A Simple Little Errand

Michelle forces her body into the dress. She gulps, sucks in her gut, squeezes her thighs, bares her clenched teeth, throws back her head, balances on the balls of her feet, grips and pulls the strained fabric, growls. Her torso lengthens to its limit, a muscle in her neck threatening to pull, her calves cramping, the dress scritching at its seams, the threads screaming release or rip. She exhales, slumps her shoulders, spills her belly over the bunched-up, immovable dress.

She swipes the sweat from her cleavage and consults her reflection. Why did she wait until the last minute to try on her only sexy dress? It’s a knock-off Louis Vuitton, spun from black faux-silk, cut a half-breath below the knee, ruched mercifully along the belly and hips, sleeveless, neckline plunging toward a single, shabby-chic flower sewn into the V’s inverted apex at the sternum’s fade, sheer across the shoulder blades, an exposed silver zipper opening at the bottom of the lumbar curve, closing at the top of the thoracic. Haute couture imitated, Parisian high fashion made affordable. She has nothing else to wear, nothing that would make Joe change his mind.

He begrudgingly agreed to take her to dinner tonight, on their wedding anniversary, though last night’s fight was their worst one yet. He has damaged the dress three times, ripping it off her in his clumsy heat. She replaced the zipper, sewed the flower back in place, replaced the torn sheer swatch, but there are no tools to fix her body.

Lucy calls from the living room and Michelle pushes the dress south until it releases its death-grip on her hips. She yanks on jeans and a tank top.   

“Mommy,” Lucy says, lining up her stuffed animals. “you sit with Ellie and I’ll sit with Max.”

Michelle sat with Ellie the Elephant yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before that, asking Ellie questions and holding Ellie’s face—with its plush gray trunk, its smiling pink mouth—to her ear, nodding and repeating aloud Ellie’s answers: Your favorite food is pizza? Your favorite cartoon character is Grover? Your favorite friend is Lucy? Lucy asked if Ellie really said that Lucy was her favorite. Yes, no kidding, you’re her favorite, of course you are, look at you, Lucy, you’re the best thing about this family. Fairytale lies, a talking elephant, but one truth stood: Lucy was the best thing.

Michelle should play the game again, for Lucy, an only child, but she can’t bring herself to get down on the carpet for the fifth time this week, ham it up with a stuffed elephant, enter into the ridiculous world of five-year-old farce, extract from her panicked and half-broken heart the fabricated inner monologue of an elephant whose formerly folksy button eyes have flatlined. She can’t morph into the mother she was yesterday: floor-bound, tired but willing, mind-numbingly bored but able to access a modicum of maternal instinct. Michelle can’t play with her daughter because for all the fights she has had with Joe over all the years and months and weeks and hours and minutes and seconds of their marriage, for all the swearing and hurling of glasses and slamming of doors and make-up sexing, last night’s fight escalated with Joe’s utterance of the one word neither of them had ever spat: divorce, an ugly threat dressed up in legalities and formalities, its calm finality playing out via prim paperwork, stuffy conference rooms, condescending lawyers. He’d resorted to similar fighting words over ten years of marriage—separation, a break, guys night, weekend apart, space—but never that word.

She needed another dress. A dress as good as the dead dress in the bedroom, a dress fit for the Champs-Elysées, Montmartre, Mona Lisa. That paper in high school, on Louis Vuitton, that great title: “Louis’s Long Walk.” So much research, trips to the library, back issue upon back issue of Vogue, Mr. Albee, the art teacher who deemed fashion low art. That feeling of proving a teacher wrong. Faux! Louis Vuitton, a working-class boy, son of a farmer and a hat maker, who, at age thirteen, walked nearly three hundred miles from Anchay to Paris, sweating through odd jobs en route, arriving at age sixteen—more than two fucking years later—in the city of lights, where he would burn brighter than the twenty thousand bulbs on the Eiffel Tower. She needs another LV counterfeit, a second stunning lie.  

