scanned the room. “Lift the kneecaps!” he shouted. “Kneecaps in!”

Ludo contracted the fronts of his thighs and wondered what his wife would make of the teacher. Compact and sleek as soap, the little man oozed sexuality even as he recalibrated sweating students with nudges of his fingers and toes. He and Jen made love only a couple of times a week, and for that she had to be cajoled, but every day he felt his body’s demand for release. Sometimes he suspected her of pleasuring herself on the sly while he dealt with traffic and ball-busting clients, keeping the leaky ship that was their family afloat.

After class he pulled on his street clothes. People changed quickly and didn’t linger in the Center’s one changing room. The girl in yellow shorts, her small breasts barely concealed under a sports bra, was trying to untangle a barrette from her dark curls.

“Shit,” she said, looking up at him. “I can’t get this out.”

His hands trembled as they freed the trapped strands from the thick silver hinge. A scent of apricots clung to his fingers.

“You could keep things in there,” he said, gesturing at her thick spiraling hair. “Your wallet, keys…”

“Oh my God,” the girl said, eyes wide. “I blow it dry, iron it. It does what it wants.”

“Think of it as an advantage,” he said. “This way if you get kidnapped you just pull out a screw driver out and jimmy the trunk.”

“Or a pillow,” the girl said. “For a little nap.”

“A cigarette to smoke before your execution.”

The girl smiled, a blush creeping up her neck.

“You have beautiful eyes,” she said.

“They come from a rare eyes dealer,” he said, feeling a jolt at his groin. “He’s at the flea market behind the carpets and copper pots…”

She put a hand in front of her mouth and laughed. He grinned and slung his backpack over one shoulder. Halfway to the door, he turned and said:

“I should get your number.”

Her eyes, surprised, flickered over his left hand. He thought she would pretend she hadn’t seen the gold band but she smirked and asked: “What about your wife?”

“I don’t think so,” he said with a grin. “My wife doesn’t give her number to strangers.”

Outside he found the metro, jumped on a train, and waited for his connection at Champs Elysees. The train thundered up, brakes whining. A dark skinned black teenager wearing headphones, sweat beaded on his forehead, stood on the other side of the car. The train rumbled on. Ludo felt a tugging of eyes, an oppressive sensation of being observed. He glanced to the side and was startled by his reflection in the glass. Not bad for forty. He hadn’t flirted in ages and the great feeling was only a little marred by the fact that he was riding on public transportation. As the train eased into Varenne station Rodin’s The Thinker, a ragged hole in its hollow right thigh, glided into the window like a snapshot. The hydraulic brake-release hissed and the train rolled forward again. At the next station a group of fifteen or so high school students crowded into the wagon. A tall boy with a Catholic medal, one of the newcomers, said loudly in French: “Whoever’s doing that, you’d better stop pinching my bum.”

A few beats of silence and everyone laughed. The boy’s shirt was open to the third button and he wore a silk scarf loosely knotted over his bare chest. Amazing how people continued to accessorize, even in this heat. Ludo noticed a crucifix dangling alongside the medal and he briefly loathed the handsome, dark-haired kid though he couldn’t think why.

He arrived home to find his wife’s portable easel set up in the living room next to the French windows, a portion of floor covered in newspaper and tubes of paint. The easel had that just out of the box look, all unblemished pine. Boris must be at one of his activities. Monday was Judo, or perhaps Drama. The living room reeked of stale coffee and turpentine rags, and his wife’s canvas was heavy with slabs of saturated color. Looking at the thick globs, he thought of the money she spent chasing fantasies. She’d started hesitantly introducing herself to new acquaintances as an artist. The first step in making something happen, she tentatively said, was in believing it couldhappen. He wanted to hold her from behind, work her pants down with one hand while unclasping her bra with the other and playing with her breasts. Where was she?

The drapes were yanked to the side and the windows open. Across the street the neighbor’s curtains ballooned against his wrought-iron balcony. The man often appeared with disheveled hair, a kimono knotted at his waist, sniffing the air with his large Roman nose. Ludo had noticed him on the town square in a velvet jacket reading a paperback. Waiting, he supposed, for salvation to appear out of the ether: a girlfriend, a job, a spaceship to the moon. Now through the gauzy curtains he recognized the man’s gray-streaked mane and discerned a familiar figure sitting on the couch beside him. Putain de merde. Fucking shit. Last time it was a grungy Scotsman with a six-pack. She had introduced herself in the grocery store just because the guy and his girlfriend were speaking English. This absurd reaching out to strangers was unbearable! Why did she do it? He pictured the scene: his wife at her window, the neighbor at his, each trying to catch a breeze in this stifling heat, it was natural to exchange a few words of neighborly greeting, and then, very casual, Oh—do you paint? Did you catch that marvelous Lucien Freud retrospective at the Pompidou? I bought the book. If you like you can come over and have a look…

He squinted through the window, grimacing, and saw two wine glasses and a bottle, heads bobbing in animated conversation. His wife complained about the difficulty of adapting, the emptiness of her days when he was at work and their son at school. She dropped her painting class despite the non-refundable fee because she said the other students were all doing boutique art and she wanted to do something real, maybe even start making installations. It was boredom, he knew that, a lack of purpose. She was too proud to try to get in with the other mothers as they gathered at the café each morning, never inviting her, and there was no one else to talk to. If they had stayed in New York, she said, she would have a job and friends. Her parents would be within driving distance. She could shop at the co-op.

He thought with pleasure of the girl in the yellow shorts, young and smiling. Through the window he saw his wife waving her arm, the neighbor’s vigorous head nodding. The fraud! As if he gave a damn about what combination of words came out of her mouth. Ludo did a quick run-through of his options. He could call to his wife through the window, or ring up her cell phone, or pound on the fraud’s door… All of which would make him look like a jealous fool. He couldn’t let his wife find him here seething: couldn’t confront her until he’d settled on his revenge.

He slammed out of the apartment and stormed down the street to the Café des Sports. In three gulps he downed a 1664 lager, releasing a hissing belch behind his hand, and then signaled the waiter for another. He finished that and ordered a third, which he sipped while looking at photos of Carla Bruni and le president de la république in the pages of an abandoned Paris Match. As dusk settled he felt a pinching in his heart. He’d drunk the beers too fast and was now a little drunk, but at least the alcohol had numbed the pain in his shoulder. Beside him the window winked its cool eye. He thumped his chest and looked at the dour silhouette of the town’s city hall, a concrete slab wedged against a darkening cobalt sky. A yellow clock illuminated the building’s façade and, several yards in front of this, the grim trickle of a fountain, a cement rectangle whose only whimsy was its spray of municipal water misting the heat-flushed faces of passerby.

Ah, familiar faces! Mothers in fur vests and dark denim bending towards children who prattled relentlessly about the latest trombone lesson or judo slam across the dojo floor. Bureaucrats trailing the ghost of their thirty-five hours. A blue-suited city worker manning the wheel of a small truck while his partner, high above on a wobbly mechanical ladder, screwed light bulbs into street lamps. A drunk with his pants at half-mast struggling with the door to the public toilet. Children kicking balls and jumping rope. All these frenetic silhouettes—actors in a shadow play—reminded Ludo of his wife laughing it up with the bachelor across the street, of his bank account filling and emptying in a cyclical tide. Outside, friends and neighbors plodded forward as if this shadow life was real, buying houses, businesses, investing their lives…

He took out his cell phone and dialed. Upon hearing his voice she said a happy Oh, hello! and he felt a wonderful galloping like horses over roses. Her name was Natasha, and she agreed to meet him tomorrow…

 

He arrived early and ordered an espresso. The café, a few steps from her apartment, she’d explained, was of Natasha’s choosing. Two young men, kids really—from his wizened four-decade perch he could call them that—sat at a nearby table. The bearded one with elbow patches stood up and attempted a chiropractic manipulation that involved pumping his friend’s arm. Next to Ludo a man in a leather porkpie hat kissed his tattooed girlfriend. The soul of pretension! Ludo writhed in inner discomfort. Everywhere he looked, he saw stupidity, ugliness.

Conscious of his suit and tie he drank his espresso and manipulated the keys of his Blackberry. Last night he’d lain awake horny and sweating in the terrible heat while she refused to come to bed. And still not so much as an SMS! As if his display of anger when she returned flushed with wine and accomplishment made him the bad one.

“But I invited him to dinner Saturday,” she said.

“Well, uninvite him.”

He remembered coming to this very café with his son, Boris, after they sailed a rented toy boat around the fountain at Luxembourg Park.

Looking like a small man in his black pea coat and scarf, Boris had stridden in and announced to the girl with the nose-stud behind the bar:

“I’m having a diabolo menthe!”

The girl had laughed and brought over a glass with two-inches of green syrup, and a bottle of Sprite.

“At last!” she said as she set it in front of Boris, who was sitting as straight-backed as a miniature Mao Tse-Tung. “Enfin! A man who knows what he wants!”

Ludo had loved this generalissimo moment, and guarded the memory of it like a jewel. His son—the bright child of a spoiled, overeducated, but endlessly encouraging American mother, and unblemished by the filthy trailing weight of Europe and France—would know how to command. When he recounted the story at a dinner party no one seemed impressed so he added another detail. He told everyone that as they left the café he, Ludo, spotted twenty Euros in the gutter. He picked the money up and put it into Boris’s pocket. It felt like a benediction, a sign of good things to come. “Spend it any way you want,” he told everyone he had said to his son. “Buy a giant bag of candy!”

The café door opened and his heart flew.

No. This person was in her forties, a woman trying too hard in stilettos and a tulle skirt. Her friends leaned toward her admiringly, exclaiming: “Wo-ow.” The place was crawling with artist types. His wife could bring the neighbor and look deep into his fraudulent, Neanderthal eyes.

A head of dark curls was moving toward him. Natasha. Wearing a tight sweater and Converse high tops. Away from the yoga studio, she looked different. She dropped a textbook onto his table and grinned. He felt an icy sliver of disappointment.

