Short Shorts

Allegra Cohen

Copyright 2011 Allegra Cohen. Cover copyright Amelia Farley 2011.

Preface

I went through Europe writing helter-skelter, and so the shorts in this collection are honest but tawdry. The longs are a little more serious, the sorts of pieces in which you try to instill a mood and an end and all that. This is my first collection and you can read it in one gulp, the shorter ones in line at the supermarket; and I am very thankful to my parents for being ever-encouraging and helping me to produce and publish it. I would like to thank Amelia Farley for doing the cover. I am also thankful to Esme Weigand, for being a staunch editor and a glorious person, and for showing me how it’s really done.

The Shorts

Each page is its own story, short enough to read in line at the grocery store.

"Merci, monsieur." The old woman took her bag from the butcher. He twisted his lip beneath his prizewinning mustaches and frowned.

"Not so much this week, eh? Are you slowing down, Lydia?" He gave a caketaking grin.

"Mon dieu, non, monsieur. I am only practicing for the grave. My daughter has gotten married and now we do not cook so much together."

"Listen to the medicin, madame, listen to the doctor. He tells you that you need your beef." The butcher lifted his saucisson finger in emphasis.

Lydia hefted her bag. Her forearms were as dimpled and thick as fatted cow legs. "I have plenty here, monsieur. I make a hearty stew."

"A stew any man would long to taste, madame." The butcher twinkled his eyes as the cash register showed its price and Lydia sighed in happiness.

Forty-seven: excellences, mediocrities, years. I have a small crystal ball in my left hand, a big one in the right. More in front of me, catching the light. Without fail they tend to trail in glistening wakes so bright.

My eyeballs, my balls. I have no balls. There's a trio of little boys watching, scratching and scrunching their noses. A girl sniffs her roses. A man stubs his toeses. Stupid American sandals.

The man is about as old as I am. He has a job mowing lawns of money, he drinks wine and eats from rivers of honey. My contacts are giving me a headache. I'm trying to catch his eye, I want to send shivers down his spine.

Shit, I dropped a ball.

Rue Gambetta, then Square Gambetta and now Place Gambetta. "Who was Gambetta?" I asked, folding the map. Cherie flipped her hair.

"Gambetta was a beautiful woman with long tresses that were red and golden. All the boys loved her." Cherie rubbed at a ring on her finger, a blue heart, I thought it was tacky.

"I don't believe you," I said.

Cherie looked sad. "Try," she said.

So I was a god of the ages, see, and when I noticed these girlchildren I felt an instant need to woo them, like the movies, I watched movies, even as a god. So I glided up to them and tilted my cap and grinned, and they felt woozy in their knees. My teeth were long and my gums a predatory pink.

"Can I ask you girls a question?" I demanded.

They nodded, the one on the end turned a pretty peach. I patted my snuffbox, front jeans pocket, man of the ages. The one on the end took a bud with a length of wire out of her ear.

"What are your most treasured flowers?" Because every girlchild likes flowers, she likes to tuck them in her bronzed hair and feel the stems tickle her neck.

"Roses," the first one said forcefully, and she had a cascade of roses on her unmade bed, fragrant, the same color as her nails.

The second one was bashful and toyed with her ear-ring. "Peonies," she finally said, and lo, they blossomed, translucent, filling her bathtub with delicate sighs.

The third one seemed at first glorious, her ear-bud dangled into her bosom, a snowy white with a speckling of freckles, she was a darling little egg. But instead, she said, "Johnny jump-ups," and I thought of the insolent flowers and how hard they would be to find, even for a god, and how lifeless their purple and yellow petals got when you only squeezed them twixt your thumbs. It would take a hundred thousand blooms even to cover the end of her cot. To brighten her dead room would take a miracle.

"You are the wickedest of girl-fiends," I declared to her, and suddenly she was there not any longer, and instead in the cracks of a dripping walk, where housewives snatched and weeded. Only a coil of wire on the ground next to her friend beauties. She bloomed in her temerity, in spring, baked under the sun, was silent and rooted to the spot. And forever after people would frown on her, and clip her quietly from her grave.

James is driving and suddenly he starts glancing over his left shoulder in little lapping bursts. He's looking at a field of grapevines. You know how they grow the vines in rows, so you can look down each row and see the little flash of world at the end? Well, somebody—some wise guy or somebody without a girlfriend—he put cutouts at the end of each row, each one different so as you speed by it's like a jerky motion picture. It's a girl whose skirt is billowing up, caught by the wind, and her face is two blushing cheeks and two eyes and an oh! as the skirt erupts to reveal ruffled panties the color of a strawberry granita.

"Whoa," says James, still turning his head from road to field, "whoa, did you see that?"

The road's so bumpy I wish he'd look where he's going. "Yeah," I say, "looked like Janet. Tighty-whities and no spice." I can't even remember what color my panties are.

James leans over and kisses me. "Unlike you."

Outside the sun flows over us and the green of the sapling forest slides by.

I have dyed feathers on my helm and the leather of my boots is kind of greyish and stinky. Luckily it's blustery out, but the chain mail still makes me break a sweat and even in the cold I can smell myself radiating up from the breastplate. I get these gloves that make it hard to hold the flyers and some of them flutter off occasionally like they've decided I'm too stupid to be seen with. I'm stalking around the castle grounds with Louis's little brother (also in mail and tabard) whose face is like a cooked yam under his droopy old jester hat.

There's a group of girls gawping up at the castle and its screeching symmetry and big old towers. I figure maybe swaggering up and bowing, then offering one of them a flyer and winking, I figure all that might get them giggling. There's one I'm watching with boobies like two lances. I take a step towards them and they close up their ranks like a porcupine, peeking over each other's shoulders and laughing, and the dopey looking one gestures to her crotch and the one with the boobies holds up two fingers with maybe an inch between them. My stomach feels like a giant rotten wormy peach.

