Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 (13 page)

Ostensibly, we were going back for another scotch. He poured us each a fuller-than-average glass and invited me to come sit in the “library.” I sat on his bed's plain blue comforter, panic and desire roaring in my ears, and I wondered what happened next.

Very little, it turned out. We sipped our scotch and talked. We talked about our favorite translations of the Odyssey, local politics, ancient history, modern relics. Where I had expected him to throw me on the bed, he was touching my hand, laughing a little too loud. At one point, he reached for my knee, and held it. But still we kept talking, kept sitting, kept killing time.

I kissed him. At first he seemed confused, and when I pulled away, he muttered something like, “well.” But suddenly I was in his arms, and his mouth was on mine. It wasn't sexy so much as—overwhelming. I tried to slow him down, but he was already taking off my top, kissing my breasts in eager, quick pecks. He pushed me down on the bed, finally, a part of the fantasy I remembered, but suddenly I realized that I didn't much like being pushed down. I liked to push. I don't know why, at that point, I didn't roll away and say, sweet as I could, “Baby, settle down.” But instead I let him pull off my pants and spread my legs, because this was how I had wanted it to go, wasn't it?

"Jane,” he moaned as he slid into me, and for a moment I cupped his face in my palm and I was there, fucking him, not in the script in my head. But when we met eyes, all we could do was look away, and he started to thrust, and it hurt, but I let him. I just let him.

That night, Oscar and I had Chinese take out. In my defense, it was really expensive Chinese takeout, from a boutiquey place across the city line. But still. I felt ashamed.

"No, I take this as a good sign,” Oscar insisted as I passed him the orchid chicken. There was no real orchid in it, just a few rose petals masquerading. “It means you've been working."

Oscar has been convinced I'm a genius ever since our fifth date, when I read him an early portion of the Story before bedtime. It's the sweetest thing ever. I felt like someone was ripping out my spleen.

"Yeah, I put in a few hours,” I said.

"What'd you do otherwise?” he asked.

"Oh, um, helped Phil with some stuff."

"Phil?"

"The minotaur."

"The surrealist. Has he hit on you yet?” Oscar laughed.

I saw a flash, then, of Phil's head over my own, those animal eyes, the snuff of his breath—

"Oh, god,” I said. I laid my head on the table and buried my face in my arms. “I fucked him."

"What, Jane?” Oscar said. He was spooning out rice. He hadn't heard me.

I peeked over my arms. “I fucked him. We killed some sirens and I just kept hearing their song and—"

Oscar put down the rice box very slowly. This was a bad sign. “What?” he said.

I hid my face back in my arms. I had no answer.

"It was a mistake,” I said.

"You what?” he repeated. I heard in his voice, however, that it was starting to sink in.

Suddenly, Oscar shoved his chair away from the table; his plate clattered, but it didn't fall. For a moment, I was back with the bikers, and I expected him to smack me.

"Get out,” he said.

"I'm not leaving,” I said.

Oscar didn't say anything.

"Get out,” he repeated.

I laughed; it turned into a sob before I could even take a breath, and I buried my head in my arms again. Oscar stood, and I heard the door slam, but I couldn't look up. Slash trotted over, and I swatted him away.

My mother used to explain adulthood to me like this.
You run wild, honey, and for a while it's great. But eventually you get tired of living for yourself. You get tired of being selfish.

I'm still not tired of being selfish. But acting for yourself, taking care of yourself, is a fuckload of work. Having someone else around to limit choices, to temper things, to keep you out of trouble—it makes it easier. Makes you feel grown up.

Especially if you love them.

Phil came by a few hours later, bearing a dog toy for Slash. I made him come around to the back door.

"I can't come with you anymore,” I said.

"I don't want you to,” he said.

"You. This,” I said, gesturing at his animal's head. “Intimidates me."

"I know. It's in the story."

When Allie looked at Brutus's fur, his dangerous hands, she forgot who he was. She liked it, but it scared her.

"Let me kiss you,” he said.

I closed my eyes.