She’s a student.

Her thick brows slanted in a way that reminded him of Renoir, of Renoir’s soft-faced Michelin nudes, and he briefly visualized a thick muff of dark hair between her legs.

“Coucou!” she said, tapping the table with the big ring she wore on her forefinger.

“Sorry,” he smiled, standing to kiss her cheeks. “Seeing you makes me think I might do something I’ll regret.”

“Regret?” she said with a laugh, raising her hand for the waiter. “Coming from you, that sounds funny. Come on, let’s order some drinks…”

 

Walking to the metro he stopped to gaze at a lumpy bronze statue of a soldier, Capitaine Dreyfus. Dreyfus stood with a broken-off sword was in one hand, and a pigeon fluffed on his brimmed cap. At the statue’s base a plaque in French said: ‘If you wish me to live, have them give me back my honor.’

Ludo picked a bottle cap off the ground and chucked it at the pigeon, his shoulder igniting with a burst of pain. The pigeon flapped to a nearby branch, dust motes spinning in the silvery light.

A jogger thudded past.

American, he estimated, as her firm buttocks and pink thighs wobbled past, a baseball cap tucked low over her eyes. Who else would run down the middle of the street?

Massaging the painful shoulder, he descended into the metro. In California everyone wore baseball caps and jogged. His own memories of a childhood trip to the Golden State were foggy, though he retained the image of waitress setting a miraculous stack of fluffy pancakes topped with maple syrup and a cloud of whipped cream in front of him. Ludo felt that if he returned to California—now, today—the state’s sunshine would wrap itself around him like a long-awaited homecoming embrace.

His train arrived and he hurried on. As it lurched forward he lost his balance and stumbled over a girl’s white sneaker. The girl—a sallow, lank-haired Parisian—glared at him like he was an assassin. He smiled, thinking of Natasha, who, in hindsight, seemed almost more American than his wife. In California he and Natasha could wear baseball caps and go jogging. They could politely ignore the movie stars who were also jogging, and when they had jogged their requisite five miles, they could stop at International House of Pancakes and order a tall stack with bacon, after which they could sit on a beach and watch the golden afternoon roll in…

The train slid into Varenne station. Ludo noted that a too-small metal patch had been soldered over the hole in The Thinker’s thigh, leaving a thin uncovered strip: an entrance for a family of cockroaches. Even people repairing master art works in this country were incompetent! As he stood there swaying in the overcrowded wagon, his mood plunged. All he wanted was a feeling of fulfillment, a relaxed body and mind, yet his wife, instead of helping him reach this goal, chatted up the neighbor and pushed him, her husband, away! She was a good one for complaining about a lack of marital solidarity, but wouldn’t lift a finger for the benefit of their team!

At home he swung open the door, his keys jangling in the lock. His wife was perched in front of her easel, and did not greet him as he came in. Her sharp little profile made him want to slam the door over and over until it fell off its hinges. But this was his home and not a monkey house, even if his wife insisted on acting like an ignorant ape. He pulled the door to until it gave a soft click. He dropped his briefcase, shed his clothes and showered, the hot water drumming his tight, painful shoulder. The pain was now radiating up into his neck. Afterwards he slicked back his hair, poured a tumbler of Bailey’s on ice, and walked towel-waisted into the living room. Jen was still working away, and it occurred to him, dim hope igniting in his chest, that she might be inspired to strip away his towel. He dropped onto the couch and pointed the remote at the television, his body radiating a moist heat.

“Do you mind?”

“No,” he said, flicking past CNN and the 24-hour airport channel.

She sighed and squeezed out some white paint. Through his peripheral vision he noted that the curtain was closed, and that she looked pinched and pale. This was deeply satisfying: perhaps, for once, she felt chastened. He found a UFC match, turned up the volume, and took a long swallow of his drink. Two guys beating each other bloody. His wife smeared a gob of paint onto her canvas. The sweet icy liquid flowed down his throat, and he propped a cushion on the coffee table and positioned his feet, adjusting for maximal comfort. He noticed that the nails of his big toes had been molded into claw-like points by his lace up work shoes. He retrieved the nail clippers from the bathroom, returned to the couch, trimmed the nails and gathered the slivers into a mound next to his drink. It felt good to be clean. It felt good to begin to relax.

His wife stared at him, her mouth hanging open.

“You’re a pig—do you know that?”

He held her gaze for a long moment, chuckling and watching her face redden as it became apparent he wouldn’t dignify her attack with a response. Finally he broke eye contact, gathered the clippings into his palm, and dumped them into the ficus. Amidst the hoots and applause of the UFC crowd, the boom of the American announcer’s voice, he dressed and walked outside into the heat.

 

The sky drooped. Three workers with grit clinging to their bare arms were installing maroon awnings above the Monte Carlo pizzeria, tools scattered across the sidewalk. Massaging his burning shoulder he walked to the metro, imagining the relief of a cold beer flowing down his parched throat.

On the train an old man suddenly grabbed at the air and tumbled at Ludo’s feet. Ludo stared down in bewilderment while a woman leapt forward and crouched at the man’s side. His white-headed wife gaped from several feet away, her hands clutching shopping bags. The old man convulsed briefly and opened his eyes, very blue, looking confused.

“It’s the heat,” someone said, and the man was ushered out at the next station, I’m all right, I’m okay, flanked by his wife and the female Good Samaritan. As the metro pulled away the two old people were sitting on molded orange station chairs staring straight ahead, white-faced, backs erect. Ludo looked at his shoes, the ridged floor where the man had fallen. I should have done something, he thought. Shown initiative, taken control… He wanted a drink, to lie down, to feel the coolness of fingers in his hair…

Outside it looked like rain. He found the blue door and the name: N. Bontemps. She rang him up on the third buzz, he climbed the stairs, and a wave of apricot incense rushed his nose as she opened the door.

“Were you standing there long?” she said, touching his arm. “I had the stereo on.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Oh.” Her cheeks turned pink.

She led him in and locked the deadbolt. His eyes began to itch: somewhere in this stifling studio was a cat. The couch beneath the loft bed was scattered with fur-coated cushions. They sat amongst them.

“I’m boiling,” he said, tugging at his shirt collar. “Do you have anything to drink?”

“Sure,” she said with a smile. “Tap water okay?”

“Anything wet,” he said, disappointed, picturing the gently sweating bottles his wife stocked for him in the fridge.

The water was filled with tiny bubbles and tasted tinny. He drank deeply. Her brows jumped as he drained the glass, his throat clicking.

“Excuse me,” he said.

She laughed behind her fingers. He wiped his mouth and set down the glass. Outside the window a sparrow chirped, and a motorbike could be heard bombing at top speed around a corner, its tires squealing. A tremor flickered across one of her eyelids, her gaze steady on his face. Quiet descended. He leaned in and kissed her. She curled into him, climbing his calves with her toes. He was suddenly charged up, light and strong. He pulled her close, tilting his head to change the angle of the kiss, and his neck made a soft ominous click and blasted him with pain. Damn it. He jerked forward, a gesture she seemed to misinterpret.

“Come,” she said, slithering up the ladder to the loft.

He followed, his shoulder and neck electrified: stage-one of a searing discomfort he knew from experience would last for days. The sheets were rumpled, a large white cat luxuriating across the pillows. Staring at him, Natasha removed her shirt. He moved toward her on his knees, head bumping the ceiling, and reached for her small firm breasts.

“Lie down,” she commanded.

He did and she removed his pants, caressing him through his shorts. He lay back and tried to concentrate on her fingers’ light touch, her lips moving down his belly. His eyes and throat itched and pain radiated from his shoulder up through his neck.

She took him into her mouth and he stared at the greasy marks on the ceiling, feeling himself shrinking, lifting his gaze to catch a glimpse of a glistening pale mushroom poking out of his black pubic mound. He felt a flash of anger and pushed himself into a sitting position, his neck leaping in agony.

“Stop,” he said, her mouth a crumpled O. “My neck—”

“Relax,” she said, tousling his hair. “We’ll get it to go up…”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What?

The cat stood and stretched the length of its back, rattling its fluffy tail. Natasha gazed at Ludo in silence, her legs folded neatly beneath her. An unpleasant feeling squatted on his chest. He felt the tedious necessity of justifying himself, explaining… Suddenly her hand flew to her mouth and she gave a mighty yawn. This must be very dull for you, he wanted to say. Forgive me for boring you. Heat shimmered from his torso and limbs, hovering, trapped, at the ceiling.

“Unfortunately, I really have to go,” he said, with an unpleasant tightness in his throat. “I only stopped in to say hello, but now—”

She gave a nervous little laugh: “Oh, come on. You have to stay!”

But he was already halfway down the ladder.

 

He sweated through Trikonasana, and his shoulder, better after a week of ice packs and gentle stretching, sang with joyous release. Jean-Luc walked the room, tapping his slender toes against students’ feet to nudge them into alignment. Ludo examined the teacher’s slightly bowed shins as the man lingered, eyeing him for fault.

“This shows an understanding of the posture,” Jean-Luc finally said, and Ludo’s blood surged with vindication.

In the changing room, Natasha’s yellow shorts showed half-moons of sweat beneath each buttock. She glanced over as he walked in, and then quickly averted her eyes and made a show of rummaging around in her bag. Relieved, he pretended not to notice her.

At home he found his wife working on a watercolor. The carnival-like beeping of a video game drifted in from their son’s bedroom. The watercolor—pastel clouds on creamy paper—was weirdly soothing.

Ludo crouched and placed his head on Jen’s lap. He felt a slight shift in her posture and the weight of her hand, tentative, on the top of his head.

 

 

Jessie AufieryBIO

Jessie Vail Aufiery has lived in Miami for the past year and a half after more than a decade in Paris. She is World Literature Editor for The Literary Review, and lives with her husband and twin daughters.