She cannot be left, cannot be a single mother, cannot begin to dream of what job she could land after years at home. If Joe leaves, she will be doomed to this carpet forever, this living room with its blaring blue television, its piles of picture books, its food-stained carpet, its marker-and-crayon wall art, its minefield of Legos. She won’t be able to escape at night, when Joe gets home, because Joe will be gone. She’ll never again participate in her book club, six-dollar movie night, cycling class at the shitty little gym where she watches sitcoms and sweats boredom. At least her Friday night French classes at the community center keep her dream of visiting Paris alive, if barely.

“Mumma needs to go shopping.”

“Shopping! Lucy can come?”

Michelle imagines Lucy asking to ride the dinosaur outside Kmart, begging for a toy, whining for candy, melting down, wasting time, getting in Michelle’s way. She’ll find a sitter.

“No, mumma needs to be fast.”

Lucy wails. 

Michelle bops Lucy on the head with an inflatable baseball bat, but Lucy refuses to be cajoled. Handing the bat to Lucy, Michelle bends down so Lucy can bop her back. Glaring at Michelle, Lucy bops herself in the face, escalating her own crying fit. Michelle grabs the bat and points it toward Lucy’s room.

“Go,” Michelle says. “Toute Suite.”

Lucy grabs Ellie by the neck, goes.

~ ~ ~

Jen crams. The exam is in an hour. She knows she can pull off a C. She needs only to earn a grade that will propel her across the stage in a cap and gown. Nobody in New York, where she will move after graduation, will ever ask about grades. They will only say, you may have this job, or this one. You may live in New York City, a four-hour drive from East Boston, yet a million miles away.

“Cerebrum,” she says. She is pacing her bedroom and reading the definitions on the flash cards. The principal and most anterior part of the brain in vertebrates, located in the front area of the skull and consisting of two hemispheres, left and right, separated by a fissure…a fissure, what is that? She pulls her phone from her pocket, types fissure into Google: a long, narrow opening or line of breakage made by…the definition is obscured by Michelle’s name. “Fuck.”

She taps the red circle, declines, continues reading: cracking or splitting, especially in rock or…Michelle again. Jen thought she would have a sliver of uninterrupted time during which she could stuff the complicated definitions into her head and keep them there just long enough to pass the exam. Her mother had BINGO at the Elks and wasn’t around to distract her every ten minutes with stupid questions; her brother wasn’t in his bedroom, exhaling rank weed clouds that seeped past the rolled-up towel stuffed in the crack under his door, cranking music that reverberated off her paper-thin bedroom walls. Her father wasn’t there because her father had walked out seven years ago and never walked back in.

Why did she think she would be granted time and space? In this ugly slab of East Boston, with its triple-family houses, its tell-all chain-link fences, its unannounced cup-of-milk-procuring visitors, its porch parties, its narrow driveways, its unembarrassed boxer shorts and matronly bras flapping on fraying clotheslines, its beat-up cars laid to rest on brown lawns, its window fans and Styrofoam coolers packed with weeping cans of Coors in lieu of air-conditioning, its barking dogs straining at yard stakes, in this neighborhood, in this cacophonous corner of hell there was never privacy, or quiet time, or any place a twenty-year-old doing her level best to escape could hide to hatch an exit strategy. She taps the green circle.

“Hello?”

“Can you babysit for a few?”

“Sorry, going to school.”

“Seriously, honey, twenty minutes. It’s wicked important.”

Jen studies the index card. It is responsible for the integration of complex sensory and neural functions and the initiation and coordination of voluntary activity in the body. Why had she taken all that time to write the complete definitions? The words make no sense and she isn’t smart enough to retain their meaning.

“Twenty bucks for twenty minutes, that’s easy money. Please.”

Cash for gas, a taco on the road.

“What kind of emergency?”

“Edison is going to cut the electric if I don’t drop off a check.”

When Jen’s father left, so did all semblance of order: electricity cut for days, mail piling up, spaghetti seven days a week. She pictures Lucy, Michelle’s super cute kid.  

“Twenty minutes. Seriously, Michelle.”

“I swear on my mother’s grave.”

~ ~ ~

Mumma is mean, Ellie the elephant says. Mumma won’t take Lucy to the store with the green dinosaur out front, the one where you put the quarters in, climb on, go up down up down. Lucy cries into her carpet, pounds her pudgy fists, clutches Ellie’s trunk and thrashes the animal against the floor.

