You are reading Fiddleblack #17
Adele knew she was in trouble when Tom’s long strides carried him in on that September night at Kat and Harry’s Cafe, white button-down shirt and jeans, black hair brushing his collar. He did not sense trouble when he sat at the bar, one stool between them, ordered a stout and placed his cigarettes near the ashtray. She had arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1988, and he in 1990. Each armored in a Ph.D., hers in literature and his in Economics, each with a divorce, motivating a change, a shift to some place else.
Then the awkward moment, the time silence hung in the air, neither he nor she looking up, heads down studying their drinks, staring at anything to keep from saying the first word, being the one ever responsible. Adele, more than Tom, was used to being hit on, silly lines that men still boys toss, most times nothing but then the occasional bite from the woman who’s been sitting too long alone and conversation happens, lips ready to play over the second and third beers until the man and woman wind up in the back booth, darker than the bar, thighs touching, talking of Buffalo Springfield and William Burroughs to pizza for breakfast and hangovers that last until the next night.
At a summer solstice party in Santa Barbara, California, fifteen years later, Mary with a flute of sparkling wine toasted Tom and Adele as the perfect couple. They turned to each other and kissed though she felt oddly out of time as if the toast were premature. If perfect meant having all the desirable elements, she produced a smile that hid the reverse—the cracks and empty places. She listened to him speak as he told of days together writing on the deck at home and breaking for an Americano.
“Tell Mary about your new story,” she said.
“Negative Space,” Tom said. “Adele made it work, varying syntax, moving subjects to the end and staying with the image until it cracked open, releasing je ne sais quoi.”
She loved his expression of gratitude, that he saw her as a participant in his writing life. But she felt different, too much of a feminist to think of herself as a helper. She was a writer who sensed her confidence receding, being pulled under by his success. His hand, the one without a flute, touched her shoulder.
When they first dated, she always ordered fish, any fish on the menu—mackerel, halibut, bass, cod; she didn’t choose fish because she thought it tasted good; in fact, she abhorred the smell, fishy like the boats at Stern’s Wharf but she thought it good for her, high in protein, vitamin B and D, and omega 3 fatty acids; yet even more, she liked the way she looked eating fish and wanted others to see her taking small bites of white, flaky flesh, lifting the delicacy with grace to her lips then laying it on her tongue to begin the process of mastication, a word her mother used often because her mother thought often about the body and what she learned from biology and no one of her mother’s era, particularly her mother’s friends, would use a common word like chew, something cows did to cud not civilized human beings to flaky white fish.
Adele still wanted a child or thought she did when she saw a mother and daughter sharing a quiche at a bistro, forks poised. Their words muffled and their lips full. She watched them lean closer, turning their heads slightly to hear what the other said, and she could feel their love or thought she could as if they were wearing it just under their skin. Tom broke the silence.
“What about salmon for dinner? he asked. “I can grill it.”
“What about a daughter?” she answered and watched him lick his finger, capturing flakes from his croissant.
“Daughters come from babies come from eggs, fertilized,” he said
“I am forty-nine and have old eggs,” she said and turned her head. “But just look at them.”
Tom’s fingers caressed her shoulder, traveled down her arm, resting on her hand. He sipped his Americano remembering the 90s when he switched from briefs to boxers and placed the pillow under her, tilting Adele after sex. Side by side they would lie thirty minutes longer, giving the sperm time to catch the egg, naming rock bands from A to Z as they did on drives to the Gulf.
“We tried,” he said.
But she couldn’t hear, not really hear, the relief in his voice
She was sad. She was sick. Fighting a nasty cold, sneezing into her sleeve when she couldn’t reach a tissue, her sinuses stuffed and achy. And, of course, she received a rejection on her most recent submission with the usual response: We received many well written, compelling stories but unfortunately we will not be able to use yours. We wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere. She deleted it, wiped into oblivion, called the editor a sexist worm, wanted to hit reply with fuck you. Another minus sign for what she wanted to create. Reaching for a sugar-free cough drop, she slipped under the covers and called the gray cat who stayed at her feet, tail swishing, eyes closed, ignoring her.