The Room

The Room

by Aurora Brackett

 

There was a treacly smell in the room, something on the way to rot. The walls were yellowing. There were no windows. There was only the door that I had long since stopped hoping would open and the chair where I sat, riffling through children’s books, memorizing the texture of fluff on the down of an ugly duckling. The metallic spines holding together thick cardboard pages. Why children’s books? I wondered. The room wasn’t so much silent as it was stuffed, like cotton balls in the ears. Plugged up with nothing. I was waiting. I had been waiting. I waited. I came here to complain and now I am waiting, but I have forgotten my complaints.

Once, there was a front room – a small office with wood paneled walls that ended abruptly a foot from the ceiling, giving way to visible joists and crumbling sheet rock. There was a brown carpet that did not reach the walls, around it the cold tile floor where I stood and cleared my throat. A woman sat behind a desk in the middle of the room. She held a calculator in her thick hand and poked at its buttons with the top of her thumb. A wide face, a smudge of dirt across the forehead, fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. A farmer-secretary. She didn’t look up.

I have combed over this moment hundreds of times. I took the bus. I walked from the corner (A bus stop bench. An empty cup on its side rolling back and forth.) to this building – a brick building, a state building, a school or a business office or a department of something or other under the undersecretary of someone dash someone, someone. I stood on the cold white tile and waited for the woman to notice me. I looked for a chair. There was nowhere to sit. I cleared my throat. “I want to complain,” I said. She looked up and said nothing, stared like she was still waiting for me to speak, her eyes saying, Yes may I help you? but without much interest. I had spoken. I heard myself. “I want to complain,” I said again. Again those dull eyes, the color of dirt. I know that I spoke. She looked at her calculator. I took a step closer. “They told me to come here,” I said. The woman stared. Her face was too round for that metal desk, those sharp bright edges. Swollen feet in pinched heels swung toward my legs. “They told me to come,” I shouted. “On the phone. They gave me this address.”

The farmer stood up and gathered her crops: her clipboards and stacks of paper. She walked to a door behind her desk, pulled a key from under her sleeve and gestured for me to follow. A long white hallway: no pictures, no marks on the walls. A white paneled ceiling, a dull gray floor. At the end of the hall, another door opened and the stack of clipboards were pushed into my chest. “Wait here,” she said. A voice that I heard just inside my head and then it was gone and the door closed.

But what kind of voice? Bored would be too easy. A misplaced voice: wadded up closed fisted politeness barely hiding a solid squawk.

It isn’t metal, but a thin gold paper that covers the spines of these books. Pictures of barnyard animals stamped on both sides float down the length of the spines. I’ve been peeling off the paper. Sometimes I can get a good long strip in one solid piece: a cat in shoes, a cow on the moon. I spent some time yelling. The yelling makes me thirsty, and though I hear my voice fine, I can feel it being swallowed by the stale air as soon as it leaves my throat.

I had an apartment. A refrigerator and a sink on one side of the room, a bed on the other. I had a window that looked out onto a supermarket parking lot. During the day, I sat in my chair at the window and took guesses at what people had in their bags. I watched vagrants steal shopping carts. An old woman in a stained green quilted coat pushed a cart away from the store, ducked beneath my window, and thinking she was alone, began to empty her pockets. Every few minutes she stopped her work to push the palm of her right hand at her face, first one cheek and then the next, a light slap, grinning as she did it. Nearly half of what she poured into that cart – pennies, stones, scraps of paper – fell through the metal bars onto the pavement below. The woman wheeled her cart away leaving half of herself behind. I had an apartment. The telephone rang and I answered it. Often there was a pause, static over the line as I said hello, hello? A high-pitched nasal voice, a language I couldn’t understand came through the static and I listened to the voice worrying for me, worrying with furrowed brows, a clicking tongue. A question followed by a pause in which I cleared my throat, prompting another question. I’m sorry, I whispered, I don’t know.

I could see from my window, the old woman, a bald spot and heavy gray hair matted at the forehead, yellowing fingers gripping the cart handle as she pushed it away. Wait, I yelled. Paper folded in the front child seat. The old woman paused and moved a front page to the back. She touched the page now revealed, shocking white against gray sky. It was about to rain. There was an old woman who lived in a… Wait! I say. You forgot!

 

The ceiling panels are pinpricked. I don’t look for patterns. Nothing can be done with the ceiling, the floor. I don’t touch the walls but already the smell has seeped into my clothes. I can’t imagine the room into anything other than what it is. I can’t leave, not even in sleep. If I close my eyes I see walls; my thoughts hit against them. I form words to curse but the moment my anger begins to build, it flattens. Sometimes I stand up and think I could climb up onto this chair and leap from it. At least a bruise, a scrape might give me a temporary break from stillness. I think if I fell to the floor I would be making use of the room. But in the next instant, I exhale and sit down. I open a book. I only want to remember.

I had an apartment. An old woman walked towards my window wearing a cape, carrying a basket. She hummed as she wheeled away, turning pages. And when I couldn’t hear her anymore, I looked down at what she’d left behind. The small things that no one can hold onto anyway. Pennies and thread, blotches of color. An alphabet swam in newly formed puddles; letters sank under the weight of rain. The phone rang and I answered it.

The phone rang. It was some kind of bureaucrat, a Mr. So and So. I could hear his frowning and grimacing over the line, a fat-choked voice. “Just calling to ask you a few questions,” he said. But there never were any questions. “We’re terribly sorry,” he said, “we’re backed up. Overwhelmed. Please call if you need anything.”

He called and on the days he didn’t call, his secretary called. “How is your little boy doing?” she’d ask and when I told her I had no boy, she’d laugh and ask about the weather and hang up the phone. Or she’d tell me about her children, how they kept her awake. “Hard to manage everything,” she’d say. Her ceiling fan was broken. She was busy too. So many phone calls, she didn’t know what to do.   The fat man changed his tone from day to day. I liked it best when he shouted. I could always hear him sneering through his niceties, but when he shouted, then I knew we were in business. “I have six hundred and fifty-seven files on my desk,” he’d growl. “Who in the hell are you? Why did I call this number?” If I interrupted him to tell him my name, he’d yell, “No more names! Fuck you and the fucking mother that named you!” This always made me laugh and hearing me laugh the fat man would chuckle, sensing that we had something in common. He would then clear his throat and mumble apologetically about a hernia that had been giving him trouble, paperwork moving through improper channels. And then caught somewhere between choking, laughing and telling the truth, he would hang up.

If I ever found out what they were calling about, I don’t remember. He never got to his questions and so perhaps it does not matter. I believe they were the only people I talked to, and so I looked forward to their calls, especially to the fat man’s angry days. “Fucking mother,” I’d laugh, and I could hear him slapping his thigh in some tiny, hollow office. “My mother didn’t fuck a day in her life.”

“Your mother lived in a clock and sang cuckoo,” the fat man would shout.

“Your mother was a walrus,” I’d sing.

“You’re an idiot,” he’d say, and clear his throat and quietly belch, apologizing for his ulcers, his bad breath, his tumors. “Just calling to ask you a few questions,” he’d say.

 

I have spread the contents of my wallet across the floor. The woman left me with forms but no pen. I fixate on the image of her face: the lips swollen and overpainted, the forehead wide and smudged, a sneer, blotched skin, a drinker’s nose. A sour taste forms at the back of my mouth. Good, I can use this. I draw it backwards: see myself climbing the steps of this building, my thin shoes on wet pavement, a lame pigeon teetering on the sidewalk’s edge. I see myself sitting on the bus. My knees shake against rumbling floorboards.

One moment serves as backdrop for the other. I stitch them together clumsily. I hear the slow indifference of her feet, click-clacking against the tiles as I sit on the bus and wait to arrive. In both places, and now in this room, heat rises to my jaw.

She leads me down the hall. Keys clatter on her wrists.

I look out the window as the bus passes through an industrial landscape: an open warehouse door, a metal gate making diamonds of empty space. Behind the gate, a man works a blowtorch. The bus rocks at a stop and the brakes hiss, letting out thick rasping breath. I look for street signs. Across the aisle a teenage girl is kicking her feet against the seat back, drawing stars on her legs with a black fingernail. Her shirt is loose across her chest and when she bends over I can see etched patterns filling the space between her breasts. Her chest is green lines. She looks up as I’m staring, gives me the finger and throws a pencil which hits me in the neck.

The sound of high heels on a tile floor.

The girl on the bus is a bird. She’s all bones and matted hair, her clothes torn and feathery. The pencil lodges in my jacket pocket. I let her laugh. The brakes release a burst of air, a sigh, and with it my jaw slackens and again I’m losing the thread.

The secretary locks the door behind her. I can hate her for this.

On the bus I don’t recognize street names and the driver’s announcements are two blocks off. I don’t know this part of the city. There are alleys every other block, men lurking in doorways alone, standing as if about to move, staring at the facing walls as if contemplating crossing a river. Their eyes see a world of danger. Worry floods the corridors. I touch the edge of my wallet. The young girl laughs at me again and throws a penny. What is the world coming to? I’d like to ask her. The secretary locks the door, the keys clatter against her wrists, but those hands, they give me pause. I have sympathy for the hands – thick fingers and dirt beneath the nails giving lie to another kind of life. The girl on the bus is singing (rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief). Rain hits the window sideways. Raindrops pick up dirt and turn the glass to mud. And I remember the windows of my room when I was a boy, a basement apartment – quick moving feet kicking the city against the panes, walls so thin I wanted to push through them. The girl turns her head. “There used to be more,” I say. There were photographs on the walls of our living room. Pictures of a house built from the ground in flat planes of mud. A few new trees on the horizon. There was an old woman, holding her shoes and skirts in her hands to cross a stream, her eyes wide from the shock of water. Someone outside the frame holds her arm. The bus comes to a stop. The girl is already gone. The woman closes the door behind her and I don’t hear anything after she goes.