~ ~ ~

Michelle hangs up and a pang of guilt comes then goes: a little lie, so what? She stabs a straw into a juice box and pairs it with a Lunchable for Princess Picky Eater. Jen knocks. Michelle says lunch can sit on the table until Lucy decides to stop being a brat and come out of her room.

Michelle checks her purse before starting the car: twenty-eight dollars, enough for a cheap dress if she skips another month of French. Done. Finis. How is she going to pay Jen? A check. A rubber check. A check that Jen can deposit next week.  

She had warned Joe about the cost of having a kid, but he convinced her that the journey of parenthood would be more exciting than any of the scenes on the earmarked pages of her Paris Fodor’s. Michelle flipped through that beautiful guide after last night’s screaming match and tried to remember why she had believed him.

Thing is, he was sorta right. She’s still dying to go to Paris and it’s true that her life has become a series of dull actions that involve keeping a child alive, but what would life be like without Lucy?

She needs to look good tonight. If she nails it in terms of sex appeal, Joe will stay. That’s the simple formula for matrimonial success when you say “I do” to the prom king, a boy who stood on the poorly lit gymnasium stage, his blonde hair shaggy, his bowtie askew, his crown too small. The boy with the rock-solid abs and going-places grin, who devolved into a jelly-gutted nine-to-fiver. But he’s been there, and they’ve been through everything together: the deaths of both mothers; a brush with foreclosure; the fire in their second apartment that laid waste to clothes, furniture, photographs; her breast cancer scare.

Michelle parks crooked in the Kmart lot and catches sight of Rob crawling by in his piece of shit El Camino. What a loser. Drives around all day jonesing for coke. She goes into the store and makes a beeline to the dress department, hustling to beat the tick-tock of Jen’s clock. Hanging a hard right at intimate apparel, she glimpses a pink naughty nightie poking its left tit out of the clearance rack. She pictures herself giving Joe a private Moulin Rouge show, but when she thinks about the trip they will never take to the real Moulin Rouge she wants to scream. Keep the scream inside, she thinks. Do him right: mouth, hands, lube, back door, whatever it takes to make him stay, at least until Lucy’s in kindergarten, when free time will open up, when options will present themselves.

~ ~ ~

“You have to eat lunch,” Jen says.

When knocking yields nothing, she tries to turn the knob but it won’t budge. What more can she do? She did not come here to fight with a five-year-old and she did not come here to intrude on the kid’s quiet time. She can’t help it if the kid doesn’t want to eat. What’s she going to do, force feed the kid? No. She’s going to study, that’s what.

She plops on the couch, unzips her backpack, pulls out the flash cards, snaps the rubber band that binds them, tosses them on the coffee table, laments the loss of her studying groove. The flash cards are too smart for her, too intricate, teeming with words she doesn’t comprehend. She consults her text book, opens to the brain diagram. Good, a picture, color coding, visuals.

Lucy will be fine. Children know how to entertain themselves. If Michelle wanted Lucy to eat lunch maybe Michelle should have stuck around until Lucy ate lunch. Michelle was the mother. That was just, like, parenting 101. Jen adds to her mental list of things she will never do when she becomes a parent: leave child with babysitter when child is clearly upset and has not eaten. But she wasn’t a parent, not yet. First there was walking across the stage and New York and new friends, better people, go-getters with class and intellect.

“Cerebrum, cerebellum, frontal cortex.” The brain in her book is split into sections, black arrows aimed at it from all directions.

~ ~ ~

Lucy wipes her tears on the curtain and looks out the window. Emma Johnson’s pool is an aqua-blue rectangle with an inflatable purple duck on top and a flat raft the color of bubble gum. A bird lands on the chain-link fence, then dips to skim the surface of the pool. It swoops up and lands on the duck’s head. Lucy opens the window. “Hi, bird, hi!” she yells. The bird flies away, its launch causing the duck to spin and glide.