Tom was sitting near the artificial Christmas tree untangling lights. As Adele squeezed by, her elbow hit a glass ornament that fell and exploded, red glass spread in an imperfect circle. This was their first Christmas in the new house they bought in Santa Barbara, their first Christmas without parents. Her father dying shortly after his mother last spring, and now they had no one to visit, no one to invite.
“Oooh,” she said.
He heard her and thought, she must be bleeding. Cut. But all he saw was her looking at the shattered ornament.
“Are you ok?” he asked.
“That was my dad’s.”
He tried not to sigh or say anything or make a gesture because he knew a storm might come and somehow he would be implicated by thought or deed or lack thereof. He stood and carried the lights to the kitchen table. When he came back, she was sitting beside the broken ornament, staring at it.
“Do you even miss your mother?” she asked.
He sat down across from her counting out Mississippis. “Of course, I miss her.” And he did miss his mother decorating every room of the house with tinsel and bells and baking cheese straws, hiding them in a tin until Christmas Eve.
“Why don’t you ever talk about her?” Adele asked
“I do sometimes, but she’s gone. It always comes to that,” he said. He remembered shortening phone calls and visiting less often after his father died, leaving his mother too much to her own choices. Couldn’t understand her needs.
“Do you want to forget? Adele asked, looking at him as if he should say something more, do something. The way he should have done something for his mother.
“Are you warm?” Tom asked. He opened the sliding glass door and picked a chocolate, the pound box on the coffee table, waiting to be emptied. He sat next to her this time. “We have our lives, you and me. We have tomorrow.”
Adele pushed the glass fragments into a neat circle, then a smaller circle, and an even smaller circle. Glass dust stuck to her fingers reflecting light.
Tom left her to get the dustpan and broom.
Side by side on the love seat recliners, Adele and Tom fell deeper into silence until their thoughts lost the shape of words and she closed Mrs. Dalloway, laying her hand on his thigh. He turned and smiled, following her into the back room, avocado leaves scraping against the window and just enough afternoon light.
They still undressed each other, she unbuttoned his shirt, sliding it off his shoulders into a soft heap and he slipped her tee shirt over her head down her back. She loved its tickle. The shedding of layers that hold us apart before lying together on cool sheets, wrapped in arms that know.
To save the cats from evergreen toxins, Adele and Tom had bought an artificial Christmas tree. Red-blue-yellow-green lights flashed day and night, bewitching them by New Year’s Eve. February she purchased red construction paper and cut out hearts. Two-inch diameters suspended limb to limb with ribbon.
The gray and the calico slept beneath.
Over a bottle of Syrah she and he sat before the tree.
“Should we take it down?” he asked.
“It would be cruel to dismantle in April,” she said. “Imagine bunnies and eggs.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m still on hearts.”
They watched the lights the hearts the sleeping cats, knowing spring would come and they could be sitting there, watching the lights the hearts the sleeping cats.
Tom would like that, Adele thought, a pound of French Roast from the French Press on State Street, a new coffeehouse in an old storefront, each cup pressed to perfection. Coarse grounds trapped beneath wire, caged at the beaker’s bottom for four minutes, not longer, not hours like the boy in the black and white Boris Karloff movie who screams until a murder of crows lifts the cage and drops it softly in the Adirondacks. Thereafter, Adele flinched at the sight of wire any wire: True Hardware, a nightmare; her father’s garage, an inquisition; construction sites, an ordeal. But a French press was different, wire too small to hurt for long.
“Would you like a croissant?” the barista asked.
“Not today,” she said.
Tom would eat one without a qualm, without worry if he weighed less yesterday than tomorrow. But she bounced from scale to scale, watching the needle turn, feeling her skin stretch with each taste, each teasing of her tongue. How she hated the morning after.
“No éclair? No Palmier?”