But when he pulled away, I didn't feel that connection, like we were the same person or something close. I just felt like he was the monster. And I was the girl.

Oscar came back at two A.M., so drunk I went outside to make sure his car wasn't parked in a tree. He wasn't an angry drunk. I would have never married an angry drunk. He stumbled in and threw his arms around me, crying. Screaming crying, worse than I'd seen him since his mom died. I took him upstairs and held him as he wept, murmuring, “Why, why, don't, don't.” I helped him to the bathroom after he puked on the rug, sat there with him as he dry heaved for two hours over our water-saving toilet. I got him water, toweled off his sweaty brow, wiped his mouth.

Around dawn, I helped him back into bed. I called his boss at work and left a message that my cooking had give him food poisoning. Then I crawled into bed, and he laid his head on my chest. Things were never easy with me and Oscar again. But I chose him, and he let me.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Jon Hansen

Owl pellets. The table is covered with them.

No, not owl droppings. We're not using a polite euphemism for owl shit here. No, they're owl pellets. True, pellet is a misnomer, but you can't call them owl balls, it'd sound like some sort of smutty joke told by third graders. Ball of owl sounds excessively formal, “United States of America” kind of formal, and owl sphere sounds like a problem from high school geometry. And what they are, these owl spheres, balls of owl, owl balls, owl pellets are simply wondrous.

The Mission Palms Hotel is famous for these. A pamphlet display nearby tells you they're made on the premises through ancient secrets impenetrable to all but a few. You pick one up and run your fingers over it. The feathers ruffle to the touch, each tiny spine poking at your fingertip, the snowy white-and-gray speckle standing out against your skin. It's warm like a rock left out in the Arizona sun, and when you hold it up to your ear you can hear a faint heartbeat.

The ball shivers a little in your palm, so you put it down and cruise over to the bar for a drink. If you come back later all refreshed and decide to take a seat on that overstuffed couch by the table and wait, they will open.

Their wings will unfurl and spread wide as their yellow eyes appear, blinking in the light, and their claws sprout to clatter on the lacquered wood. If you're still sitting on that wonderfully comfortable couch, the owls might regard you, their round yellow eyes staring at your face, looking as if they're trying to decide if your nose is actually some sort of fat, fleshy, hairless mouse. And then they will spread their wings and fly. They will swoop about the room in short arcs, grazing the high wide windows with the tips of their wings, before turning to fly out through the double doors propped wide, soaring into the blue, blue sky.

Will you be here? Possibly. Possibly not.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Variation on a Holy Sonnet

"which doth in eating heal"

Veal, zeal, mouth, moth—

"And it's going to get worse,"

our friend tells us, his others, a shower of frozen rain breaking on the grass toga of the lawns and embankments up from the trolley-lines that disappear with green sheds into the streetcar suburbs.

The walls and bricks gather around his studio apartment right out of “The Overcoat” or “The Nose."

Time to raise the absurdist torch, a Zippo.

A filtering consciousness—of what?

Winter cafes and coffee shops are a kind of meretricious hell where even in dreams we are waving good-bye to friends on subway platforms who are losing their natural fibers.

For a moment, against our senses, it's as if we have to push our cart from motel rooms past the black ministers pointing out in eternal shock and gathered around one whose body would have been eaten even without forks and riflescopes

in the oldest worlds as well.

And then we must plug in the vacuum with a sound like a football stadium for their cufflinks and plated tie-pins to get to where we will tuck in the burned sheets and covers over the bloody mattress pads.

Baskerville Hound

Boars and bears stuck out their tongues, and their teeth dripped into candles.

You may have heard the old dog hooting.

Roads got damper closer to the coast.

Eastern Connecticut to Maine, there were old cemeteries and farm houses;

swamps were light and definitive.

The tall gray hats had dour pleasures.

The great hound brought the child to the bakery, said to take her pick.

Here was coughing at the next table like an old man at the library, the Baskerville hound, your English hound.

Grassy breath steamed up the base of the lamp.

These census books had joined the Civil War.