~ ~ ~

Michelle arrives at the size sixteen rack and swipes at the sweat pooling in her lower back. Two sales associates crowd her, their busy-bee aggression sending her stress levels soaring. One is a brunette, middle-aged retail careerist with severe bangs, the other a coiffed senior citizen whose name-tag and smock shimmer with accusatory cleanliness. Severe Bangs is strapping dresses onto plastic hangers, hooking the hangers with loud clicks against a hollow metal rod. Michelle parts a clump of dresses and extracts a navy blue maxi with a daisy eyelet pattern from knee to ankle. Severe Bangs gives her zero space, doesn’t respond to her repeated throat clearings or occasional hip brushes, just keeps angling coat hangers into necklines. Meanwhile, the old lady blocks the other end of the aisle, wrestling with a pricing gun like an untrained sales sniper preparing for a mark-down spree.

“Excuzay-moi,” Michelle says to Severe Bangs. “Would you mind scooting over?”

Severe Bangs takes a long time to scoot, and yields less than a foot of extra space to Michelle, a paying customer. Michelle makes a mental note: learn get out of my way in French. Sorteer day may chamay?

~ ~ ~

“Passive aggression is violence enacted in the mind,” Jen chants, hoping the information will stick. This one she gets. She can do this, she can pass. She will not be like her mother, she most certainly will not be like Michelle.

She sits up straight on the couch, crosses her legs, pictures her first client sitting across from her in a New York City skyscraper.

“Go on,” she says.

The imaginary client says she feels like she doesn’t fit in.

“I see,” she says, crossing and re-crossing her legs.

The imaginary client says she’s smarter than the people around her and she feels freakish.

“The answer is detachment,” Jen says. “It’s the only way.”

The imaginary client thanks Jen and says she doesn’t know what she would do without her.

~ ~ ~

Lucy wiggles into her bathing suit, her belly protruding like an unpeeled orange. She flops on her bed and practices swimming, her chubby arms wind-milling, her legs kicking a course through sheets and blankets.

~ ~ ~

Standing outside the fitting room, Michelle wonders where Severe Bangs and the old lady have gone. She takes a few hesitant steps past the desk, pokes her head inside. Eight stalls yawn empty in the florescent atmosphere.

“Hello?”

The question lands on a mirror at the far end of the fitting room and Michelle takes a few more steps so she can see herself in the distance. She unloads the pile of dresses on top of a red shopping cart that overflows with the wilted clothes of disappointed customers—blouses and pants and skirts and dresses that did not fit, weren’t right for the occasion, didn’t flatter, hung wrong, pinched, cost too much. She holds a black cocktail sheath up to her body. She smooths the skirt down her thighs, pins it to her midsection, turns, arches her back. No, this one won’t work, not even worth trying on, too plain, too straight. She transfers it to another red cart brimming with discards, grabs a periwinkle shift with butterfly sleeves, a maybe for its arm-flattering functionality, but the length isn’t—

“Shit, you scared me.”

Severe Bangs appears in the mirror beside her, a few feet behind.

“You can’t be in here without a number.”

“There was no one.”

“How many?”

Michelle scoops the pile from the cart, counts. “Nine.”

“Too many. Seven, max.”

~ ~ ~

“The frontal lobe plays a role in the choice between good and bad actions,” Jen reads. Lucy isn’t using her frontal lobe very well by skipping lunch.

“Lucy,” Jen yells across the house. “Come on. You have to eat. Mom will be home soon.” Jen doesn’t feel like getting up again. She has to finish studying. She has to cram all the information about the brain into her brain.

Nobody wanted Jen to go to college. Her mother would have been happier if Jen got a job at one of the real estate offices on Centre Street, or a local restaurant. An honest living close to home.

“The temporal lobe assists with the perception and interpretation of sound.”

She tilts her head toward Lucy’s room. The lack of sound concerns her. She calls Lucy’s name, listens, and finally forces herself off the couch. She presses her ear to Lucy’s door and hears the child talking to herself.

“Lucy?”

No answer.

The alarm on Jen’s phone buzzes.

~ ~ ~

Lucy tells Ellie the Elephant that she will be right back. “You sit there and you don’t peep and you just be quiet and be good and be the daughter and play by yourself. You hear? I’ll be right back, I’m the mumma and mumma has to go somewhere and you can’t come.”