Couldn’t the young barista with his ponytail see her agony, smell her fear, how he was tempting her, how easily she gave in to what was offered, only to regret.
“What do you think of my story?” Tom asked, sitting on the couch perpendicular to her.
“I like it. Your character reminds me of Abner Snopes,” Adele said and handed him his manuscript.
“Snopes, the barnburner and horse thief? Are you kidding?”
“No. Your art collector has Snopes’ need to control.”
He stared at the draft, pen marks turning the pages into illuminated squiggles. She wrapped her fingers around the white mug. Should she zap it? Warm coffee took her home. He had asked her to edit in red but then slumped against the cushions.
“The collector’s not a scoundrel whose son abandons him,” Tom said, slipping his story back into his black leather portfolio.
“Sure, Snopes is openly dishonest. But so is your collector who buys cheap from street artists who paint flamingoes and funky chickens on plywood,” Adele said. “The collector knows Outsider Art can claim big bucks in the right galleries,” her hand still holding her cup, her voice rising a couple of notes. She couldn’t argue with him. He was still an economist, logical from point A through the alphabet, condensing life to an equation and drawing her the graph.
“Arbitrage is the moral equivalent of arson?” he asked. “Aren’t you forgetting there are laws against stealing and destroying property?”
“I didn’t say that.”
She answered so quietly that he leaned closer, asked her to repeat herself, took her other hand.
“All the collector has is passion, the same with Snopes. Men of fire without an art form,” she said and let go of her cup, released his hand.
Some weeks he made pizza from scratch, fresh mozzarella tomatoes basil sprinkled with virgin oil, crust papery crisp, uncorked a Zinfandel and called her to the table. Some weeks when his colitis flared, he ate applesauce and farmer cheese, toast and boiled potatoes. No wine, red or white. His colon enraged during earthquakes, tsunamis, and radiation leaks. His horoscope predicted upheaval: Mars was conjunct with Uranus, the planet of surprises.
“Are you frightened?” Adele asked.
“Of course. I don’t want a colectomy, my asshole in the middle of my stomach.”
Through the French door Tom studied a crow iridescent black picking the grass for seed, short beak up and down like a desk ornament. She watched too, the breeze cooling their silence.
“That won’t happen,” she said.
“The drugs aren’t working,” he said.
“Did you ever hear the Aesop story about the crow and the pitcher?”
“Remind me.”
“A thirsty crow comes across a pitcher with water at the bottom,” she said. “Tries to reach the water with her beak. She can’t. Tries to push the pitcher over. She can’t. Then drops pebbles, one by one, into the water until it rises high enough to drink.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Adele knew she could write, she’d always written and written well by the moderate standards of the schools in her small town. In the eighth grade she wrote her first poem for Mrs. Smothers about a white cat trapped in the neighbor’s basement, but Mrs. Smothers did not choose to read her poem in class, reading Pam Walker’s about thunder and lightning and a lost girl. Adele felt rejected but kept writing and her next poem was about thunder and lightning and a lost boy. Mrs. Smothers liked lost children and read that poem aloud. Adele felt ecstatic.
Traveling in and out with words, she had stacks of diaries in pastel shades, pink and lime being her favorite, always with lock and key, from the fifth grade on. It all started under the sheets with Nancy Drew and a flashlight. Her idol had a roadster and solved mysteries. Adele was too young to drive but started keeping secrets. She played with words more than her next-door neighbor, letters exploding and collapsing, taking her places.
Words were marvelous, a word her mother used when life was full of wonder and Henny Penny didn’t think the sky was falling. Those moments were exquisite, according to her mother and her mother’s mother, and she wanted to store them in her diary. Today I saw a hummingbird around the red tube flowers. Dad took me to the Ringling Brothers Circus today and we ate the largest cotton candy ever made. Mom and I saw Gone with the Wind on TV today. Dad is handsome like Rhett Butler. She was at home in her diaries but began calling them journals in college.