The Baskerville hound rested a forepaw on the hat of the old east and dour pleasures, libraries, and Easter cookies.

He said try caraway, try the bitter and dry cakes—who would eat that stuff?

Nobody but the slobbering dog of the moor who eats people food.

The people stopped for dinner on that Welsh road;

they wondered about tramping through underbrush.

On white streets, musicians clutched windows shaped like cellos and violins.

I looked out from ooze.

You claim the Baskerville hound pleased you as a child.

I went out on the ice to knock people over.

It was clamped and thuggish in my helmet, but there were only examples of the north, these circular prints, confounding snow.

Poem about Alma Mahler

In late summer, when Rose of Sharon bushes are full of folded notes,

Professor Z. talks me down sloped streets. He picks the beetles from the red dahlia's lower stems.

Oscar Kokoschka's mouth is open too, just like his life-sized Alma doll.

Old men doze with their mouths open and pale glasses of wine.

—Was it her exfoliating tenderness for men, Franz Werfel's muse,

Bernadette's Veil, her beautiful skin, resistant to photography, realism, total baldness?

—In the sound of the ice melting deacon-sour Walter Gropius hurts himself and his creamery for topping coffee and dessert.

No more sweet stuff for him.

—It was like synesthesia, some charm

That doesn't photograph well.

Love goes on forever.

The peaches are crooked, the tomatoes are ready.

There's no respectable taint to subsistence gardening here.

If you can eat it, plant it.

On Gussie Terrace,

Mahler's 1st, 2nd, and 4th Symphonies are hot stuff, jaw droppers.

If you listen carefully, you can hear how Alma Mahler's barefoot has run through her husband's hair, which stands up straight as the cosmos and sunflowers against the chain link fence.

On the Porch

The landlady looks like a pig's ear.

It's not like these prodigals have some rural homestead to return to: this is it, fellas, she says, collecting her weekly.

No grumbling, Richard.

The old man borrows your guitar and sings some sweet spiritual on the porch. The thing about guff is a lot of it means, why not me?

Why don't you love me the way you used to do?

So when she comes down from the roof textured with her pride, you think maybe you should give her some credit.

Don't need roofers

OR husbands! Ex-cons, out-of-state troopers, construction workers and male students are alright, as long as they're straight;

she won't rent to women, they cause trouble.

But here comes the funk and oversized teeth of the prostitutes your neighbors love to say good-bye to in the morning, big bellies hang-hiding their belts on the porch, catching the punch line:

grandpa dropped his teeth in the trash and the rubber in the glass.

Great Taste

We used to live across from a place called Great Taste in English and something else in Han characters.

The motorcycles would set off the car alarms as they came home while the pigeons woke up in their obscure cornices.

My brother would buy us some wings.

He got up and ground the chicken bones in the garbage disposal drain while everybody was still talking, but I missed my brother, Unassimilated, when I followed myself from Hamlet, NC., to Philly or from Binghamton to Boston.

My shoes had been eaten by the hogs, the hogs that were eaten by the houses, the houses that had eaten the woods.

The hogs were rooting around the tops of parsnips with a tear-shaped memory of the smell of the truffle lodged between their ears. So I missed my brother, who lives in Dayton, and was glad that the importer unrolled the red bolt of Turkish leather in the living room.

Nor do I forget that the southernmost tip of Japan and Cape May County, New Jersey, will blossom again before these stony precincts and swing like the nuts and the lovely dark iris labia of islands and continents.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Karen Joy Fowler

Charlotta was asleep in the dining car when the train arrived in San Margais. It was tempting to just leave her behind, and I tried to tell myself this wasn't a mean thought, but came to me because I, myself, might want to be left like that, just for the adventure of it. I might want to wake up hours later and miles away, bewildered and alone. I am always on the lookout for those parts of my life that could be the first scene in a movie. Of course, you could start a movie anywhere, but you wouldn't; that's my point. And so this impulse had nothing to do with the way Charlotta had begun to get on my last nerve. That's my other point. If I thought being ditched would be sort of exciting, then so did Charlotta. We felt the same about everything.