~ ~ ~

Michelle likes the silver slinky cocktail dress, but the skirt is too short and she hates her dry, scabby knees, and it doesn’t show cleavage, which is the thing that Joe needs to see. She wouldn’t go so far as to say good sex is the only thing that will get him to stay, but just because she wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t go so far as to being the truth.

She squeezes herself into a black slip dress that looks like the best one on the hanger, but now that it’s clinging to her body, it actually looks indecent, like underwear. Or does it look good, sexy? She considers popping out of her stall to get a second opinion from Severe Bangs, but she’s sure the response will be unfavorable. The slip dress feels terrific against her skin but it’s clingy in the wrong places, accenting her gut, her lumpy thighs. LV would hate this dress, everything about it, its revealing cheapness, its lack of structure, its absence of detail, but as she poses she feels increasingly excited by the dress’s shamelessness. She doesn’t want to take it off, wants the cool caress of it to remain, the glide and shiver of it as she turns, turns again, inspects areas of her body she normally hides. Fine, a second opinion, she’ll get one. She unlatches the hook, steps out of her nine-by-nine box.

~ ~ ~

“I have to go to class, Michelle. Hope you’re on your way.”

Jen has not left a voicemail in a million years, but Michelle is not answering her texts. Her professor made it clear that nobody gets a pass on the final, no excuses. And he locks you out if you’re a minute late because once you get out there in the real world, no one cares about your car trouble, your other commitments, traffic. Jen tries again.  “Answer, bitch,” she says into the phone. She doesn’t like to talk like this, like the trashy people in her neighborhood.

When the phone goes to voicemail a third time, Jen can’t get the words “academic probation” out of her mind. She goes to the front window and pushes the curtain aside. No sign. She knocks on Lucy’s door. She’ll just have to take the kid to class.

“Lucy, open up please,” she says. 

Nothing.

What was she doing here? The child hadn’t come out of her room the whole time. What was the point? Babysitting wasn’t even what she was doing. She was just sitting in her neighbor’s house when she was supposed to be on her way to class.

She knocks again.

“Lucy, come on,” she says. “I’m going to be late.”

~ ~ ~

Lucy drags her little white chair to the window and climbs it. She lays her belly on the window frame and lets her head and shoulders hang out the window. She reaches her hands down toward the lawn and tumbles out. She climbs the fence.

Emma Johnson’s yard has green grass, unlike the brown grass of Lucy’s lawn. She sits on the patio couch for a few minutes and is surprised that it is more comfortable than the couch in her own living room. She hops down and moves toward the purple duck. The duck is bigger up close, and Lucy is delighted to discover it is a girl duck, with red lipstick and curled eyelashes.

~ ~ ~

“No good,” Severe Bangs says. “Too tight.”

Michelle retreats to her stall, peels the dress off her body, sits in her underwear on the triangular slab of wood in the corner. Her phone vibrates. Jen. She’s so goddamn serious about having enough time for college, a.k.a. snob training.

Michelle knows the right dress will appear if she just focuses for five more minutes, but now Jen is in her head, and Michelle suddenly knows for sure that Jen thinks she is better than Michelle, even though Michelle’s babysitting money helps pay for Jen’s bright future, and even though Michelle has known Jen’s mother since before Jen was born. Jen should thank Michelle when Michelle asks Jen to babysit, not rush her with text messages. She gathers the dresses, brings them out to the red basket, pauses. Be a decent person, she tells herself, don’t be a person who just throws the dresses onto the cart and expects everyone else to clean up her mess. She finds the rack and begins re-hanging. Nearby, Severe Bangs complains to the old lady about the proper protocol for re-hanging dresses after try-on. Michelle wonders who Severe Bangs thinks she’s kidding if she doesn’t know that Michelle knows she’s talking about Michelle. Severe Bangs is speaking like a police siren now, blaring across the whole dress department about the virtues of dipping the hanger into the neck instead of stretching the fabric, fluffing and straightening, looping the little pieces of ribbon around the indentations in the hangers so the dresses don’t slip.

“Hey,” Michelle says, venom in her voice.

Severe Bangs jerks her head up.

“I know how to hang up a dress. You don’t have to worry.”

The old lady is behind Michelle, brandishing the pricing gun, moving toward the scene of the confrontation. Michelle keeps the smile plastered on her face.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” says Severe Bangs.