In the middle of the night, or what I imagine to be night, I open my eyes to find a man sitting on a low stool in the corner against the door. The stool was not here before. This is my first thought. The man perks up when I open my eyes. I notice my position, slumped against the wall, and quickly stand. He is immaculately dressed – a smooth blue suit, not a trace of lint. He rises and extends a hand, which I take, the palm warm and damp. “Excuse me,” I say.

“Not a problem,” the man smiles. His voice has been polished, organized to reflect a hint of sympathy. He meets my gaze without wavering, ready for anything.

“You locked me in,” I say. The man tilts his head to the side. The smile makes me uneasy. “The lady gave me forms and no pen. I’ve tried to yell.” He nods. There’s no break in the smiling. My throat is swollen. “How do you explain this?” The man tilts his head to the other side, like he’s examining a rare flower. He sits down and takes from his pocket a small notebook and an equally small pen, both red. He has the face of a superhero: glossy, with perfect angles.

“We’re sorry about the wait,” he says. He smoothes his eyebrows with an index finger. I look down at my wrinkled pants and sit, ironing my pant legs with my hands. I notice my smell, the smell of the room mixed with sour sweat, against his cologne. When I look up again his brows are knitted, a paternal frown of concern. “I’d like to ask you a few questions,” he says.

“I’ve been locked in here for days,” I say.

He looks at his watch. His face grows even more serious. It’s a careful deliberation. “Two hours at most,” he concludes.

I shake my head. “Much longer,” I say. I don’t own a watch. My eyes are red and stinging. I haven’t slept. My clothes stink. “I have proof,” I say.

“Now,” the man says again, “a few questions.” I look at the stool he is sitting on, strong wood, oak or maple, no nails visible. I think: This is the stool that carries the man…

            “I need you to answer everything honestly, of course.” He smiles again, as if we have an understanding. “While at the same time, taking into consideration that every question I ask is of some import. Consider your answers carefully.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“Shall we begin?” He touches the bridge of his nose, pushing up invisible spectacles. The seriousness of the gesture frightens me. The man glances at the contents of my wallet, spread across the floor like a game of solitaire. As he bends to write, his tie swings back and forth across his lap. “Understand?” he smiles. The walls behind his head are unchanged, yellowing, peeling in places. The man seems out of place here. He’s much too healthy. “Understand?” he says again. I nod.

“Do you have parents?” he asks.

“No,” I say, “They’ve passed.” A scratch on the pad.

“Are they living?”

“I just said they’re dead.” Another scratch. This is the man who buried the cat who chased the mouse who lives in the house…

“Siblings?”

“No.”

“Are you employed?”

“No.”

I think of the bus again, the windows washed clean by rain. I’m looking out at the city. Two young men stand half on, half off the curb; one holds his hand to the other’s shoulder. They’re staring up at the skyscrapers, their necks craning. It is raining into their eyes. The tops of the buildings sway close together, closing in the sky. There must be a gate for the rain to enter through. When the light changes, the men open their umbrellas. Sewing machines on desks line the sidewalk, women and men hunched over needles, the cloth growing wet. The umbrellas pass them, sheltering each for seconds at a time. The girl on the bus has gone back to scribbling on herself, now with a pen. She hums.

The man makes a note. “What is your family history?”

“History?”

At the front of the bus, a woman stands up and grips the metal pole, wobbling in her shoes. As she bends to lift her child, the bus lurches and she stumbles. The little boy laughs. The driver apologizes. The woman sighs heavily through her teeth, brakes releasing air. She walks off the bus, each step loud, the boy slung at her hip.

“Family history. Where you come from. Medical history. That sort of thing,” the man says.

“I’m trying to remember,” I say.

“Good, good.” The man’s lips are a line. He nods his head.

“We came here in order to build something,” I say.

“Of course,” the man says.

A foundation of mud and bricks. Pine split and shaved for beams. “My grandfather made his own house,” I say.

The man scribbles in his book.

My grandfather rode a horse, his feet were caked in dust.   “He and his brothers raised up the sides, carved the supports.”

“Staked a claim too, I imagine.” The man smiles wistfully.

“Yes,” I say. “A claim for the land. You remember?” I have a photograph in a drawer. A house half-finished. Unmade beds under an open roof. Ohio? Idaho? Where was it?

“Do you mind if I continue?” he asks, writing as he speaks.

I look at the contents of my wallet on the floor. The man taps his pen against his thigh. “Now,” he says. “What do you want?”

“Excuse me?”

“As I said before, be certain your answers are clear,”

Why did I come here?

Out the window, buildings blurred together in my peripheral vision, whites and greys and metallic lines. At the bus stop, blood rose to my cheeks. The rain overflowed in puddles at my feet, buoying the smallest things to the surface: scraps of paper, splinters and nails, a letter or two. But the old woman was long gone. She had marched off into the rain, victorious, her cart spilling scraps for me to follow.

“Sir?”

“Yes?” I say.

“Your answer.”

“I came here to tell you something.”

I remember standing at the bus stop, looking down at the puddles. I remember leaving my apartment, my mind full of words. I was building an argument. I was readying my attack. Perhaps then it was concise, but now it has overtaken me, spread out in every direction. Standing on the bus, the open door letting in grey light, the odor of exhaust, an empty paper cup rolling back and forth across a bus stop bench. The slick granite steps. The woman who touched my hand accidentally as she opened the door to this room, history under her fingernails, rough hands built for work, a back that rises from its bent position at the end of the day in a wide muddy field. She stands and looks out at the horizon, blues and grays in fading light. The air smells of horses, sweet manure, rain in the dirt. Her boots sink in the mud. She holds a hand to her head to shield her eyes, though the sun has fallen. It is an old habit. She looks out into the distance; the fields stretch for miles. She turns and glances at me and then through me, to the house where her children are waiting. So many children. The future, she calls them. She doesn’t know what to do. Her hand has left a streak of dirt across her forehead. We walk carefully around the furrows. The old woman holds her skirts in her hands and I hold her arm to steady her.   The house is almost two-dimensional in the distance; our feet are heavy with mud. She sings a song to pass the time, a thin lullaby. The tune is familiar.

 

BIO

Aurora Brackett lives in Las Vegas, Nevada where she is a PhD fellow in fiction at University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Black Mountain Institute. She is a recipient of the 2013 Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence,  the San Francisco Browning Society’s Dramatic Monologue Award, the Wilner Award for Short Fiction, a nominee for The Pushcart Prize and a 2013 Sozopol Fiction Seminar Fellow.  Her work has appeared in Nimrod Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, The Portland Review, Fourteen Hills and other magazines.  She is currently fiction editor of Witness Magazine and was an associate editor of Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives published by Voice of Witness/McSweeney’s in 2010.

Ellen Mulholland

Clothed in Flames

by Ellen Mulholland

 

Publication permission granted from the author, Ellen Plotkin Mulholland

 

 

What if you could change a moment in your past before the future catches up with it? Kathryn Clark believes anything is possible. The voices in her head tell her so. After a mysterious letter inside an old “Back to the Future” lunchbox links Michael J. Fox to her birth father, she begins a secret hunt for the actor and a time-travelling car. When the actor comes to town for a fundraiser, Kathryn learns the real message in the letter. 

 

When Jenna returned to her family home fourteen years ago, just a few weeks before she’d shift from being a single gal to a single mom, she asked for one thing. She wanted to live in the downstairs basement so that they’d all have some privacy. She didn’t want to feel like she never left home. Didn’t want to be seen as some teenage failure, the girl who slept her way through high school only to end up a single mom before she turned 19. Her parents never saw it that way. Fred didn’t. Hard to say what Irene really thought. Still, Fred and Irene respected their daughter’s wishes. They agreed that physical boundaries would help them all get along. During the next two weeks (13 days to be exact), Fred and two fellas he hired from the local hardware store set to work sanding, painting walls, laying carpet, and finishing bits of plumbing.

It’d be two months before the bathroom was completed with a shower and proper sink. In the meantime, Jenna would fill a bowl with water and leave it on the table for small wash-ups for herself and baby Kathryn.

It wasn’t until fall that Fred and the boys finalized everything for the small kitchenette and hooked up gas for the heater. By Christmas, Jenna and her little girl had everything they needed to live. “I’ve got the basics, Pop,” she told her dad the Saturday he showed her how to operate the thermostat. “I’ve got my shelter, warmth, food, a way to stay clean, and most importantly, I’ve got my family, my love. What would I do without you and Mom?” She wiped a tear.

Fred pulled her close, nestling her small frame into the crook of his underarm. Brushing back her soft ginger strands with his other hand, he told her in so many words that there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for his family. He paused and added one condition.

“You know, baby girl, now that you’re a momma, you need to pay attention to that Watson family bug.”

Jenna pulled away. “The what bug?”

“You know. Momma. She’s been battling those demons upstairs for years. It started with her mom, and, well, it doesn’t seem to want to skip any generations.” He pushed his hands into his front pockets.

Jenna watched as the sun’s invading rays painted jagged stripes across the low-pile carpet, poking its warmth over baby Kathryn who lay dreamily in her white wicker bassinette. “You mean her depression? You think I’m gonna get that, too?”

Fred smiled. “Baby girl, you already got it. You know that, right? Why do you think you ran off right after graduation and came home a few months later with this little doll.” He motioned over toward the tiny baby. Her belly rising and falling. The sun and shade playing games across her face and blanket as a quiet fall breeze pushed through the raised window and rustled the lace curtain.

Jenna turned from her father to adjust the baby’s blanket, protecting her delicate skin from the afternoon sun. “Well, hmm, I mean, I guess, maybe. I mean, well, sometimes, yeah, sometimes I kinda feel, I dunno, blue. Course now with this little gal, I feel so blessed, Pop. Really. She’s just the best thing.” Jenna raised her hands toward her chest and clasped them together as if taking hold of the girl’s own precious little heart and placing it next to her own.

