I ran out and around our building but there was no sign of her, no imprint I could find in the snow, nothing. When I tried to start my car to look for her, the engine sputtered and died. I grabbed Kimberle’s keys to the Toyota, which came to life mockingly, and put it into reverse, only to have to brake immediately to avoid a passing station. The Toyota jerked, the duct-taped fender shifted, practically falling, while I white-knuckled the wheel and felt my heart like a reciprocating engine in my chest.
After that, I made sure we spent as much time together as possible: reading, running, cooking venison I brought from the smokehouse, stuffing it with currants, pecans and pears, or making smoked bison burgers with Vidalia onions and thyme. On any given night, she’d bring home a different girl to whom we’d minister with increasing aerial expertise. At some point I noticed American Dreams was missing from the shelf but I no longer cared.
One night in late January — our local psychopath still loose, still victimless — I came home from the smokehouse emanating a barosmic mesquite and found a naked Kimberle eagerly waiting for me.
“A surprise, a surprise tonight,” she said, helping me with my coat. “Oh my God, you smell. . sooooo good.”
She led me to my room, where a clearly anxious, very pregnant woman was sitting up in my bed.
“Whoa, Kimberle, I. .”
“Hi,” the woman said hoarsely; she was terrified. She was holding the sheet to her ample breasts. I could see giant areolae through the threads, the giant slope of her belly.
“This’ll be great, I promise,” Kimberle whispered, pushing me towards the bed as she tugged on my sweater.
“I dunno. . I. .”
Before long Kimberle was driving my hand inside the woman, who barely moved as she begged us to kiss, to please kiss for her.
“I need, I need to see that. .”
I turned to Kimberle but she was intent on the task at hand. Inside the pregnant woman, my fingers took the measure of what felt like a fetal skull, baby teeth, a rope of blood. Suddenly, the pregnant woman began to sob and I pulled out, flustered and confused. I grabbed my clothes off the floor and started out of the room when I felt something soft and squishy under my bare foot. I bent down to discover a half-eaten field mouse, a bloody offering from Brian Eno, who batted it at me, her fangs exposed and feral.
I climbed in my VW and after cranking it a while managed to get it started. I steered out of town, past the strip malls, the corn fields and the interstate where, years before, Kimberle had made me feel so fucking alive. When I got to the smokehouse, I scaled up a back-room bunk my boss used when he stayed to smoke delicate meats overnight — it was infused with a smell of acrid flesh and maleness. Outside, I could hear branches breaking, footsteps, an owl. I refused to consider the shadows on the curtainless window. The blanket scratched my skin, the walls whined. Trembling there in the dark, I realized I wanted to kiss Kimberle — not for anyone else’s pleasure but for my own.
The next morning, there was an ice storm and my car once more refused to start. I called Kimberle and asked her to pick me up at the smokehouse. When the Toyota pulled into the driveway, I jumped in before Kimberle had the chance to park. I leaned towards her but she turned away.
“I’m sorry about last night, I really am,” she said, all skittish, avoiding eye contact.
“Me too.” The Toyota’s tyres spun on the ice for an instant then got traction and heaved on to the road. “What was going on with your friend?”
“I dunno. She went home. I said I’d take her but she just refused.”
“Can you blame her?”
“Can I. .? Look, it was just fun. . I dunno why everything got so screwed up.”
I put my head against the frosty passenger window. “What would make you think that would be fun?”
“I just thought we could, you know, do something. . different. Don’t you wanna just do something different now and again? I mean. . if there’s something you wanted to do, I’d consider it.”
As soon as she said it, I knew: “I wanna do a threesome with a guy.”
“With. . with a guy?”
“Why not?”
Kimberle was so taken aback, she momentarily lost control. The car slid on the shoulder then skidded back on to the road.
“But. . wha-I mean, what would I do?”
“What do you think?”
“Look, I’m not gonna. . and he’d want us to. .” She kept looking from me to the road, each curve back to town now a little slicker, less certain.
I nodded at her, exasperated, as if she were some dumb puppy. “Well, exactly.”
“Exactly? But. .”
“Kimberle, don’t you ever think about what we’re doing — about us?”
“Us? There is no us.”
She fell on the brake just as we hurled beyond the asphalt but the resistance was catalytic: the car twirled a double ocho as the rear tyres hit the road again. My life such as it was — my widowed mother, my useless Cuban passport, the smoke in my lungs, the ache in my chest that seemed impossible to contain — burned through me. We flipped twice and landed in a labyrinth of pointy corn stalks peppered by a sooty snow. There was a moment of silence, a stillness, then the tape ripped and the Toyota’s front end collapsed, shaking us one more time.
“Are you. . Are you OK?” I asked breathlessly. I was hanging upside down.
The car was on its back. In a second, Native Son, Orlando and American Dreams slipped from under the seats, which were now above our heads, and tumbled to the ceiling below us. They were in Saran Wrap, encased in blue and copper like monarch chrysalids.
“Oh God. . Kimberle. .” I started to sob softly.
Kimberle shook her head, sprinkling a bloody constellation on the windshield. I reached over and undid her seat belt, which caused her body to drop with a thud. She tried to help me with mine but it was stuck.
“Let me crawl out and come around,” she said, her mouth a mess of red. Her fingers felt around for teeth, for pieces of tongue.
I watched as she kicked out the glass on her window, picked each shard from the frame and slowly pulled herself through. My head throbbed and I closed my eyes. I could hear the crunch of Kimberle’s steps on the snow, the exertion in her breathing. I heard her gasp and choke and then a rustling by my window.
“Don’t look,” she said, her voice cracking as she reached in to cover my eyes with her ensanguined hands, “don’t look.”
But it was too late: there, above her shoulder, was this year’s seasonal kill, waxy and white but for the purple areolae and the meat of her sex. She was ordinary, familiar, and the glass of her eyes captured a portrait of Kimberle and me.
Wild Roses
Mary Anne Mohanraj
It started with a phone call. Sarah had been expecting the call, but it was still a shock. She had learned over the last few years, as friends succumbed to old age, and to one or another disease, that there were limits to how well you could prepare for death. It was usually cancer, of one type or another. Cancer had gotten Daniel, too. It was hard when it was someone you’d loved.
“He’s gone.”
“I’m so sorry, Ruth.”
“Can I come out? Tonight?”
“Of course.”
“The next flight down arrives at 8.30.”
“I’ll meet you at the airport.”
Sarah put down the phone, meeting Saul’s calm eyes as he walked out of the studio, wiping paint-stained hands on his pants. She bit back brief irritation at his calm. He and Daniel had never quite gotten along, though they had tried, for the sake of the women. Saul had been quietly pleased when Daniel’s career had taken him to Seattle, though not so pleased when Ruth joined him there, a few months later. Saul had locked himself up in his studio and painted huge dark canvasses, ugly compositions in a dark palette: black, indigo, midnight blue. But Ruth had been happier with Daniel than she had ever been with them, happier married and with children on the way. Eventually Saul had bowed to that truth.