Would you believe the whole summer's like that? Louis's little brother in tow, sometimes buying him ice cream and then taking him back to change his tabard, Louis never saying a word to me but just handing me more stupid flyers for another stupid old tournament. And the turkey legs roasting in a hell pit with leaping yellow flames, sending off plumes of smoke all succulent, way too expensive. I only ever ate one, and that was bought for me by Bernadette who's almost as old as the castle. And everywhere these girls snickering and the boys peering at me sidelong like, oh my god, that sucks, like they've never had a summer job. Probably haven't.

I'm manning the freaking gate, watching the fat guys belly in with their toddlers, when suddenly this guy's in front of me. He's wearing a striped boatneck, and his face is stylized, all jaw, all Roman nose, all hallowed cheek and ripe lips. Aviators. He raises two fingers and doesn't touch me but traces the line of my jaw in the air, taps my helm almost sweetly.

"Je l'aime," he says, I like it. Then he leaves, some kind of magic on his face and the air's still tingling around me.

Would you believe I'm coming back next year?

The cherry tree is drooped with winter and age, but I remember when it was spring it was new and bursting. The snow is piled around it in white, dirty mounds, snowy white, brown. We're here, my shoulders are hot, his mouth is tracing a crystal path across my exterior, and the snow makes sounds, it goes slut slut slut slut slut.

They chopped the church in half to make a new road. Unfortunately, Pastor John was in the wrong spot at the time.

Under the blue sky; under the watercolored clouds; under the gaze of the sheet of mountains rising from the hills; under terrain of tree groves and pockets of lavender and rapeseed, flurries of purple and yellow, billows of olive and emerald; under the stern tell of the village, whitewashed and sandy gold; under the shuttered eyes; under the sign saying GAZOLE; here slumps a man in an old T-shirt, here is the woman who brushes the hair from his red and sweaty brow.

There's a sound most brilliant. The buzzer, it whines, somebody whines to be let in.

They can stay out, they can stay in the cold. Jemima drinks sherry. Her throat lights up like a Christmas esophagus.

They can stay where they're put. Where he put himself.

She goes to bed.

Waking in the autumn, her bones feel crystallized, so she goes for a bicycle ride to stretch the stiffness from her knees. Her doorstep is brisk and empty. She eats a cup of yogurt standing up, bathed in the light of the fridge and the close grey rays coming from the window. Time passes. She fixes her hair in the mirror, purses her lips, sashays, full of lunacy, around the flat.

The next day, sometime three weeks from then—and now it is snowing—the buzzer goes off again and she goes off as well. It is a decision she makes consciously, with plans streaking down the sides of her brain like watercolors or rain, but the next thing that happens is her body's choice. She lets him in, his eyelashes hold snowglobes, and he smiles so warmly, like drinking hot cider, he leans towards her as he comes in and she catches a lungful of his smell. At first she moves closer just to sniff that smell, that which has ghosted away from the sweatshirt he left in her laundry hamper, ghosted away from her pillow, and because they run parallel, because they always have, he touches her hair and she collapses like a parachute, deflates immediately on his solid ground. He is warm and she can thump his chest and hear sounds, hear his heartbeat in the darkness of his cavities.

"I wanted to open the door," she says, craning her neck for air that she can breathe, air colder than the pocket between them.

"What door?" he asks, muffled by her neck, leaving a snail's footsteps on her collar bone. She imagines it evaporating, a million crystals, breathed back into his fine flaring nose.

"When you buzzed. To be let in. Before the snow came down." She can hardly breathe at all now, she feels her lungs block up with his carbon, she shoves gently at his chest and gently he presses her to the wall. His glistening teeth reveal themselves. He's smiling puzzledly.

"I never buzzed," he whispers in her ear, "you told me not to, so I didn't.

You told me you never wanted to see me again. That lasted. Ha ha." He tugs her towards the bedroom, at this point he probably knows her apartment better than she.

She rolls her eyes at the fridge, bare of their photographs together. In the morning, she'll fix that. In the morning, she'll fix all of this.

There is a man in an aloha shirt slumped on the patio outside the hotel, his bulk clammed neatly into the white plastic chair. He has ruddy fat fingers that cup his cheek, his mustache is disheveled by sleep, and his eyelids are clamped droopily closed. On his feet are black socks, no shoes.

A pebble skips to a halt at his feet. Another one follows, making a clicking sound across the pavement. Something rustles in the bushes. A long leg protrudes from there, followed by a teenaged girl, and a friend with a mullet and a V-neck shirt who stands behind her as they flick more pebbles.

"Fat man!" V-neck hisses. "Oh, fat man!"

"Ssshhhh," the girl giggles.

"Fat man, your hair is on fire," V-neck whispers, "you won't have any left. Your shirt's on fire, man." He takes a pebble from the girl's hand and sends it flying. He sucks on one of the girl's fingers.

“Really, don’t,” the girl says in a soft voice, leaning into V-neck like a sapling under winds. The man sniffles a little but does not wake.

"Your house is being flooded. Your momma got hit by lightning," V-neck whispers louder, around the girl’s finger, "run home, fat man."

"Don't be mean," the girl insists, dislodging her finger, and V-neck reaches around her to cup her breasts. She twists. "Stop it."

V-neck nibbles on her ear. The girl bends her head towards him dreamily; her eyes slip closed for a moment and everything relaxes before she straightens and takes back her ear. "Quit it. Come on, let's leave him alone." She rustles gracefully back into the bushes.

"Fat man," V-neck whispers, before following the girl, "Fat man, your daughter's gonna lose her maidenhead."

The man snorts awake, his whole body jumping forwards, but when he rubs his eyes and peers blearily at the space in front of him, there's nothing left to see.

The flocks of great birds soared together in the sky. Over the mint grasslands, the king of the white birds met with the queen of the black.

"We are being hunted," said he, "we are being punished."

The queen rolled her eyes. "So who ain't?"