Then Tom appeared. She loved him. He became a writer too but long after Adele. He never kept a journal and started writing when she told him it’s a good way to work out problems. But now the problem was the writing. She began to feel uncomfortable in her own words, doing the thing she loved, watching syllables stretch into words, words into poems, and poems into short prose. What she once thought natural, thinking out loud on paper or now most of the time on screen, seemed awkward, or she thought so. She felt lost somewhere between her words and his. How he urged her to go into scene and opened her manuscript where she and he, or two people like them, discussed what a reader wanted. She, not the character, turned to him, I need to go to the toilet. Can we talk about this later?
And hiding in the bathroom, Adele knew what she was doing, no longer able to bear his instruction. He easily put his characters into tension, lots of dialogue with even the right amount of description. And he wanted to shake her characters out of their solipsism, move them out of their heads into a conversation with each other. But she was not like that, she was not a conversational creature and rarely thought that kind of existence would appeal to her characters. They looked inward like the eyes of Milton after his glaucoma; they explored the abyss of their own interior with wretched delight, always wanting to go to the darkest place within, the shadiest part of their being.
But how could she tell him that, how could she say it was futile having her characters speak, they were beings locked inside her journals and refused to be pushed into a public spectacle. But she knew he would win, thunder and lightning for the reader. He would be the one to receive awards while she raveled the thoughts and emotions of her character night after night, refusing that a finer existence could be found.
After her anxiety attack, Dr. Kent ordered an echocardiogram. Wires stuck to her chest, the nurse pulled Adele’s shoulders forward as she lay on her left side.
“Don’t move until the red light blinks.”
A screen reflected a half moon wobbling in and out of darkness, sloshing to every beat. White lines of lightning tore through, and the nurse froze the image, jotted on her clipboard.
“What are those?” Adele asked.
“I’m measuring the left ventricle,” the nurse said.
Adele looked away at the stress-test walker and blood pressure cuff. Closed her eyes, the sloshing comforted her. She imagined walking into the Pacific, waves washing her, leaving traces of salt.
Six weeks ago in Portland, Oregon, their first vacation since her father died, Adele lay in the hotel bed, ice wrapped in a washcloth on her forehead.
“You’re okay,” Tom said and read from the Mayo Clinic Website on his iPad. “Hold ice on your brow and breathe deeply.”
She tried to believe him. But she kept her left index finger on her sports watch, her pulse climbing, moving between 130 and 148.
“Stop counting. One long breath, hold, and breathe out,” he said.
Twenty minutes later he fell asleep, his hand on her left thigh as she measured her pulse, 141 on the illuminated face. That night his snore soothed her and she snuggled against his back. Her father wanted to drift into a deep sleep and let the water take him away. She wanted sleep too, shut out the ringing and throbbing.
“You can dress now and go back to the waiting room,” said the nurse, shaking Adele’s shoulder.
When she walked in, Tom’s finger moved across the iPad and turned the imagined page.
In a green tunic the barefoot man held the smoke in his hands and rubbed it over their shoes and jeans, chests and faces.
“Sage will protect you,” the man muttered and turned to the next couple.
“What now?” Tom asked.
“We wait for the guide,” Adele said.
This was how they got to the Funk Zone, Santa Barbara’s Left Bank.
“To broaden our awareness of how we fill physical space,” she said.
He, who had apologized for their last movie choice three times, deferred.
“I already know. You’re 5’9”, weigh 159; I’m 5’11,” weighed 200,” he said
She didn’t smile.
Through a yin yang beaded curtain, the guide led them up a narrow staircase to a black room, two women in tights suspended on aerial cables. No music, no voice, a white light on black encased muscle and bone twisting around thick wire, arms pulling the other closer until torsos and heads melded, energy flowing through them like a circuit with no breaker. Adele’s right hand touched Tom’s, vessels raised and soft. With the tip of her forefinger, she traced the longest from his wrist over bone through knuckles to the base of his middle finger. She remembered the sudden horripilation traveling up her arms in freshman biology when the instructor lifted his hand and said: “Look at your fingertips. They are more sensitive than your penis or clitoris.” She’d felt warm and wet, sucking on her middle finger to test the correlation and understood that masturbation would be the ultimate sexual sensation and that her fingers must be kept clean and moisturized for moments like this when standing together in public, witnessing the foreplay of two bodies on wire, their heat rising, filling the room with musk and yearning so that now Adele turned to Tom, her fingertips teaching his veins to follow her out of the room, down the narrow stairs and past the barefoot man in green to a dark place under the night.