 

That was 14 years ago, and in that time, Jenna has wallowed in the blueness, never fully lingering for too long. Until recently.

She’s never forgotten her father’s warning that day in the basement apartment while the sun finger-painted her floors. She considered her mother. Yes, Irene carried the family curse, the Watson family gene of sadness, sorrow, a sort of angst, an existential shoestring that winds its way around your soul, gripping the interior of your heart, puffing and whooshing a gray fog inside your mind.

Jenna watched her baby girl grow bigger, crawl, walk, run; talk, yell, cry. But she never saw her smile. Never. Not until that summer morning at the yard sale when Kathryn was 10. She’s seen a few more smiles since, and she can recall the day and time of day of each. She can count them on her fingers.

So as Kathryn grew, Jenna couldn’t help but feel the tug at her heart, the yearn, the pull for that infant warmth, that baby smell, that needful gaze. Kathryn’s father has never been in the picture (not since he created it). Jenna never expected anything from him after that night. Never asked, pleaded or begged. She didn’t want money, didn’t want help. It was a moment of passion. When the yearn for another baby bubbled like indigestion in the deep hollow of her gut, Jenna found a new man to plant a seed. She and these babies were all the family she needed. The babies and her Pops.

Finding another dad wasn’t going to be a problem. This has never been a problem for Jenna Clark. Men are drawn to her like bees to a flower. And like a bee that gathers what it needs, it moves on to the next flower, never lingering beyond the time necessary. This doesn’t bother Jenna. So she says. She only craves the warmth, the temporary distraction, the energetic release. The buzz.

Alex arrived in their lives just a few years later. Again, the father unknown to the family, only to Jenna. Gone. Unaware of his creation.

Jenna does not desire a long-term relationship. She realizes that it’s struggle enough to maintain her own life. To find the courage each day to rise from bed, tend to her family, smile at work, eat, bathe and manage good health before the sun sets deep beyond the sea, so she can climb back inside the comfort of her soft, springy bed, beneath the warming cotton layers.

Once back within this cocoon, Jenna prays. She prays nightly that her own little girl will skip that matrilineal gene, will make it through this life without the dark ooze that can encase one’s being like jelly, keeping the joy at bay, placing one’s whole self in a sort of static state, unfeeling, uncaring, neutral to all that happens around, apathetic to all that is to come.

The pills help Jenna, but she wants more than a pill to deaden what is already numb. Her. Jenna wants a life normal. She wants what she has pushed away. She wants love, a whole family, a future, a purpose. As night grips her, and the darkness encases her, Jenna observes the internal movie of anger, fear, and self-loathing rise up along the interior workings of her body, adhering to the mucousy membranes, tissues, and cell walls. She waits, anticipates that crossing, that bridge that connects the bad to the good, the conscious to the unconscious. Ether fills her awareness like a rich fog bank creeping up along the Thames.

Then it comes. That moment. That instant before sleep overtakes her. Before she forgets what could be. There it is. Static. Lightness. Detachment. Untethered to all that weighs her down, Jenna Lee Clark floats in the lightness of her being, in the possibilities that are yet realized. She rests within the weightlessness and waits. The fog dissipates as Jenna rises, carried on the wings of her own gentle thoughts, lifting higher up and away, not on the ground, not in the heavens, attached to nothing, a balloon without a string granted permission to be free and float on its own path, directed by nothing and no one, adrift, untethered, light and carefree, lifted without being held. Then the darkness moves in, silent, no landscape. And she is asleep.

 

 

BIO

ellen mulhollandEllen Plotkin Mulholland grew up in San Bernardino, California. After earning her degree in Journalism and English Literature at the University of Southern California, she moved to London and wrote her first novel. Today, she parents, writes and teaches in Northern California. She is the author of two YA novels: “Birds on a Wire” and “This Girl Climbs Trees.”

 

Richard Hartshorn

Excavation of a Breathing Fossil

by Richard Hartshorn

 

My first mistake was pulling onto the shoulder when I saw the hitchhiker. She stood on the pavement in a patch of shade, sporting black heels and holding a cardboard sign that read Nautilus. Her hair was long and red, skin sandblasted with freckles. Once she settled herself into the passenger seat and wedged the sign into the back, I decided she must have been around twenty-four. After introducing myself as Kate, I asked her name. She looked up at the air bag advisory on the sun visor, scanned it until she reached the French translation, and said, “Danger de Mort.” We shook hands.

Caterpillars had erupted from the Earth during the summer solstice, infesting the district and making it their home. Tree branches were reduced to thread. I couldn’t walk outside in high heels without impaling soft bodies or draw the bedroom shades without black, suctiony lumps clinging to the glass and blotting out the sun. The Mayor, who would be up for re-election in a year, had proposed only one solution, and it involved the word flamethrowers. The idea had yet to be applied, but I shelved my habit of sitting with my back against the brawny oak in our backyard while flipping through gardening magazines – the trunk writhed and rippled with life, like a giant muscle.

“Where is Nautilus?” I asked the hitchhiker.

She fingered some caterpillar guts on the windshield and narrowed her eyelids. Why had I offered her a ride if I’d never heard of the place she wanted to get to? I didn’t look away. If I could handle a classroom full of third-graders, screaming and breaking pencils and shoving gum under desks, I wasn’t going to be intimidated by a woman called Danger. We shared stubborn eye contact as the engine stuttered and the sun baked the leather seats. Dust spores hovered between us.

“North,” she said, cracking the dead air and sending the spores whirling. “Take me North.”

We passed through three towns and rolled across the expanse of open highway. Danger simply pointed to the exits she wanted; she knew precisely where she was going, and I allowed myself to trust her.

Unable to endure the silence as we pulled onto a two-lane exit ramp, I blurted out, “My husband likes pornography more than he likes me.” She hadn’t asked why I was so cooperative, why I was okay with driving her as far as she wanted to go, but she was bound to.

I discovered Bryan’s hobby after a fight. Thinking on it now, I couldn’t tell you what the fight was about. Bryan wasn’t incredibly discreet with his personal things, but when I planted myself in his office chair and pushed his laptop open, I knew what I was looking for. I entered his email password (MyGirlKatie), ferociously clacking the keys as if I meant to hurt them. I expected – or perhaps wanted – to find questionable messages from young girls with slutty usernames, maybe his female clients from the gym, listing the scandalous ways in which they’d thank him for tightening their cores and molding their legs into smooth, toned trunks.

What I found wasn’t nearly as simple – Bryan had requested and paid for pornographic art, which he’d thought out in incredible detail: fetishistic mayhem I’d never thought could exist anywhere outside of science fiction. I looked through every drawing, from the rough sketches sent by the artists and approved by Bryan, to the finished products, trying to fuse my mind with Bryan’s and figure out the thought process that led him to this. Through his glowing computer screen, I tried to become him.

 

“So,” said Danger, “Did you divorce him and become a wandering transport servicewoman?”

“We’re still together,” I said. He’s in Los Angeles, meeting with some people who want to give him his own DVD series. He’s a pretty well-known fitness trainer. I substitute teach because I enjoy it. I wouldn’t abandon those kids even if Bryan got the deal.”

Danger forced a yawn. “I’ve never heard of him. I do kickboxing. That’s all I do. And look at me.” She dragged a hand across her flat stomach. I tried to remember whether any of Bryan’s fantasy women looked like Danger.

She flicked the radio on and twisted the knob until she found a station she liked. She tapped her heels in tune with a juvenile pop-punk song midplay.

“We’re doing okay, though,” I said, talking over the machine-gun guitars and braking at the cyclopian eye of the traffic light.

“Take a left here,” she said.

When the green arrow lit up, I took my foot off the brake, turned onto the main strip of whatever town we’d just entered, and pulled into the first roadside diner I spotted.

The diner was called Red Carpet Cafe’ and was decked out like a celebrity hotspot. The front steps led to a glass entryway underneath a maroon awning, adorned with star-shaped lights and a marquee featuring the day’s food specials.

Danger said she’d rather stay in the car, but agreed to come in when I told her I’d pay for breakfast. I tugged on the diner’s glass double-door, which made a shiff sound as it opened, and held it for her. The diner’s lobby, made to reflect the prestige of its name, was embellished with black-and-white photos of movie directors and beloved actors, and the tile floor was painted to look like a rolled-out red carpet. The air conditioning swept Danger’s red hair as she passed through the doorway, and there was a certain beauty about her, all the allure of any cover-story socialite I could think of, but in the out-of-makeup way. Playing her doorwoman and seeing her flounce across that red carpet in those black heels, I imagined Danger de Mort headlining the next box-office smash.

After a teenaged waitress seated us in a roomy booth, I used the cloth napkin to wipe away the remains of the caterpillars I’d clomped while walking from the car to the diner. Danger ordered an orange juice. I was too disgusted with the green and black smears on the white napkin, and with myself for my public behavior, to even look at the waitress. It must have been mutual, because she did not ask me if I wanted anything.

While we waited, I asked Danger about the tattoo on her forearm: a helical blue shell with a coiled mass of tentacles percolating from a hood-shaped opening. A single eye indented the shell, and it appeared iridescent, as though it had been painted with the film of a soap bubble.

“I’ll let you ask me one question about it,” she said, and I thought of a conversation I often had with Bryan about how celebrity actors must grow tired of fans asking them to quote their most famous characters or to slip into a phony accent they’d owned onscreen a decade ago. I bet everyone asked Danger about her ink.

I asked, “What did the tattoo artist use for the eye?” and I immediately wished I’d asked her what the creature was. But there was something about the eye, something about the way its colors seemed to change as Danger moved her arm, blue and purple and yellow, in flux.

“I told him I wanted everyone who looked at me to see something different,” she said. She swiveled her arm. The colors flickered. “This is what he did for me.”

The waitress returned and placed a sweating glass of orange juice on the table. She looked down at me, the shoe-wiper, the public menace with death mashed into her napkin, and asked, “Have you decided?”