Bleeding cold outside and the boulangerie hasn't raised its blinds. Through the mist and the smell of chill and my own wet wool, I can make out the glorious scent of fresh bread. I've got my scarf tied over my head like a gypsy and stamp stamp stamp, o, my feet. Wellies are pits of damp cold darkness. I wouldn't mind some woman bringing me hot cocoa. Chocolat chaud...maybe on her knees. In an apron and not much else. But a piece of bread would be fine even without the woman. Anyways, o friends, no more of that. Got tricked into proving myself, see, now all I get to hump around about is normalities like pastry. It took months to convince Brother Pascal to let me have breakfast duty, just hoping she'll see what they've made of me, and now it's hardly worth it since I can't go to my old place. Which opens earlier anyways but god knows the girl won't have me. O, what a woeful tale. It's like somebody didn't put yeast in my life. Fucking flat and crumbly—woops, sorry, lawd. Gotta be pious. If it's what she wants then damn it I'll lay it on thick til she can't see through it and maybe she'll have me back in her floury embrace. If she even knows I'm a good frère now...wrote her that letter but I bet she set fire to it. Damn, the cold! And her bread was a tough crust and nothing but heavy golden clouds inside...smells like heaven...Dunno whether I love the girl or the goods better. Good lord, they've finally opened, now let me see what I'd like for a little snack...fuck it all, everything's soggy, it's all shit, this was always more fun with Janine.

Gloria, like the champagne, was my dad's driver in New England. Driver to and from the airport, that is; in a black car, I remember vaguely, but maybe that was just the black of her coat and cap like a sailor's cap. Once my parents invited Gloria in. It was raining and outside the night was prismatic and blue. She was big under her coat, her blond hair curled out from under her cap and her face was big and crinkled, older than my parents'; both she and my father were glistening with rain. She must have watched a hundred welcome-home hugs, which were always like vises, the cool pebbly leather of dad's jacket and the warmth of the rest of him, and the rain dripping out of his beard. I don't know what they talked about when the wine was poured—maybe we all sat and groped for something to say, waiting for her to leave, talked about the northeastern weather which united all of us back then.

There is a family of three in the car, two elders and a girl in the backseat. The man is driving. The back of his neck is red and his shoulders are raised like hackles around his ears. The woman sits next to him squinting at a map. She frowns and peers past the windshield out at the dead long desert.

"Straight?" The man wipes sweat from his forehead.

"No, no, no, go right," the woman says.

"I can't go right."

"Then go left."

The car leaps over some speed bumps and hooks left. The girl in the back puts her feet up on the seat.

"Now what?" the man asks.

"Turn left here," the woman says, pointing.

"I can't. There's another sign."

The woman sighs as the car veers right around a corner. It stops. The black heat of the street boils up around it.

"What do you want me to do?" the man asks.

"I don't know? Keep going, I guess."

"Look, I'm the driver, you're the mapreader. Tell me where to go."

The woman bends to the map. "It's harder than it looks, none of these streets are labeled. Turn right here."

The car inches forward, then the man says, "There's another sign."

"Here? Oh no, I guess that's blocked. Here?" The woman cranes her neck. "This is weird, it's like you can only turn in one place on each street."

"We're being herded," the girl suggests to the window.

"Do you want me to turn around?" the man asks.

"I don't know! Why is it always my decision?" the woman says.

"Because this was your idea."

"I don't remember it being my idea. You said, let's go to the park! And the moment we can’t find it or all the stupid trees are dead, you say…”

"That's because this whole city is a shithole."

"What do you want to do?” she asks. “Go home? I'm tired and hungry. I do not want to spend another five hours in the car."

“We couldn’t get out of here anyways,” the girl points out. “We’re trapped.”

"You could go someplace fun with the kid and I’ll get a bus back,” says the man.

"That's totally unrealistic bullshit," the girl says, raising her head, but nobody hears her and she bends again towards the window, resting her forehead on the glass. Through the shimmer of the asphalt she sees figures, moving slowly towards them, winding up out of the ground.

So I picked up a nickel, which counts as five pennies, and then I picked up tuppence, and after that I had seven days of bad luck. First day I looked in the mirror and realized I was going bald; second, third days I spilt coffee on my tie and my secretary looked at me like, why are you still in a job? After that it got worse, I ate something that didn't agree with me and spent half the night on the toilet with Jeanne putting down cups of tea outside the door, wondering since when is my stomach so fucking dainty; and my car broke down, and I wasn't strong enough to push it back home; next day my boss called me in and said he'd been noticing I wasn't performing, even though I knew I was; day after it rained, even though I knew it'd be sunny. My son's paintings out in the backyard curled up like leaves and boy was he mad. My wife—Jeanne—said what's the big deal, just stop picking up pennies. I say it's enough to make you question everything you thought you knew.

The Longs

Written not on the go but at my very own desk.

Phone Calls

Once there was Dana. She lived in a very tall highrise on the top floor all surrounded by stern dark trees, and she did not go down to the other floors because of the white bone dust sprinkled in each little room. She relayed phone calls from the great blue mountain in the distance; they came on slender black lines over the trees, slipping into her relay box, and then the box would buzz, asking her to make the connection. The box used to sound like a cicada, there were so many calls; she used to spend all her nights at the box, making and dropping connections, writing in her little ledger. But there were not so many calls now.

Next to her desk there were high glass doors, and she could step out onto the balcony and breathe the air. It smelled fresh all the time, and green and silent. She kept the doors open all through summer, which it was now. Today she sat at her desk with the relay box turned all the way up, listening to silence.

Then, she heard something, a buzz, familiar, like a cicada, and she felt filled with hope. She looked to the box, and it winked at her. She put on her headphones and made the connection.

They were two women, talking about the ruin extracting business. They summoned pictures in Dana’s head of monsters lumbering through the forest, taking shreds from the ground and sucking out the ore. She thought of the men and women that would come with them, setting up tents and then a town. It would be fun to take a break from relaying and walk down through a town, going someplace to drink a lemonade and talk to somebody nice.

