Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 (3 page)

"Even if you screw up the rest of your life?"

I am not crying. I am John Wayne. I am Sylvester Stallone. I am Jean Claude Van Damme.

Fuck.

I'm not even Jackie Chan.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Jean is not crying. Jean must be John Wayne. “Sure. Yeah. I guess."

The mailman is horny. It could not be more obvious. I am supposed to punch him in the face. He is supposed to bleed and bruise. My schwartz is bigger than yours. This is a sallow, shallow business.

I don't want to. Shit. I'm supposed to. I'm supposed to punch him in the face, and he rolls down a hill and gets dirty. And I stand over him and say, “Stay the fuck away from my wife, dickweed."

Only it doesn't happen that way. What happens is, I stop being John Wayne and run all the way to the car, where I watch the odometer until Liz catches up.

Going home would be awkward, so I don't. I guess I have to at some point—get my TV and my pants and my ramen noodles—but I don't want to think about it. I wonder if I could sneak in, take my stuff, and sneak out. It seems possible.

Liz offers to let me stay at her place, so I do. Mostly I let the clock on the microwave tell me how much time I've wasted. The lights go down and the blinds go up. I am fetal in Liz's sole kitchen chair. I wince every time it creaks, hoping it doesn't wake her up. Sunset trades places with midnight trades places with gloaming. Their game of musical chairs seems to make less and less sense as the hours pass, until I don't even bother watching.

Liz is in the doorway. I swallow—my mouth tastes like bile—and steal a glance at the clock. It seems to have settled on 3:55 AM. I assume we are operating in the AM. Nothing is certain.

Liz is wearing an undersized nightshirt and a pair of purple panties, and I take this in only because it is something new. The various crevasses of the kitchen have grown dull.

"Would it be stupid to ask if you're okay?” she asks. Her voice is a musical hum, laced with genuine empathy.

"Try me.” My voice is a hideous rasp. I cough and make another attempt. “Try me.” My eyes sting.

She sits on the table and rubs my shoulder. “Are you okay?"

"No."

She laughs quietly. “Are you going to be?"

Outside a streetlight flickers. The world is too dead. I hope someone somewhere is jumping on a trampoline. That would be reassuring.

I meet her eyes, and John Wayne evaporates completely. There's a Dead Sea behind my eyes. “I'm as happy as I've ever been."

Her hand crabwalks down my leg and comforts mine. “You didn't answer the question,” she murmurs.

I burrow into her shoulder. “I have no idea.” Another swallow. “I should. I really should."

She squeezes my hand.

"I really, really should."

"I guess he's always got a package for you."

Jean is preparing something that approximates barbeque. Red, white, and blue streamers adorn random outcroppings. I suspect that a party is on queue. She was never the decorating sort.

She turns around, goes limp and looks disgusted. I wonder if she follows the logic of this thing. It is not given to her to be disgusted. It's my turn. I wonder if she knows that.

"How did you get in? I didn't hear you."

"Back door key. The fact that it's my house didn't hurt.” Liz has convinced me that this is a fact that bears mention.

"What do you want?"

"Well, I'd like my things. And my house. And all of my keys. And for you to get the fuck out."

"That's it, huh? That's how it is?"

It is very possible that my brain is a firecracker. It has been lit. I restrain myself from screaming unintelligibly.

"Well
I'm
not fucking the mailman."

Jean emulates a disappointed second grade teacher. “Oh, fuck you. Don't tell me you never fooled around. Saw an awful lot of Liz these past few months, eh?"

My fists are very, very clenched. I am glad that I recently clipped my fingernails. I might otherwise have removed large chunks of my own flesh.

"Not—nearly—enough.
Out
."

Jean gives me a lopsided grin and sighs. Why is she doing this? She seemed to have a morsel of remorse when I caught her.

The adrenaline, I suppose.

"Fucking pussy. What are you going to do?"