He did not want depression. She preferred sourdough toast and fig preserves. He preferred chocolate croissants and hardly ever dreamed of the dead. She did.
Some nights her mother and father returned, not always together, not always to her.
Two nights ago, a stranger walked into the kitchen, wearing her father’s Irish cable cardigan. Where did you get that sweater? she asked. A gift from your father. He’s back home, the stranger said. She walked into her parents’ bedroom on Martling Road, not their last house but their first. She could hear the shower and her father talking to her mother. She stood there until the door opened. In his white terry cloth robe her father walked past. She called for her mother and woke up to Tom shaking her.
“You’re crying,” he said.
At the back table near the espresso machines, Tom sat writing when Adele walked in.
“Want to buy me a vanilla latte?” she asked.
He handed her his gold card. Starbucks was his refuge away from home. Before he ordered, the barista would ask decaf Americano, two shots? He liked being known there, the feeling of welcome, of being valued. The hours lost in writing, a world compactly his own, white noise sealing tight, possible characters walking through the door, conversations to overhear.
“There’s a Chihuahua-mix rescue puppy at the Montecito Pet Shop,” she said.
Sometimes he would tell her he was working and didn’t want to be interrupted. She had a way of forgetting boundaries when she wanted to talk.
“Is it yappy?” he asked.
“Not really. When I walked to the fence, he came running, big brown eyes, little paws stretching to reach me,” she said. “There were two other people watching, but the puppy came to me as if he wanted to climb into my arms and go home. He’s neutered and has had his shots.”
“I’m allergic to dogs,” he said.
“I’m allergic to cats,” she said.
“Touché.”
He heard her longing, her need to care for life beyond them. The time Gray was sick, she fed her with an eyedropper for three weeks. She and the gray cat were inseparable though Tom sometimes wished the cat didn’t sleep on a pillow between them.
They sat sipping their coffees. A young girl with green hair looking all of eighteen came in carrying a Hello Kitty computer bag.
“What about the cats?” he asked. “The calico can handle it but Gray might move to the top of the bookcase.”
“I called Dr. L who said cats aren’t bothered so much by a different species. What I like about the pup is he’s small and at max will weigh about ten pounds, Gray’s weight.”
Tom thought Adele looked teary. He knew why she was here. The girl with the green hair stood at the counter, coffee in hand, searching for a place to sit. He saved chapter twenty-three and closed his laptop, nodded and smiled.
Adele sat at his table, writing in her moleskin journal, waiting for Tom. Together they would visit the Chihuahua-mix again, big brown eyes, so different from their Zen cats, window sleeping, fur rising and falling.
Her vanilla latte still warm, she noticed a woman, perhaps ten years older than she, and a girl, really a woman the age of her students, talking close, probably mother and daughter on a Saturday outing, the mother proud of her grown daughter but missing those times she followed the mother from room to room, asking to help, tugging at her dress.
Adele was writing about the June Saturday she and Tom drove to Gulf Shores on a lark, to drink Schlitz in the waves and listen to blues at the Flora-Bama, sleeping on the beach, hidden behind dunes, sand rubbing away cells, and taking whore’s baths at the gas station.
Looking up, she saw the mother and daughter across from her laughing, a blueberry muffin broken and crumbled on a napkin. The older woman brushed the girl’s face, not with a mother’s touch, more like his caress of her, finger tips sliding done the jawline, down the throat, across the collarbone and then stopping, only stopping because they were at Starbucks, at the edge of the tee shirt. The young woman, her eyes partly closed, leaned back against the padded bench.