The noise from the box had startled her and her heart was hammering weakly in her chest. She listened to blueprints buzzing over the lines, and the voices soothed her, and all too soon she had to drop the connection.

There was another call that very day, and Dana found that she fell easily back into the rhythm of connections. There was a bird outside that she watched as she listened to the call; it was green and blue and purple, and had two heads, one black and wizened. Dana unwound her headphone extension and went to the balcony.

She opened the doors and the bird cocked its heads at her, but did not fly away. She reached out a hand and it hopped tentatively onto her palm; its talons were tiny and sharp, tickling her. Dana held it until the box called for a drop, and then brought the bird inside.

The bird was named Gardenia, and she was a cheerful fragile thing, whose company Dana enjoyed while she was at her box. Over the next few weeks, they became fast friends.

One day Dana stepped out on the balcony and saw a thinness in the forest, a lost dimension. It was not so dense and ancient, now; it looked almost fertile, the darkness gone, the trees wide neat fences for sunless flowers in the depths. On summer evenings she liked to watch the pale rabbits on the skirts of the forest, dipping in and out; and the darker, heavier things that shambled further inside; but now she did not like looking so much at a forest shaved thin and ghostly. On this evening she was stretching her skin, feeling small after a day at the box, and her hands still shook and tried to make connections; and she realized it had been many weeks since she had stepped onto her balcony and seen the forest.

She watched the treeline carefully, keeping one ear cocked for the buzz of the box and one concentrating on a strange noise that filled the air, not a bird-noise or a bat. It spoke deeply and throbbed through the air, saying grm grm grm. Sometimes a brother would return, farther away: grm grm grm. But over these calls there was the box, insistent like a child, and Dana went to it hurriedly.

It was the peak of the summer and she was bent, broken, shivering over her box with the heat and the noise. There were a hundred men making arrangements, a hundred women screeching at each other, and Dana felt that more plans gone awry and more screaming fits would kill her. So she hung up her headphones, leaving the work to some other relay worker in some other grand green place, and sat back, feeling her bones realign.

It was like the old days when there had been no dearth of calls; entire cities flowing through her black lines and connections made seamlessly, so that the privileged caller heard no gap, no chink or click in certain service; and conversations so versatile it was like living in an endless realm; and her performance flawless, her strength always there in her fingers and eyes and the small of her back. It had been what felt like centuries since she had been needed in this way—the way for which she was built. And the pale yellow light that winked on the relay box, it was the ghostly faerie yellow of her dreams.

She loved the different voices that bounced down her lines. When she heard a shout, she thought her headphones were still on, and somebody was angry because she hadn’t made the connection—but then she knew that it came from outside and that the endless quiet of the forest had been broken.

Dana rushed to her balcony, feeling her throat fill up, and thrust herself out into the light. She let out a cry and Gardenia dug talons into her arm—they swayed, drinking up the change woozily. There was no green left; things looked naked and hot and blistered, and there were two monstrous yellow belchers down in the brush, dormant but with jagged mouths and claws. The heat made Dana feel sick. But then she looked again at the machines, and her breath caught in her throat; a blue anemic hand went to her breast. There were men down there! In fine green vests that glowed in the afternoon light, men pointing and shouting, men unshaven and broad-shouldered and human, in and out of the belcher cabs, in wellies and lumberjack shirts and strong brown hands.

That evening, Dana put extra tomatoes in the soup, sure that the men downstairs would like to come to dinner. Gardenia did not eat anything, and her heart was shuddering beneath her warm down, so Dana put her to bed early and ate dinner alone. The men did not come, and Dana returned to her box, but the headphones felt slimy on her ears and eventually she went to bed, too.

Dawn was cool and misty though the rest of the day would be hot and clear. Gardenia had a fever; her eyes were filmy and she tucked her heads under her wing, away from the light of day. Dana brought some water and covered her with a scrap of sweater before starting work. She kept the volume low, to listen for Gardenia, and for the men who must have seen her highrise and must have been curious.

Sometime during lunch there was a sound that Dana recognized with a deep thrilling joy. The doorbell was singing through the room. She checked on Gardenia, whose feathers were matted and sweaty; then left the room for the dim stairwell, passing doors she had left closed on purpose—she did not like this part of her home and went through it quickly.

The front doors were large and she strained to open them. Outside stood a man in a fluorescent green vest, some red whiskers, and a pair of scarred stiff jeans. Beneath the vest his chest was sanded brown and smooth. Dana held her thin hands tightly together and said, “Hello, can I help you?”

“Sure can,” said the man in a highish voice. “Me and the boys are cutting down these pretty trees and we was wondering, Now where can we get some nice whisky to cool our consciences? A gorgeous woman such as yourself wouldn’t have any alcohol hanging round, would she?”

Dana peered around the man’s bulk and saw the bare sad stubble around them. The earth was a strange dry color that she had never seen before, and looming distortedly in the wrecked flat fields there were those yellow belchers, men hanging like monkeys off them. The air had lost its clarity to dirty sawdust and exhaust. Sweat beaded on her upper lip and under her arms.

Dana turned her attention back to the man. He was looking at her expectantly, a ghost of a sneer forming his upper lip, and suddenly she felt like the last tree in the forest. “I don’t, I’m afraid,” she whispered. “I don’t drink.”

“Might I come up, then? I’m awful hungry and the firm’s sent us nothing but pig skins for weeks. A pretty thing such as you wouldn’t mind it if I came up, would you?” He leaned towards her, a thick odor of smoke and sweat. “Would you?”

His eyes tracked her uncertain face, her hands knotting to and fro. They were frightening eyes, quiet and sure and very dark.

“Be my guest,” she murmured, and turned to show him the way.