The firecracker is erupted. My head is white pain. “
Out!
” I scream. I wonder if it comes out as a word. My hands are tendrils of sheer quivering fury. This is the way the world ends. I need to destroy something. I go for the TV.
Cheers
is interrupted mid-pun and splintered into something equally meaningless. Sparks fly. It's a wonder I didn't cut my hand. It's a wonder nothing caught on fire. My mother would be disappointed.

The message seems to have gotten across. Jean makes a hasty exit, and I stand shaking for a very, very long time.

Sex is faith. An internal dialogue. Trust in another to do the right thing.

Liz's mouth moves from my neck to my lips in a shockingly fluid movement and I yield happily.

Oh, my God.

We are entombed in blankets, and oh man, this is nothing new, but this is
good
. She kisses me and she kisses me and she kisses me, and my hands are everywhere they can reach.

Our spines arch simultaneously and I can't help but smile.

"I love you,” she whispers in her meek way that makes me want to break down and cry.

Oh, God. This is good and right and exactly the point. Oh, God, exactly.

Let's fast-forward. Because as vital as my four years with Liz are, the future's the constant end to our means, right? The eventuality of what we do now?

Somehow I trade my twenty-four-year-old body for that of a man of twenty-eight, and exchange unemployment for a contract with a minor science fiction publication. It's not much, but it's something.

Liz and I trade our places for something in the woods. With few exceptions, we want to be alone together. My only gift from my dear old dad pays for us until the first check from
Otherworldly Stories
comes in. Money is never too significant an issue; I'm always in the mood to splurge.

Stretching the laws of credibility, I never see Jean again. I recognize the mailman in the pharmacy once, and act as if I don't.

To Liz's concern, I become a little addicted to CNN. The space rock the size of Norway is a bigger and bigger story. It will be the closest an asteroid has ever come to the Earth, astronomers say.

We are on the happiest brand of cruise control. 2010 is a breeze. 2011 passes with hiccups, but nothing insurmountable.

2012 is rife with nervous energy. I take Liz out every Saturday. We investigate Disneyland. Two weeks at the beach? Hell, make it three. Nothing is small enough to disregard. Beggars receive twenties. There is a time to be charitable, and it is a vital time to recognize.

A trip to New York? Sure. The crown jewels? Let me work on that.

December arrives with butterfly-antelope hybrids in tow. My synapses make a habit of misfiring. This does not seem possible. Not at all. From what I've tasted of desire, I side with those who would prefer the Earth not be hit by a fucking asteroid.

It's popular on the news, now. The view, they say, will be fantastic. Cults form, as they do.

"This is the way the world ends,” they say.

And yet December crawls on. My sanity is on the edge of a knife. This is the point at which I am profoundly uneasy.

Hanukkah trades places with Christmas, and Christmas trades places with New Year's Eve. As night falls I watch the sky. The news was right, the view is spectacular. The asteroid, dubbed “Bucky” by some dumbfuck reporter or other, burns like a rogue star.

Liz stands in the doorway. “Do you want to come and watch the ball drop?” She grins in the dark, and crickets chirp ignorantly. “It's gonna be a rockin’ New Year's Eve."

The pun occurs to me immediately, and it hurts. “No. I'd rather not spend my time with the TV."

Liz meanders to where I stand and wraps her arms around me, sighing happily into my neck.

"Jeff?"

"Yes?"

"I love you."

"I am reassured.” It comes out clunky and awkward, but I mean it.

We are wrapped in one another as the ball drops. It is forty years before she admits to me that she wrote the letter, and by then, of course, it is too late.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Cara Spindler

Introduction

We lived in a house. It was a house in a land of robbers. Maybe other people lived elsewhere: dancers, farmers, tailors. Our house was made of stone. The trees drooped towards it, a tunnel. A cavern.

In my dreams I see their houses: there are streets with lights, and noise. Cars of bright colors. Sunlight. The sunlight here is always weak and hidden. Moss covers our roofs, our driveways. The first trick every robber child learns is to walk silently, to slip in and out of rooms without notice. We lived in a house of robbers, in a house of stone covered in moss.

My mother was not like us.