I’d been so enchanted with the shining eye of Danger’s forearm that I hadn’t even begun thumbing through the breakfast menu. “Just a fried egg,” I said. “No butter on the toast.” I didn’t really want it, but not having glanced at the menu, I thought of the last meal I’d made for Bryan before he’d hopped a plane to L.A. He took his fried eggs underdone and his toast butterless; he loved to watch the yellow lump burst and drag the bread crust through the yolk.

The waitress scribbled the order on a white pad and turned to Danger.

“I want the Anne Francis,” she said, pressing her finger against an image of food on the menu. “Bacon, not sausage. Potatoes crispy, not burnt. And a side of raspberries. I’m sure you’ve got some back there.” The waitress jotted it down and scuttled off, probably suppressing groans. I was dying for a coffee, but was still embarrassed about scraping the corpses from my shoes and didn’t need another reason to draw attention.

My eyes meandered to the glitzy marquee menu and then to the wall of black-and-whites – had they really snagged Ingrid Bergman’s autograph? Danger, disinterested and withdrawn, stared at the backs of her hands.

I’d tried to treat this like an adventure, an outing with a best friend, but the silence made me see the hitchhiker as a stranger again. The freckles dotting her nose and cheeks were unfamiliar; the way she shook the hair out of her eyes was something out of a magazine spread. She didn’t even trust me enough to tell me her name. She was a kid. I was supposed to call Bryan in an hour to see how his meeting had gone, and I was countless miles from home, far from our bed, where I liked to lie when we talked on the phone, and far from my garden, where I could bury my hands when we were done.

Danger tore the fat away from the bacon with her front teeth. She smashed her egg yolks with a fork.

“What do you do for a living?” I asked.

She skewered a piece of egg and didn’t look up from her plate. “I don’t remember.”

“Why can’t you tell me anything about yourself?” I said, stabbing a chunk of my own egg and mirroring her mannerisms. “I told you about me.”

She went “Ah,” holding up a finger, indicating that I was to wait for her to finish chewing. After swallowing the eggy mass, she said, “No, you told me about your husband. I know more about him than I know about you. All I know about you is you don’t like caterpillars on your shoes. You said something about teaching, but I can’t see you taking care of children.”

“I like to keep a garden,” I said. “That’s why I hate the caterpillars. I make life. They chew it up. Your turn.”

“I used to cliff dive at Crooked Pitch. Happy?”

“You can do better than that.”

She put her fork down. “What if this is a test?” she asked. “What if Mother Nature put me on the side of the road with that cardboard sign?”

“Fine. What’s the test, then?”

“It’s not for me to figure out, Kate.” Her words came out like spit, yet she pronounced my name the way a protective sister might. I ripped off a piece of toast and clammed up. Danger’s egg yolks had spread across her entire plate, drowning the bacon. She sighed as if resigning, touched a finger to the white ceramic, and asked if I’d ever dissected an animal.

“Frogs in middle school,” I said.

She worked her finger through the yolk. “My father was a crabber and a fisherman. He was also a drinker. One night, he got loaded and brought home one of his traps. He’d caught something he hadn’t wanted. It looked like a tiny sea monster.” I pictured the sea-beast tattooed on her forearm. “I was bad that day. I broke a cup, muddied the kitchen floor, made a lot of noise. Cried for no reason. My father hated that.”

“Did he hurt you?”

The yolk began to solidify around the bacon and the barely-touched potatoes. She continued pushing her finger through it, and the yellow gunk collected at the end of her nail. “I was twelve,” she said. “I think he knew better than to hit me anymore, but I was still afraid. He put this, this thing in front of me, and he told me to eat it. Everything but the shell. So I did. With my hands.”

I needed her name now, but I didn’t have it.

“It made me stronger, Kate, pulling every tentacle from that shell. They were like weeds with strong roots. It took me a full minute to chew each one. I even downed the eye and scraped the rest of the meat out of the shell with my fingernails.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew he didn’t think I could do it. He’d passed out by the time I finished, so for all he knew I could have thrown it out the window, but it was still victory. I didn’t throw up, just gagged a little. Had a nice conversation with the bathroom mirror after that. I was pretty sure the thing had still been alive while I was picking it apart. Even when you swallow and it all stays down, that’s not the type of thing you ever really digest; know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

She stopped playing with the food and pushed the plate away from her. “I need to get the hell out of this place,” she said. She flagged down the waitress for the check. “Thanks for the ride, Kate. I can find my way from here.”

 

Every morning, I passed a Lutheran Church on my way to work. The church was older than my parents. God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts, the church sign once declared in blinding white letters on paneled wood. Bryan, slouching in the passenger seat, amended the sign: “God always re-gifts the spiritual fruitcake.” Even road signs weren’t safe from my husband’s wit.

We rode to a fancy French restaurant and he mimicked the waiter’s accent. We shared dessert, a slice of white cheesecake in a perfect triangle. After that night, I began recording the messages on the sign, even the ones that weren’t all that funny, and a year later I already had so many pad pages, gas receipts, and old napkins full of laconic scripture, I could’ve easily scribbled the opening chapters of my own Book of Holy Passive-Aggression.

A week into my summer vacation, a few days after breakfast with the hitchhiker, I overtoasted an English muffin while distracted by a talk-show on television, and began planning a trip to the store. I whipped the car keys around my finger and headed down the road – driving past the church, I could just make out the words, Fight Truth Decay, behind the wall of caterpillars.

The night before, I’d dreamed of graphite-sketched women with mile-high stilettos and pink hair stalking me through the halls of my old high school. They jerked with each step as though being drawn on the spot. “I miss you,” Bryan had said on the phone the night before, in the weakest voice I’d ever heard come out of him. He must have suspected that every word between us made me think of the grotesque pictures on his computer, of impossible naked acrobatics he’d never even suggested we try together but was quick to fictionalize with his fantasy women. When he said he missed me, I wondered if he was imagining me revving my little Japanese car and disappearing from his life.

“I miss you, too,” I said. I knew how I sounded. I wanted to hurt him. I also wanted to snuggle him like he was a child apologizing for a mistake, but I knew he’d be filming his debut fitness video the following morning and would be surrounded by sweat-drenched, hardbodied women in tight sports bras. He’d enjoy their blithe personalities, their flawless skin, and their exuberance for increasing their heart rates. He’d place his hands around their narrow waists to make sure they were squatting with immaculate form.

“I’m going to buy a brand new computer when I get home,” he muttered. “I’ll get rid of all that stuff.”

“Let’s not get into that now,” I said. You have to focus.”

“Whatever you want.” He sounded defeated, as though he’d spent all day gathering the courage to speak to me about this. After a breathless pause, he said, “I’m about to take my group through some stretches. We’re filming Plyometrics at nine.”

If the test video satisfied the fitness company’s bigwigs, Bryan would be called back to Los Angeles and his fitness program would be promoted on national television. This was supposed to be a time for celebration, but I couldn’t detain my shock at what I’d found on his computer, and the shock manifested itself in my speech. My hoarseness told him I’d been throwing up. Every avoided subject was a sign I’d been tearing through his suit-closet for incriminating pictures and revealing letters. I felt like a culprit myself. My tone was false. My voice, a lie. When I spoke, Bryan could sense my nightmares.

When he’d first received the call from the fitness company, we’d sat at the kitchen table and planned a weekend of poolside laughter, fresh hotel sheets, iced champagne, and commemorative photos to top it off, but hoping for any of that now seemed ineffectual. Bryan persisted with his promises to exhume a sexual seed that had been growing untrimmed for years.

“You’ll do great,” I said.

When we finished talking, I walked to the garden. I drove my hands into the topsoil, working them in until I couldn’t see anything below my wrists. I spread my fingers like roots.

 

When the geraniums had sprouted promising buds, Bryan returned. An airport shuttle stuttered up to the driveway and Bryan appeared from behind the sliding door, dragging two Pan American suitcases behind him. I waited at the end of the walk. When he reached me, he dropped the luggage and kissed my lips.

Over the next few weeks, Bryan’s behavior became erratic. He was constantly crouched in front of the television, watching and rewinding clips of his fitness demo. When I’d try to watch it with him, he’d tell me to let him concentrate. His computer never moved from its desk. I wondered whether he knew I’d been shuffling through his things. He kept his sentences short when he bothered to speak at all.

Mornings were percussed by Bryan’s wake-up cycle: swing the bedroom door open so the knob bashes against the wall; pore over DVDs and drop the television remote onto the wooden TV stand; lift and release dumbbells on the living room floor; hurl the sliding glass door of the shower hard enough that it fully closes the first time; and when going out for the mail, slam the front door to be sure it doesn’t stick.

I remember watching a news story one morning while drinking hazelnut coffee. A newscaster in a charcoal suit, poised at the entrance of an outdoor aquarium, chatted with a young woman in a yellow raincoat. A name-tag was pinned to her front, and the newscaster held a black microphone to her face as if offering her an ice cream. “The ocean was once full of externally-shelled cephalopods, half of which are now extinct,” she said, with a TV smile that made the contrition in her voice seem terribly detached. “That’s why this find is so thrilling, Mark,” she went on. The newscaster nodded dully. “These creatures are impossible to track, and no one has ever figured out their reproduction patterns. They are literally living fossils.” A red ribbon of text accelerated across the bottom of the screen, unreadable through the steam rising from my cup.

I peered out the window at the rhododendrons puckering in the post-rain sunlight, awaiting my attention. Bryan was becoming more volatile by the day. Once his increasingly raucous morning routine was finished, he would either sit by the phone or disappear until dinner. He was afraid to wake me up, even when he knew I wasn’t sleeping. I still dreamed of crudely drawn women with flesh bared, of Bryan’s laptop cord morphing into a white, snakelike rope, looping around my neck and constricting me until my dream body died.