He seemed impatient as she climbed the stairs. When they reached the top he was breathing quickly, a massive presence behind her as she fumbled for the door. She asked him to wait for a moment and slipped inside. She hid Gardenia behind the relay box and smoothed her feathers tenderly.

Dana smiled and headed for the door, a long smile that lasted forever. She thought how nice it would be to have flowers, to be given daisies or daffodils; but when she opened the door, the man was empty-handed and his brow was thunderous. “It’s about time, small woman,” he grumbled, heading straight for her sitting room.

He found the treasures she kept there and pocketed them one by one, holding her lips closed and her head against the wall with one hand. When he was finished, he gave her a glance and said, “You’re so blue, woman, you’re hardly worth it.” So he left her alone. She sat for a while, shaking hard, and hoped that he would go hunting in the other rooms. She waited for some noise, but there was nothing and she had to assume he was gone completely.

She went to her bed and cried, cold tears that froze her cheeks, but the relay box called softly from the other room and she roused herself to it, locking the door before she sat down. She donned her headphones and was squinting blearily at her ledger before she remembered Gardenia behind the box. The bird was hot and limp and her heartbeat was too fast, and in between connections Dana fed her water that dribbled back out her beak, and stroked the feathers that were sticking out all over.

When she woke it was evening and there was a strange glow coming from her windows. Padding onto the balcony, she saw a hundred worklights suspended at different heights in the darkness. Figures moved on spidery scaffolding and some great generator roared beneath her. Between the worklights and the moon she could make out two or three sketches of buildings, all taller than hers, being erected in the night. She shivered. Then a noise came from inside: a terrifying dry rattle like bone dice in a glass jar. Dana ran to her bed, peered into the nest sitting there, scooping up Gardenia’s body which was still warm, her eyes still lifelike except nothing inside was seeing with them now. There was no heartbeat. Her mutant bird was dead and the trees were gone now and she had no treasures to see any longer.

In the morning the man came up the stairs again and banged on Dana’s door but nobody answered. Eventually he broke it down. A strange white dust blew in his face—the windows were open—but nothing else was there.

That Ache

They had broke camp no farther than a dead horse behind the big mesquite, and eventually Marie hung up her straw hat there on the branches, put odds and ends there that sparkled in the dusty sun; and she was hanging one now, the shadow of her arm a nice contrast to her peachy sunburnt face, hanging just a little strip of soda can that caught the light and ached. She turned around, licking her lips, and looked at him; and though his jeans were greased with hard labor and his shoulders ached he went up to her and swept her into his tanned and firm arms, kissing her so succulently that she wriggled and he felt his heart ache—

“Quit watching that crap, mum,” says Lucy. “They’ve ‘ached’ three times now.”

“Quit the ‘mum’ thing,’” Marlene snaps back. “You’re American like the rest of us.”

“Quit irritating me, then!”

“Quit being irritating.” Marlene turns back to her computer, sips at fizz from a cup. “Hang up the white dresses, they’re in the back behind the curtain.”

“I know where they are.” Lucy stalks southwards. Onscreen, Jack and his desert bride keep aching.

The shop is as new as her computer is new, sparkling in the sun like Marie’s baubles in a tree. It overwhelms all other efforts on the street; even its sign is bigger, POUT in beautiful rolling pink. But people aren’t coming in—they all sleep and eat in the exact same things they wear on the street, they don’t know that they need flipflops gorged with rhinestones. This town is like a zombie town, full of girls shambling by in stretch leggings and boys with empty stares picking gym-short wedgies out of their nether parts.

Marlene and Lucy ride high above the heathens, keeping to themselves during lunch hour, though Lucy goes out more and more. They try to ward off the sticky girls who shuffle into the dressing rooms and yell to their friends—Minny, Minny, help me with this zipper, it just—grunt—won’t—grunt—rip! They are dressed to kill each day, every day: no bulges, no scuffs, no under-deodorized stubble.

Marlene is infinitely proud of herself for raising such a fine silk-haired girl.

“I hate this place,” says Marlene, mopping her brow. “It ruins your makeup and the heat makes you stupid.” She’s balancing her computer atop a studded jewelry box, sipping fervently at something iced and ochre. Ghosts move on the screen. It’s a sweltering Thursday and her ice is melting faster than she can drink it.

“That’s what AC is for,” Lucy says. “It’s summer, anyways. You got to get used to it.”

“Has the mail come yet?” Marlene is worried about the bills. They seem to flutter in like wounded doves, deceptive, all alone, and then they stay and stay next to her coffee cup on her nice glass desk and shit and reproduce and pretty soon they’re more like vultures, waiting for her to give up and keel over. She’s considering shooting the mailman next time he brings one of those bills.

“Right in front of you. By the cash register.”

Marlene reaches up and swipes the envelopes from where they lie. They look fat and evil. “I’m preoccupied.”

“With ache, yeah,” says Lucy. Marie and Jack are indeed aching, but Marlene has mute on with subtitles.

One bill. Only one, at least. For the air conditioning. The amount they charge you for what should be a woman’s right not to melt! Marlene would give Lucy just to sit without creating sweat puddles in her cracks and crevices.

Here is another envelope, bigger, colored a masculine blue. No decoration, no name, just a sexy eye blue.

Marlene slits the envelope and withdraws a giant folded letter, done in a flowing hand and smelling of deep ocean. It reads:

I saw you through the glass of your shop, your hair falling over your brow, and I had no choice but to fall deeply in love with you. Woman! I would conquer hills for you, I would fell a hundred truck drivers for you, I would brave all the dumb unrepenting sockets and all the unwashed ugly shirts and all the glazed boils of humanity for you if you would even kiss me with your faeried lips—or even look at me—don’t look away!—with any kind of blaze; oh, just a flame, my sweet, just a spark or ember, just the stub of some old firework meant for someone else…I watch you enraptured. You are my princess, my one love, the bane of my fathomless sea…

Marlene looks up, startled, squints past her mannequins to the bright world outside, but of course nobody’s there. She smiles hugely—it’s silly, it is, but there’s a white spark of excitement fizzing in her middle. She calls for her daughter: “Lucy! Look what I got!”