The Water Here

When my husband found me, I was beautiful. They all say that, I know. I do not have any pictures to show you. Here there are dark woods, and it is always night, never day. And I traveled through them. Once I found a blond boy, I knew he was going to die. I tried to tell to him but he couldn't see me, wouldn't listen. And I told the people around me to warn him, and they just shook their heads sadly. “We already know.” He walked away through the fields, and I tried to follow but I got lost.

Once I found the road, the boy was already dead and gone. I was hitching rides, sleeping in the backseat, the driver refusing to answer my questions and I not caring. The landscape always flat and dark fields. Farmhouses and barns silhouetted against the sky. No power lines. No other cars. Lightning but no rain. That journey lasted months. There was a man, in a house, when we finally stopped. He died. I left them, then. Took a knife, double-edged, a triangle to do the most damage. To make them bleed.

I have told my son these stories from when I traveled this world, before I met his father. Of the town, the only town I have ever seen here, the only place where I have seen people living together. There were no roads or cars, just walking paths. Houses. Where they kept books. Where they gathered. They did not talk to the rest of their world. They had great fires in the graveyards, and they wanted to hurt me. There were secrets that went on in their houses that were terrible. This is the reason why everyone lives apart here. They do not want to be like the terrible town, with its graveyard, with its gallows between the trees. So they live separate, and silent, and never say good-bye.

When I met your father, my son, I was beautiful. I had left the terrible village, and been wandering alone for months like Rapunzel. Because I could not see, either, only trees and hills and moss. I had to suck the underside of leaves or the dew off rocks for water. I looked for running water; that would be like my road. I wanted to go to the beaches. Then when your father took me there, I knew that the beaches here were wrong, too.

Can you imagine no shells or rocks? The sand was so smooth, and I laid my cheek on it and cried. If only some seaweed had flung itself on shore, then at least maybe the water would be right. In my world, tortoises live in the ocean and swim through colored rocks, corals. Sailors used to keep them in holds for months on end, to have fresh meat at hand. They could live hundreds of years, and people carved their names on them. But when I asked him how far, how deep, he smiled. “I could walk to the horizon, and then there's the edge."

I tried to tell him, how it was, but he wouldn't listen, only smiled and stroked my head. And so I told you of the giant whales and lands at the edge, of a world round, of white bears that lived only on other white things, ice and snow, and would sometimes get trapped and float away from home, and swim miles back to their icy coast. Labrador. They had to brave black and white whales, with saw-sharp teeth, on their three-day journey home. If only I knew where the hole was, I could go back, but I couldn't take you, my son, and I can't leave you.

Wandering the forest, the only sounds I heard were animals at night, birds in the day. But for weeks I could see nothing, damp shadows, fallen trees, brush that scratched my eyes—and then there was a path.

This is how I found your father, by a path in the road—I had to pick one way. I had been here long enough that I knew about their roads. Your roads. There was a fork, and I had to pick, and if I went back, the road would be only straight. Right hand is for God, left hand is for Devil. That is what the desert people believe on my world. So I went left. And I followed it for days until I came to a house. A cottage, a hut really. Door, two windows, walls of stone, roof of grass. The door was unlocked—doors here always open. I do not know how to tell which doors should be locked and which shouldn't.

At first I thought if I could find the beach, everything would fall into place. I had this need to see water. I would take walks in the woods to find puddles, boggy valleys where the trees sit in water. A bright red leaf, preserved under water. That would make me content enough to return home, to return to your father's house. I would stare out the kitchen window at dew-covered bushes, a kitchen where the fireplace was always cold and bread appeared like magic, always almost stale, and think about waterfalls, rain storms, breeding frogs. Sounds that do not exist here.

So I told your father, “Take me to the beach.” We got in the car, the long dark car, and drove for hours. I fell asleep, the roads were shiny and wet but it was not raining. The trees were green and shadowed us. There were never any other cars, are never any other cars, even though our neighbors have garages. We do not see their cars. We do not talk to the neighbors. Their daffodils come up in the spring, bright and sad and silent. When I woke up, we were on another black road, no trees, just dunes with scrub pines. More pools, shallow and full of rusty water.