On the television, the woman in the raincoat led the newscaster toward a stone pool. The cameraman tilted the lens so that the surface of the pool was visible. Starfish clung to the sides. Beneath the opaque water, two white blurs darted around the perimeter. “Only three aquariums on Earth have been able to produce fertile nautilus eggs,” the woman said, “but no one has ever raised one to maturity. The animals often develop shell formation problems. No matter what we do, it’s almost as though they will themselves to die through some sort of natural trauma. We are hoping for an entire family once these eggs hatch.”

I recorded the rest of the show and set the television to record every installment of the Channel 17 morning news for the next two weeks. I remembered the cardboard sign – Nautilus – clutched in Danger’s hands, and how after breakfast, she wouldn’t let me take her there. But I had: I’d asked her about the tattoo with the gleaming eye, which had led to her telling the story of eating the tiny sea monster. Nautilus wasn’t a physical place; it was a mindset, a birthmark, a state of conversation. Why hadn’t she needed me once we’d arrived?

That night, Bryan lay awake, whispering about the bosses at Morton Fitness, how they sat around a polished oak table and discussed how to dish Bryan’s ideas to the public, how to get people to believe him. He joked about their tacky suits and ironed black ties, about how out of place he felt standing before them in a yellow jumper and hightops. This moment was a balm for both our wounds, maybe, but where joking would have turned to laughter, laughter to teasing, teasing to frisking, frisking to lovemaking, there was only me, the blackness of the bedroom intermittently lit by the passing of cars, the echolalia of the neighbors’ dobermans, the stubborn crack in our small-paned window, and the thought of caterpillars devouring my jasmine and coating my home like a shell.

 

The air felt cooler in the morning, as though the house had taken a breath. While I roamed the kitchen, scrambling eggs and brewing fresh coffee, the phone began shaking in its cradle. Bryan rushed in, materializing out of nowhere. He scooped the phone from the cradle and spoke his own name into the mouthpiece. After a series of nods, nine instances of Yeah and six of Thank you, Bryan hung up. “It was Morton,” he said. “They’re giving me the DVD deal.” I finished arranging breakfast and slid the egg-laden ceramic plates, wedding gifts from Bryan’s parents, onto the table. Bryan barely touched his food as he explained his ideas for the fitness program; he had clever slogans, poster designs, and even sales numbers figured out in his head. I managed “Mmm-hmm” through a burning mouthful of coffee.

I stabbed a piece of yellow egg with my fork, rolling it around on the plate, thinking of the pregnant nautilus. I thought of Danger devouring tentacles like strings of white pasta.

Bryan left for Los Angeles again. After he kissed me goodbye and boarded the shuttle, I slipped his demo disc from its sleeve, dropped it in the DVD tray, and planted myself on the ottoman. Once the Morton Fitness logo – the silhouette of a woman jumping rope – had popped in and faded, Bryan appeared on the screen, clad in black tights and flanked by two women, each with slender arms and abs of granite. “Guess what?” Bryan said, turning to the camera as though the viewer had just stumbled onto the set, which was built like a three-walled gym, “You’re here for the Plyometric Cardio Burner. Get ready to jump higher, run faster, and get those ripped thighs. Are you ready, Karen?” The woman on Bryan’s right, a curly-haired brunette who looked about seventeen, fist-pumped her approval. I endured the full forty minute workout, fast-forwarding here and there when the endless squats began to bore me or when the women in the video pumped out thirty reps of a jumping-jack-knee-tuck hybrid of which I was quite sure I couldn’t do a single one. When Bryan finished the workout, he and the women were drenched. I couldn’t help feeling a bit proud. My husband, the fitness icon. “That’s it,” he said to the camera lens. “How do you feel?”

As the shot faded back to the Morton logo, he high-fived the unnamed woman, and the brunette approached him for a sweaty hug. I expected him to shoot her one of the glib retorts he always gave me when I attempted the sweaty hug, but he reciprocated. Great grins spread across their faces in what felt like slow motion. The screen went dark as they embraced, leaving me with nothing but this moment, as if they’d drowned in each other’s moisture.

 

I still blame the caterpillars for what happened to my garden. The army of trees behind our home, which reclined over seven acres of sprawling hills, had gone from their usual apple-green to an aberrant brown.

I had spent springtime training Carolina jasmine to climb a crosshatched fence I’d nailed together and painted myself. I’d propped the fence alongside our duck pond, which my father had dug with a backhoe a few years back. During the caterpillars’ assault, my jasmine was the last plant to die, chewed to stems over the course of two nights. I scraped clumps of black caterpillars from the trellis. They felt like soft meat in my hands. I collected the hanging pots, ripped up the roots of the spider plants, and dumped the caterpillars into the pond. A duck, gliding over the still water, pecked at the ripples, unsure. I tore the fence out of the ground and swore until my mouth went dry.

Bryan had been gone for over a week, and I needed something green in the yard again.

Determined to regrow my jasmine but completely ignorant of what I’d need, I drove to the hardware store. I passed the Lutheran church sign (In the dark? Follow the Son!) and turned onto Cocca Ave, crushing legions of caterpillars beneath my tires. I attacked the store’s aisles, sifting through barrels of seed packets and rearranging the architecture of the spade display. As I heaved the door open with an armful of gardening loot, I saw her.

The hitchhiker, in a maroon dress and black heels, stood on the curb between a chest-high recycling bin and a telephone pole plastered with fliers for missing pets. Her arm was extended, her thumb pointed toward the sky.

“Danger?” I didn’t know what else to call her. I wished she would lower her arm before someone else pulled onto the shoulder and whisked her away.

“Hi, Kate.” Her hair settled in a red curtain as she turned.

“I’m sorry,” I said, still feeling uninhibited. “I should have been more helpful when you told me about your father.”

The sign was tilted against the recycling bin, facing the road. “You don’t seem like the same person,” she said.

“Why are you hitchhiking? How did you get all the way back here?”

“I shouldn’t really say. There are rules.”

Thinking I had figured out at least one of the hitchhiker’s tenets, I didn’t bring up the tattoo again.

“What if we start traveling somewhere, but we never arrive?” I asked.

Half of her mouth bent upward like a sliver of moon. In pure daylight, her face was a white, freckle-flecked seashell.

“Please spend the afternoon with me,” I said. “Please.”

 

During the non-air-conditioned return drive, I explained why I’d been ransacking the hardware store. I told Danger about my dreams, how the grotesque hand-drawn women had returned after I’d watched Bryan’s workout video. That brunette, Karen, had appeared, often with tentacles sprouting from her neck and curling around mine; her skin was made of hard white lines, as though etched with blackboard chalk.

Danger asked my age. She said nothing else during the entire drive.

“Thirty-four,” I said.

She smiled warmly, as if speaking to a grandparent.

Summer heat began lightly toasting my skin, just as it had when I’d first shaken Danger’s hand in the car. Still wearing high heels, she stood in the garden over a backdrop of yellow and green. A white admiral fluttered over her shoulder; she swatted at her hair. Sunlight cut through the striped maples, and as Danger lowered her hand, her graffittied skin glimmered with color. Her entire form refracted in the hot beams.

In some ways, I felt safer with Danger than with Bryan, who moved from room to room like a ghost of himself, and whose invented ghosts had burst through the walls of my dreams. The house felt more familiar, even among the empty pots and rotting, leafless trees, than the Red Carpet Cafe’, dressed in its unnatural colors and bedecked with gaudy bullshit.

Upon seeing the ruins of my jasmine, Danger immediately bent at the waist and pulled the trellis upright. We crouched over the soil and planted the new seeds together. She dragged a shovel from the woodshed and asked if I had anything we could burn. We descended the concrete stairs into the cellar; I breathed in ten years of must. Soot rushed to occupy my lungs. Danger laughed as she wiped the dust from the surface of Bryan’s wine rack with her bare palm. “No,” I said, stifling a cough. “We can’t burn that.”

I led her to the wood stove, currently abandoned, which sat in the back of the cellar behind ceiling-high stacks of gardening supplies. “That’ll do,” Danger said. She dumped a shovelful of ash and white coal into the metal bin under the stove, then led me up the cellar stairs the same way I’d brought her in. She poured the contents of the ash bin over the surface of each dirt pile we’d made, around the foundations of every root in the garden. She promised me the ashes would avert the appetites of the caterpillars, and indeed, long after the last time I ever saw her, I would still clot flowerbeds with ash. Stems always issued unharmed from soil to sky.

“He likes her,” I told Danger after I fast-forwarded to the end of Bryan’s fitness DVD. “That’s why he’s been so good about his computer. He didn’t touch it when he came back from L.A.”

“You’re assuming a lot,” she said. I leaned back on the couch, sinking into the forest green upholstery. She arched forward, elbows on knees, grinding the spikes of her heels into the hardwood floor.

“You do the workouts?” she asked.

“What?”

“Maybe it would help if you did the workout instead of watching him hug a sweaty woman over and over.”

“I’m not in good shape.”

“That’s the point of a workout, Kate. Let’s do this – ” she peeked at the DVD sleeve, “– Cardio Burner, together. Then I’ll be a sweaty woman, and you can hug me, and you’ll see that this thing is in your mind.”

I refused. But even after I’d gone to the kitchen and had begun preparing a chicken stir-fry, I heard the Morton theme music and Bryan’s voice, followed by the sticky sound of feet on hardwood. She was doing it.

I couldn’t watch. I drew out the time it took to prepare dinner, making sure to place the dishes on the table just as Danger was wandering into the kitchen, and as she drifted through the doorway, a trail of sweaty vapor rose in her wake.

“Hug me,” she said, ignoring the steaming plates. I was boxed into the L-shaped alcove formed by the sink and the blue tile counter. I felt a feeling like fear, and opened my arms. Danger looped her hands around my shoulders. Something in her touch, her scent, her sweat gliding along my skin, her arms hooked flimsily around me – youth bled from her.

I asked her age, whispering into a drape of red hair. She said she couldn’t remember.

 

I awoke at midnight with a cold hand caging my wrist.