Lucy yawns; the summer turns her into a tan little grub. “What did you get? Another episode of ache?”

“Something of that sort,” Marlene says. “Read.” She proffers the letter and Lucy takes it, burying her nose in the crease—“ooh, ma,” she says, “smells nice, doesn’t it?”

“Read.”

Lucy’s eyes crinkle at the first lines, but as they work over each word she starts to frown. She says, “Hey mom?”

“Isn’t it lovely?” Marlene smiles.

“Are you sure that…I mean,” Lucy works her mouth, “I don’t think this is for you?”

The second she says it Marlene knows she must feel bad. “Of course it is, darling. You haven’t exactly been in here very often lately. And my hair is longer than yours, it’s more likely to fall over my face. And besides,” she raises an eyebrow, “your dresses are looking a little snug.”

Lucy looks down at herself, cheeks red. “My dresses fit just fine. Don’t they? They’re fine.”

“Of course they are.” The letter is getting crumpled in her daughter’s grasp.

“Whatever. I think it’s weird that he sounds so obsessed,” Lucy says, squinting at it.

“You take mum, I’ll take obsessed,” and Marlene turns back to the letter, pinching it gently from Lucy’s hands to examine it further.

Friday: a slow morning, another letter, still blue. Rapturous blue, eloquent:

…And wouldn’t I like to have a soy latte with you? (You only drink soy.) Infinite soy, infinite peril.

Oh, Marlene, you are the kind of woman a man wakes up next to whether he likes it or not…

Oh, romance of the Yellow Pages! He must have found her name there; she pictures him scanning each page, brow fervent. Slamming a fist on the table, putting his head in his hands, the blue letter unwritten and unscented next to him…Marlene glances out the front window, expecting to see a tall figure slip away.

Lucy rolls her eyes. “Mom,” she says, “the first one was okay, but this is just weird.”

“I swear I’ll die of thirst—how romantic,” says Marlene. “That’s so romantic…”

“Mom,” Lucy says, “this is ridiculous. I’m the one who drinks soy.”

“Just a minor thing,” Marlene admits, scratching something in her ledger.

“Whatever,” Lucy says. “Not like I care. It’s pretty creepy.”

“Just passionate, darling. Anyways, your silken over-frock! He speaks my language. I hope he isn’t gay.”

That afternoon few people come into the shop, and Marlene spends the time sweeping and listening to the radio. She braves the sun at three to pop down the street and buy herself a designer cupcake. The air is dry and hot like a curtain around her and she hurries back to the shop, when suddenly the icing on her cupcake slumps off onto the pavement, a sad splat of buttercup sugar. Marlene stops in her tracks, almost wheels around to go demand another one, but she sees her daughter coming, sauntering down the street hung onto by three boys who are simply swooning—and she is nearly burnt, they are scrumptiously tan.

Marlene stays where she is like a deer under fire, figuring that as long as she does not move she will not be seen; and yes, Lucy passes her, glancing in another direction and laughing hard at whatever her boy said. Marlene feels something well in her breast and she blinks until Lucy’s fine brown legs and white-shorted bum are out of sight. Then she bends, her cheeks flaming, and dips her finger in the very tip of her felled icing, just a taste, before it melts and the birds come flying down.

It is Saturday afternoon and Marlene and Lucy are under attack. The people of the sweatpants have sent their best mercenaries, full of fulsome wiggling butts and bouncing unwashed parts. Marlene spends half an hour flittering from one girl to another, prying fragile dresses from their claws, explaining their three-item dressing room policy—and there is one purchase, just one, of a scrunchie decorated with a flower.

When all the prom girls have giggled themselves out of the shop, Marlene collapses onto her chaise and drags a Kleenex over her brow. “Those girls were hideous,” she says to her daughter, who is straightening a display knocked over by one girl’s vinyl sack. Outside, the world is slate blue and stagnant with heat; the clouds stir uneasily in the calm before it rains.

“Totally. Keep yourself hydrated, there may be more. Any new letters?” Lucy asks.

Marlene frowns. Sugared curves and the bleak expanse of my Marlene-less bed—and some other, more intense sentiments that Lucy wouldn’t take lightly. Why suggest to her that her mother’s pen pal is going mad with adoration? She says, “Not anything interesting, darling. He’s losing his touch.”

“Anything more about soy?” Lucy asks.

“Nothing,” Marlene assures her. “Really, nothing of interest.”

“Can I see?”

“I would prefer you didn’t.”

“All right,” but she frowns and Marlene can tell it isn’t all right.

Lucy straightens a couple of racks and Marlene goes to her computer, turning on a new episode of her ache show. Jack and his new woman are venturing out into the new town, she draped in a sea foam gown, he in his usual denim. There is a bad guy in town, too, a dark-faced scoundrel full of bloodlust, but now Jack is interested in his woman’s ear. There will be a sex scene in five, four, three, two—

“I was reading this article,” says Lucy.

“Mm?” says Marlene, putting Jack on mute. Her daughter is packing up a display shoe.

“And it was talking about stalkers, and these girls who got them…”

“What magazine?” Marlene asks. Onscreen, Jack is stating in large bold letters, Darling, you know I Need You, but it’s not the time in my life to have children. There’s still so much to Do in this world, so much to See…so much to Love…The woman’s face is drained of color, her lips red slashes hanging open.

“Cosmo. But anyways, I mean, there was this one girl who just never told anyone she was being stalked, and hid all the emails and stuff in a special folder, because she thought it was just a joke but really she liked it…”

“Mhm,” Marlene says. Jack is oblivious; his woman is backing away, her mute lips trembling. The bloodthirsty scoundrel creeps up behind Jack, winks at her, close enough to Jack that they could kiss.