Adele remembered her uncle at a cousin’s wedding with a woman younger than she, the fountain of youth, someone who wasn’t even born when he was a Captain in Vietnam. She thought May-December relationships a male thing, power and patriarchy.
The older woman, her hair resembling the cut of an aging English rock star four albums from his last hit, scanned the tables, smiling. The girl emerged from her long, auburn curls. They stood, gathering their white and green paper cups and walked out, a new moon in an old moon’s arms.
Tom watched the line grow, caffeine before work. Balzac allegedly drank fifty cups a day and when that was not enough to fire his brain, began to eat coffee beans. Tom liked his coffee too, running up a $200 bill on his Starbucks’ Gold Card before buying a French press for home but only decaf since the colitis flare. Picking up his cup and laptop, he walked outside, sat at the table for two. Balzac probably disliked if not despised dogs, too busy writing, his time intensely his, life too short to interrupt with training a canine how to behave, particularly a house dog, a small dog like the Chihuahua-mix the size of their cat, fussy enough never to use the litter box because Gray didn’t want to share it with the calico and it was his job to wash the bamboo floor or rug and now with a third pet, the pup she wanted, he would have a third infant to take care of.
Possibly that’s why their friends with dogs found, in the animal’s passing, their own life no longer leashed, not having to get up early to walk the dog or make it the last thing they did at night. And she, who did so little around the house now that his adjunct teaching at City College had evaporated, wanted to add to their tribe, tether him to a dog. Every night, every morning, every day scheduled around the pet’s needs, time never to be recovered and what did they find in return, an animal licking between their toes, following them from room to room to be petted and hugged and tended to. This neediness, this emotional incubus was not what he desired. His cup almost empty and the crowd thinned, he looked toward the pet store four doors down and walked back into Starbucks ready to write.
The bay window had mint green curtains, tasseled ropes holding them apart, and wooden shutters opening onto Washington Square in San Francisco. Carved into the cherry headboard were vines and leaves. The bed, small, barely containing their bodies, more developed since they first slept together on a single mattress with no frame in his apartment. Young then and weighted by hope, they held to each other, her right arm over his chest, his arm over hers. Nothing was too compact. Under a sheet, their warmth filling the space. When she turned over, he turned and draped his left arm over her, breathing against her neck. If she woke early and closed the blinds, he might keep his place, content with her shape pressed into the sheets. Outside, in the park, women and men practiced tai chi, lifting their arms with one palm open.
Tom sat at the round kitchen table reading Blood Meridian for the third time. Adele placed slices of orange in front of him.
“Have you finished Mrs. Dalloway?” she asked.
There was a pause, always a felt presence between her questions and his responses, longer now that he wasn’t teaching. Finally, he looked up, the novel still open.
“Almost.” And looked down again, turning the page.
How could he say so little, almost, and that was it, that was all. He had lived with her fifteen years, he knew she adored Woolf, especially Clarissa, and all he could say was almost, one word as if it were enough.
Wanting to scream, Adele stood nearly twenty seconds, her hands squeezing the rail of the chair before she sat across from him. He mumbled or she thought he mumbled and his carriage hardened because he sensed what was coming
“What do you think?” she asked.
He breathed in this deliberate manner that bordered on a groan.
“It’s a bit slow. The writing is lovely but Woolf doesn’t pull me in,” he said, his finger holding his place in McCarthy.
Lovely. She wanted to hit him. She wanted to talk about how the novel slips from the present to the past and back again, how everyone has a point of view even the girl selling petticoats, how the miracle of existence culminates in Clarissa at the top of the stairs.
He could see her lips tightening, her presence receding. Closing his novel, he said,
“Sorry. That was a bit glib. The language is pure as one image unfolds into another. But she reads like a performance, a spectacle.” He pushed his chair back so he could cross his legs.
“Spectacle?” she asked. “What the hell do you mean? You read about massacre and bloodshed and then call Woolf spectacle because Woolf’s not killing for her audience’s attention.”