After dinner, I’d asked Danger if there was somewhere I could bring her. She told me no, not this late. I watched with admiration as she threw back four shots of Bryan’s special bourbon, and as I changed the sheets in the guest room for her, she clandestinely stumbled into our bedroom, snuggled beneath the calico quilt, and fell asleep. I would have woken her had I not wanted the company, a solid body to weigh down the other side of the bed, so badly. When I felt her hand, I imagined she was my teenage daughter. Envisioning myself with children, I noticed the caterpillar on the wall, traversing an orb of moonlight. I pretended this orb was a second moon, with the body of the caterpillar blackening the surface like a crater, and I whispered to my teenage daughter stories of how her father and I gazed at that same moon on our wedding night, surrounded by ramparts of gift-wrapped boxes, our skin dancing as our blood rushed beneath it. I held onto this fantasy until the caterpillar moved, making me forget the second moon. I leaped from bed, felt cold fingers slide from my wrist, grabbed the nearest object (Danger’s high-heeled shoe) and crashed it against the wall. The kill wasn’t clean. When I brought my hand down, the caterpillar scuttled away, and the heel of the shoe severed its body; the lower portion stuck to the wall and the upper portion retreated frantically until I smashed it with my bare hand. Languid, half-asleep, I got slowly back into bed, careful not to wake my daughter, and before I closed my eyes, I tried to shimmy my wrist back between her still fingers.

 

I woke to an open shade, a brown smear on the wall, the phone ringing, and a woman-shaped dintin the opposite side of the mattress. I grabbed the cordless phone from the cradle and groaned unintelligibly into the mouthpiece.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” Bryan said, sounding ready to take on the world. “It’s great to hear your voice.”

“Yours, too.” I gazed at the spot where Danger had been. Her scent, that of cinnamon and down, was everywhere.

“You’re speaking to Bryan Cross, the Nicest Guy in America. Trademark.”

“That’s what they’re calling you?”

“Yeah. I admit, it’s a silly marketing gimmick, but Morton liked my smile.”

“What about Karen? What does she call you?”

There was a long stretch of silence. “Who?”

“The girl from the video. The one who rubbed her sweaty body all over you.”

I walked through the bedroom doorway into the brightly-lit kitchen. I squinted and felt my way around. Danger sat at the table, eating oatmeal with a salad fork. Her hair was a shaggy red mane, and her eyes, black against the sunlight, were fixed on me.

“Katie,” Bryan said, “This is the way fitness videos work. You have to act all buddy-buddy with people and look like you’re having a great time. People who aren’t in shape feel like shit, and after they work out, their knees are rickety and they’re on the verge of vomiting. They need to know that a community of involved people is there for them, and it helps if those people appear as though they like each other.”

“How am I supposed to believe that? Why did you stop looking at porn all of a sudden? Your computer hasn’t moved from its desk since the first L.A. trip. Things don’t change that quickly, Bryan.”

“You’re right. They don’t. But it’s not what you think.”

I sat at the chair across the table from Danger. Her eyes were still on me. As she lifted the fork, dripping with mush, to her mouth, her tattoo shimmered. The oatmeal steamed. I inhaled brown sugar.

“I killed a caterpillar last night,” I said to Bryan. “They’re in the house now. And you’re not here. This is the kind of thing we’re supposed to do together.”

He forced a laugh. “Killing bugs?”

“Defending the castle.”

Another pause. “I know, Katie. I’m coming home soon. We’ll talk again.”

After hanging up, I realized I hadn’t told him about my nightmares of being strangled with wire, that even if Bryan never looked at his artwork again, it decorated my dreams, and every night it killed me.

“Hi,” Danger said with sleep in her voice. I reached across the table and touched her hand. She was wearing one of my robes. We linked fingers.

 

I threw jeans on, gassed up the car, and drove Danger to the aquarium (the Lutherans had put together a message about forgiving the wicked; the deluge of caterpillars teemed around the white letters as if hiding them from me).

Yes, she’d said when I’d asked if I could bring her somewhere. There were no hints save for the cardboard sign in the backseat of my car. The tide pool from the eleven o’clock news was set between an animatronic narwhal and the gift shop, the gaps filled with dozens of passersby whose expressions ranged from enthralled to fatigued. Children waved pearl-colored wind toys with dolphins for petals; the wordless chatter of tour guides vibrated through the walls; a little girl ran between Danger and I, treading over my feet; a woman with a ring on every finger took my hand and apologized for the girl.

“I’ve been everywhere,” Danger muttered, placing her palms on the stone rim of the tide pool and leaning over the surface of the water. “I just point my finger and go wherever the driver decides to take me. It’s an exercise in interpretation, I guess.”

She told me where she’d started. If it had been anyone else, if I hadn’t felt the softness of her hand, the honesty in the lines of her skin, that road map of veins and creases and invisible hairs, I would not have believed how far she’d traveled. I leaned next to her, watching the water. She tracked every ripple.

White blurs jolted beneath, bubbles rolled across the top like boiling tap water on a stove, the perfect living conditions described by the girl in the yellow raincoat on the news. I wished one of the creatures would bob its head, if it had one, above the surface and prove to me it was growing properly, that its shell wasn’t caving in, that it wasn’t willing itself to die.

Knowing why she had come here, why she’d needed someone to take her here, I took her hand again, lifted it from the rocks, unclenched it. I felt her bones relax. I set her fingers against my lips, one by one. The grooves in her fingertips were like the stony impressions in the face of a fossil, revealing layer after layer after layer. You are forgiven, I thought, kissing her toughened skin. These hands, these contrite fingers, tore that innocent animal apart, and that’s why you’re here. But the creatures in the pool can’t forgive you themselves.

Her eyes narrowed again, her expression tentative, and her chest rose and fell in quick beats, just as it had when she’d finished exercising and walked into the kitchen dripping. As she raised her other arm, her artwork came into view, that gorgeous prismatic nautilus, and I tasted sea salt as I touched her first two fingers to my mouth.

 

            Winter destroyed the caterpillars. I wished their passing had been more romantic, but it was better than local madmen spraying fire at every stalk of vegetation in the district. While lying awake and counting the speckles of light reflected by passing vehicles onto the ceiling, I contemplated whether my murder-by-shoe had been the turning point in the struggle, whether the caterpillars had just given up after that.              

Bryan returned, and during single-degree temperatures, when the spruces froze solid after a spritz of rain and the front steps were clumped with snow, he pined to go to Los Angeles more than ever. Every other month, Morton would drag him away to appear on QVC or lead a week-long workout series with the Army. I watched the news every morning and took to eating oatmeal with a fork. One Saturday, when the sun had cracked the clouds for the first time in weeks and Bryan was selling his exercise program on the Home Shopping Network, the phrase “disappearance of the nautilus” caught my ears through the popping of hot butter in the egg pan. According to the lady in the yellow raincoat, now flanked by two police officers with folded arms, a young woman scooped the animals out of the tide pool and ran off with them cradled to her chest. Without saying a word, she hit the glass door with her shoulder and vanished into the sun, her body blurring together with the bulk of the creatures, her hair like tentacles and their tentacles like hair.

 

I considered taking up hitchhiking, but I waited.

 

After the airport shuttle had pulled away, Bryan collapsed to his knees in the snow. I knelt next to him, took his face in my hands, and rubbed the tears away with my thumbs before they froze. He told me he wasn’t addicted; he’d only been curious. Karen was no one; he hadn’t spoken with her since the shoot. He hated how I avoided him and floated to other rooms when he was home, how I pretended to be asleep after he got up, how he’d lie in hotel beds with the phone resting on his chest, awaiting my familiar ring, missing me.

I said nothing; I couldn’t even comfort him. Moreover, I couldn’t bring myself not to believe him. I tried to make myself cry, but nothing came out. I took him by the hand and led him inside, dragging one of his suitcases and assuring him I’d unpack his things in the morning.

That night, Bryan kept me awake with ceaseless tossing and turning. Unable to take anymore, I kicked the white sheet from our bodies, watching it float from my foot and settle against the oak dresser like a curtain of fog. I rolled onto him. He tore at my thin nightgown, and after flinging it into the corner, he put his mouth on me, instinctively, like an animal struggling to seal a wound with saliva. In the morning, when sunlight shone through the fish tank and cast chlorinated ripples against the bedroom wall, I felt exonerated.

 

Bryan is in the driver’s seat. I am on the passenger side with Ruby, our daughter, resting in my arms. We are in the parking lot of the Lutheran church, where Bryan leads “celebrity workouts” with the church’s elderly members on the weekend. It’s an election year, and the church’s big sign shares the lawn with the names of political hopefuls. “Judge Russell,” Bryan quips, gazing at a lawn sign the size of a chalkboard. “I will, if I ever meet the guy.” He draws a long breath and lets the air settle into his chest. He scrutinizes the old church through the pocked windshield as though considering whether he wants to go in, whether he’s supposed to sit in the driver’s seat forever.

            Ruby gazes up at me, cooing for her bottle, her blue eyes like little mood-rings. I nudge my index finger into her soft palm, and she squeezes. One day, years from now, while Ruby and I are tending the garden together, dumping ashes over soil, she will ask me about my life, about the adventures in youth and romance that led to her birth. I will tell her about beginnings, how her parents fought off the caterpillars, and how the caterpillars finally left us – they all became moths, I’ll tell her, fluttering from their cocoons and filling the sky like a fireworks display.   I remember the scent of cinnamon and down, a road trip with no destination, and if I’d hitchhiked to Crooked Pitch instead of staying to give life to Ruby, how I’d have found a frozen high-heel-print at the water’s edge, the legacy of a little savior, Danger de Mort ascendant, forever kicking through the waves with the weight of the world cradled in her arms.

 

 

BIO

richard hartshornRichard Hartshorn lives in upstate New York and earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Split Rock Review, Hawaii Women’s Journal, and other publications.

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