“And she ended up dead or something, I don’t remember, but I was thinking about those letters…”

Marlene squints at Lucy. “Look, darling, I know you think your mother is too old to have a relationship or love anything or god forbid have sex, but I am getting these letters, and I like to get them, and frankly they’re none of your business, because they are addressed to me. I don’t know what your problem is, but shut up about the letters.”

Lucy stands with her mouth open like a pudgy koi. She splutters and drags a finger through her eyeshadow. “Mom—”

“Can you listen to me?”

“Fine!” she says, throwing up her hands. “I won’t talk. About anything. I just think it’s creepy that he’s sending me these things and it scares me that—no. Never mind! Any doubts I have, I’ll keep to myself, and if you end up dead in a ditch who the fuck cares.”

Lucy walks past at lunch today with her boys, and her voice is so loud that Marlene can hear it, distorted by the glass of the shop. “I just want to see, you know?” she’s saying, and one of the boys drapes an arm around her and draws her close, “make sure…” and the others say, “We’ll make sure!” “Yeah, we’ll make sure!” The sun is bright and hard and cold, slamming down on them like a fever. Lucy shuts her eyes and lets herself be carried by her boys.

Days, oh, days. Long, long. There is a letter every morning, saying things like: Marlene. I have followed you to the edges of the earth and watched you dip your toes in the stars. I follow you each day, Marlene, don’t you hear my heart beating? She loves how he writes her name, doing it with all the care and precision of somebody kissing a rare incandescent thing, in a white bed at dawn. It carries the lightest weight and always his perfume—cologne, deep, ever-present.

It is necessary to me that you stop it, Marlene. I moan, Marlene, you bitch, you silky whore—why see other men? It’s me you want. Marlene frowns. Be faithful to me now. The time is coming when I will see you in all your glory. She hasn’t seen anybody, not that she can think of, not even a little flirting.

Jack escaped the bloodthirsty scoundrel, of course, and left his new woman in town. Marlene roots for him, admires the rippling horse he rides. Lunch is lonely without this show; the shop is empty and the mannequins watch her carefully, and there’s nobody to talk to. Lucy has been dragging about the boys on her lunch hour, leading them by their hands: lanky muscled doggy creatures with painted umber skin and neatly combed hair and jeans and sometimes no shirt. Gone, Marlene supposes, are the days of her northeast men, all cheekbones and pure white snow. Or Jack, the Midwest cowboy.

One day Lucy does not go out with her new boy friends but stays to pester Marlene. She keeps asking, “Mom? Can I get you anything?”

“An ice bath,” Marlene says. “Did you forget to put on blush today?” Lucy is pale like onionskin.

“No. Do you want a Coke?”

“Why don’t you quit bugging me and put away those miniskirts?” she suggests.

Lucy does this in silence. She drops a couple hangers with a clatter, and curses. There is the creech of a mosquito and the crash of the radio; Lucy kills the mosquito; Marlene turns off the radio.

“I think you should go out to lunch, mom,” Lucy says, fiddling with a miniskirt. “Buy yourself a mocha. There’s a super Thai place above Easel that Mario showed me just the other day. Does a great pad thai…” The miniskirt slips to the ground.

“I don’t know,” Marlene frowns, “it’s awfully hot outside.”

“It’s just a block, mom!” says Lucy, quick as a whip. “And it’s great pad thai. They even have spring rolls. All natural…”

She has a pair of delicious new sunglasses the color of a cold Coke. Cold soda, popping in the glass, sweet as the day she was born, and a plate of noodles.

“All right,” Marlene decides. She straightens her skirt and slides out from behind the counter. “Don’t mess up my episode.”

“You don’t care about anything but that ache,” Lucy says. She rubs her forehead and inhales.

“It’s a nice ache,” says Marlene. “I like it.” Maybe she will meet her poet on the street, or in a coffee shop with goosebumps running up and down her arms. “Good riddance to the folks who send me letters from above,” she says, inspired.

“What?” And here is Lucy, peering over her desk; not looking at her computer but at the mountain of letters, letters which steam up her reading glasses, letters which she has stopped reading idly, letters, letters, letters…

Oh Marlene, Marlene, Marlene, I have created an obsession for myself, bandied about by the wind of mis-generation. I long to kiss each of your limbs, draw my fingers through your hair, dine on your supple skin—to think that you are mine, totally and utterly for me…

“You know,” she says, “I think that I’ll stay in. It’s just too hot out there.”

Lucy looks frail and white, more in need of sun than Marlene. She picks up her bag and hat. “Then I’ll go,” she says. “I’ll be by the psych building, if you need me.” She wipes her forehead and toddles out into the desert.

Marlene unfolds a letter at random and slips back into her blue fragrant world.

A knock at the door, sounding glassy. What sort of socially inept creep knocks on a shop door with a sign out front reading OPEN? Marlene brushes her hair from her eyes and glances up, her face a picture: read my lips, my irritation, leave me alone. What kind of creep?

A man, that’s who. She sees first the glint in his right ear, then his smile, boyish, sharp; he swings open the door and strolls in. She watches his face and hair and eyes and ears flatten with the blast of cold air. Then she sees, cradled between his thumb and forefinger, a letter, oversized and a fervent masculine blue…

“Ice queen,” he says in a throaty voice.

“You bet,” Marlene replies, and smiles through her lashes. He’s streamlined, a long face with hollow cheekbones and dark circles beneath his eyes. She’s waiting patiently for that letter but her mouth is dry and her hands have begun to shake.

“I’m looking for Marlene,” says the man. Marlene feels her stomach plunge off a bridge; her throat fills up; she pushes down her nervousness and flutters her eyes again and says, “Why, I’m sure I don’t know who you mean…”

“Really,” the man growls, and for a moment she is reminded of the last letter. I forbid you, I love you, to hold me away; I will possess you in full like the ocean possesses the sand beneath it…At first it bothered her, but now she knows it was the poetry of obsession, of sweet engorged love, of inescapable terrifying ecstatic bliss.