“Woolf killed Septimus,” he said.
“Asshole.”
He knew enough not to smile. Adele walked to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water; maybe she’d throw it at him or shatter the glass and stab him. On the walnut coffee table they bought at a garage sale in Ventura was the most recent Harper’s, which reports that a team of forensic engineers at The University of Leicester measured the amount of force used in bottle stabbings and called it effectively phenomenal. She twisted the cap off the bottle and sat down across from Tom.
“God. I want to hit you,” she said.
Closing the novel again, he looked up at her and scratched his cheek, waiting.
“Ever hit a woman?” she asked.
“Does my sister count?”
“No.”
She drank some water. The fridge started up and she turned and watched it before looking back at him. Why does he always have to be a smartass? He’s so good at so much. But his silence hurts, leaves me feeling stranded. (Long before they met, her then boyfriend and she started drinking Bloody Marys at Myrtle Beach in the early afternoon. The next morning she woke with a splitting headache, nose swollen and raccoon eyes. X-rays showed no skull fracture. Adele told everyone she fell on the pier. The boyfriend bought her roses.)
Tom pushed the novel away, still staring at her.
“I’ve never slapped a woman,” he said, “though sometimes I’ve wanted to. But I feel guilty enough.”
He watched her pajamas cling to her ass strong and tight like a runner, muscular in the right places. Mornings she was quiet, almost timid, waking to her own rhythm as she liked to say. He was the one usually up, particularly since his colitis, read The New York Times on his iPad in the bathroom, cleaned the kitchen and fed the cats while she slept on.
Ever hit a woman? It wasn’t her question that surprised him. He knew she had dark holes like his, remorse she kept hidden. But the lie startled him. I’ve never slapped a woman though sometimes I’ve wanted to. He had. Why was he afraid to tell her? Did he want her to think him incapable of violence?
Once between the marriages, he slapped a woman so hard the skin around her hip turned purple. But the woman said, do it, harder you prick, and he did but only where no one would see, her stomach, her ass. That one night Tom yielded to something he had always fantasized, doing what the woman wanted, possibly more. And the next day, he was sick, not just from too much booze, he always cured that with a can of coke and a couple of aspirin. That morning, he felt used up as if he had consumed part of himself.
The bathroom door scraped the tile, slightly, and he feigned sleep. Adele slipped into bed. He felt her press against his back. He rolled over. Ready.
Adele stood in front of the window, watching the puppy leap against the glass. She could walk inside, sanitize her hands, and pet the Chihuahua-mix as she’d done for the last five days, stroking his hair between jumps, seeing him curled in her lap, snuggled against her stomach. She read that the breed would easily attach to the family especially if the family were calm, easy-going. But sometimes, when left mostly with one person, the pup would bond fiercely, possessive of the chosen master, suspicious of others. A pack of two. Such a thought made her uneasy, almost sad. What if the pup became Tom’s dog, slept on his knees, against his back, and identified with him because he was there more? She couldn’t take the rejection, she wanted to be the one sought, the Chihuahua burrowing inside her, calling for her, always waiting for her. Tom seemed content with the Zen cats and their independent emotions. She wanted more, some breathing love she could always hold. She would come back tomorrow, maybe there would be a sign, maybe the puppy would be gone.
She woke at 3 a.m. and moved her foot across the bed to encounter nothing but cold sheets. She sat up, disturbing Gray who stretched and adjusted her posture before lying down again. A faint light came into their bedroom from under his study door. He was writing. She closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow, trying to envision a lake, windless at dusk. He coughed. She slipped deeper under the covers, her hand finding the cat. All Adele desired was sleep, at least five more hours, free from clutter, his writing, her writing.
Chella Courington is the author of three flash fiction chapbooks: Love Letter to Biology 250 (forthcoming from Porkbelly Press), Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana and Girls and Women. Her stories have appeared in SmokeLong, Nano Fiction, The Collagist, and The Los Angeles Review. With another writer and two cats, she lives in the West.