“Well, if you see her,” he says, baring his long white teeth, “give her this, would you?” He leans towards her and passes her the envelope. Marlene feels faint and her heart pounds furiously against her ribs. As he leaves, she puts her head in her hands and imagines him astride a horse, a dark figure in the distance, coming closer…

“I shall,” she whispers, “oh!” and rips open the envelope, her hands awash in his fragrance.

The shop is dark. Outside, bathed in sodium and the last drops of the stars, a girl leans against the window and lets her boyfriend envelop her, yielding under him, a collection of shining hair and soft curves. The boyfriend is a man, definitely: the hands pressing against the glass are huge and spread-eagled; he wears a button-down shirt made of gunmetal black, a dangerous collar, a glint of something in the vicinity of his ear. Her arms sidle up around his neck, her hands dangle off the shelf of his shoulders, suspended over his broad back. His smile is a white glow in the darkness. Marlene watches them for a little while and then goes out the back way; she feels a low, dark, throbbing ache somewhere in her chest and tears up driving home while listening to a soupy song on the radio. Lucy never came back to the shop today, out with one of her boys.

On the sidewalk, the two uncoil from each other, and the man strolls away, keeping the girl’s outstretched hand in his until the gap unfurls too far and the link is broken and he is a tall shadow disappearing around a bend. The girl is wobbly as she unlocks the shop door, wistful, dreamy, raising a hand to still the bells as she creeps inside; she looks around for a moment, blinks, heads for the desk and its pile of scented blue paper.

By the light of her mother’s computer, she reads and rereads each letter until she reaches the last one.

It is imperative that you love me. You cannot survive unless you do. Find me under the trees, where the olive grove meets the psychology building. I watch you there every afternoon with your pack of dogs, your kindergarten group of little boys—why dally with them, Marlene, when you can have the fire of a grown man touch you; why bother with silly hopscotch lords, when you can have a god? I await you, Marlene. I promise if you come that I will find you again in the morning. Just dinner, Marlene, and a little kiss. I won’t say or else, I know you understand. It’s all I ask for now…

Lucy’s eyes widen and her cherry soda lips open; then she smiles, dazedly. Quietly, she puts the letter to her chest. Outside the sun is already rising, stealing silently into the sky and setting the world on fire.

Smoke

Helm spent a long time in the songshop, watching Fletch drink white midairs. There was a woman, with feet that did not fit in her sandals, who had captured Fletch’s attention and was spinning it around like a top; and Helm watched her do it and bumped Fletch with hulking tense shoulders every time he moved. The bar was viscid, so he kept his hands in his lap and his arms in Fletch’s personal space. It was hard to focus on anything because of the smoke, even his own hand held up in front of him; he did not know where it was coming from, since the ’shop was mostly deserted. The place was full of smoke.

Fletch made a joke, and the woman laughed. Helm could see a mottled red ring around her ear, on the neck. She kept laughing but reached up a hand to scratch there, gently, with plastic nails.

Fletch ordered another midair, sloshing on his stool. He rubbed at a hard jellied lump on the bar with one finger and it splintered and let forth ooze. He wiped it on his uniform and turned to Helm.

“You cannot blame me,” he said, with his special drunk precision. “I’ve been in orbit cleaning carbon with only you for too long. I will see you tomorrow morning on the ship and we’ll get our filters and get out of here, but for now you shall have to force yourself to have some fun elsewhere because I’m busy.” His words dragged their feet.

“But what’s there to do?” Helm asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, how should I know?” Fletch was rolling his eyes towards the woman and her buttons and bows. “We’re on the Ballast, there’s plenty to do. I don’t know. Get yourself a massage. Just get out of here, give yourself a break.”

“But what about the filters?”

“I said already, we’ll get them in the morning.” Fletch rubbed at the ooze ejected from the lump. “Unless you want to do it.”

“No,” Helm said.

“Don’t do this, Helm,” said Fletch gravely, “it isn’t any fun for me,” and he swung round on his stool to knock knees with the woman.

Helm sat there for a while, listening to them talk and looking at Fletch’s shoulder blades folded like wings under his shirt. Then he left his money next to Fletch’s elbow and left Fletch to bury himself.

The Ballast was an elliptical cathedral, built of darkly gleaming pillars. It curved at the top into a thick hull with many vaults, and from top to bottom there were tiers and balconies supporting districts. The Ballast had two spines that rose from its foci, and when Helm was on a high balcony and could see both of them lined up he felt a great crushing peace that stopped his lungs and heart; and there was a sense, not without panic, of floating in a great pure sphere of crystal water, seeing objects from afar that looked more like mirages than tangible things. You had to ignore the crowds that boiled over the floor. If the hull were ever pierced they would all fall out and die, like a string of organs.

Docking stations were spaced evenly around the hull, and today the western end was lit by hundreds of ships, which made a fine spectacle for Helm who stood on the east side. The late afternoon sun streamed through glassy spaces, painting the arches with sweating gold; but the Ballast was massive and there was always one side of it that was dimmer than the other, where pockets of darkness floated in reaches farthest from the sun. In the lower balconies, too, it was always dark; people spent most of their time in the dark, fumbling and doing business with a flashlight.

Helm moved out into the traffic, darting between two men with a crapmap. Skull-eyed women passed shops under bright lights that threw their faces into relief, and he went by them, and went by their children eating slushies and their husbands too, all part of the summer crowd. The summer crowd burned through pure crystal air like fire, and the Ballast’s filters were struggling; he could feel the eastern ones throb, very close to him. He could visit them, if he wanted, being authorized, but they were the same kind of monster that hung on Betty, only vaster.

Continue reading this ebook at Smashwords.
Download this book for your ebook reader.
(Pages 1-28 show above.)