“Well, it sounded like you were,” Michelle says.

Severe bangs snickers. The old lady laughs like a loon.

Michelle sing-songs a “you’re welcome,” but what she really means is “fuck you.”

~ ~ ~

Jen steps onto the porch and scans the street. Someone must be around, someone is always around, someone not working, someone not going to school, someone smoking on their porch, someone day drinking, someone slacking. All the houses on the street are empty, quiet, which really burns Jen because there is never any quiet. Up pulls Rob, three doors down. She steps off the porch, crosses, jogs over.

“Rob, I need a favor,” Jen shouts.

Rob emerges from his car, bug-eyed, his jaw working, teeth grinding. He’s fucked up. But there’s no one else.

“Sure, what’s up,” Rob says, slurring.  

“Nothing, never mind,” Jen says. “have a good one.”

“Wait,” Rob says.

He grabs her arm. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m watching Michelle’s kid but I have to get to class.”

“No can do,” Rob says. “I ain’t a babysitter.”

“Like I said, never mind.”

“Why don’t you tell Michelle to knock off her shopping spree and take care of her own kid?”

“Whatever, Rob. She had to pay a bill.”

Jen wrenches her arm from Rob’s grip and walks away.

“Why did I just see her car at Kmart?”

What the fuck? No, Jen thinks, can’t be right. Rob is jammed, it was someone else, had to be. Rob drives around all day, looks for familiar cars, familiar people, anyone who might give him the time of day, give him a bump, give him an odd job, give him money.

“Bullshit, Rob.”

“Why would I lie about that? Why do I care?”

Right, why would he? And why would it take this long to pay a bill?

~ ~ ~

Lucy dips a toe in the water and jumps back. “Cold,” she says. She looks at her house, at the open window of her bedroom. Her bed is warm and her room is warm and the pool is cold. Her stomach growls and she thinks about what Jen has been saying, the thing about eating something. Ellie is also probably hungry. She walks toward her house, starts to climb the fence.

~ ~ ~

Jen storms into Michelle’s house. She throws the flash cards and the text book into her backpack, bangs bloody murder on Lucy’s door. Open the fuck up, kid.

That’s it, she’s done all she can. This is what she tells herself as she backs out of the driveway. Michelle’s problem. The child will be fine. The child will just sit in her room until her mother gets home. Jen was always fine, five years old, six years old, seven, eight, watching TV until her mother came home, nothing bad ever happened to Jen. Lucy is behaving badly and Lucy’s mother is behaving badly and it has nothing to do with Jen. She can stay until Michelle, the liar, the piece of shit, gets home, or she can keep backing up the car. She can miss her test or she can do the smart thing, the thing she is doing now, leaving to take her test.  

Last week, Jen’s class discussion centered around “lesser evils” and “greater goods.” Jen had never considered that there were times when you had to do a tiny bit of evil in order to prevent a huge amount of even more evil evil. Same with good: there was a kind of good that trumped another kind of good and sometimes you had to make tough choices. Here, in the case of leaving a five-year-old alone in her bedroom, it felt like a lesser evil than missing her test and flunking the class. Jen turns up the radio, does not see, as she passes Emma Johnson’s house, Lucy on the fence. She will hit re-dial in a minute, to be sure Michelle is on her way.

~ ~ ~

Michelle is back in the fitting room. She’s gone through all five dresses in the second pile—none work. She stands in her underwear inside her mirrored stall.  She sees herself in the near future, a single mother whose ex-husband skips out on child support. She tries to think of how to say single mother in French, even as she lets go of the hope that French lessons will manifest the trip to Paris she’s been planning since she stepped into the gymnasium at senior prom and glimpsed that sparkling Eiffel Tower made of wire coat hangers and blinking white Christmas lights. She sobs.

Severe Bangs knocks and Michelle knows that this is it: the stand-off. Because Michelle can’t be nice anymore. She can’t keep trying to hold in her rage. She can’t. Pas question!

“You okay in there?”

What is this she hears? Kindness?

Michelle sticks her head out. The old lady shakes her head slowly, straightens her smock, and adjusts her name-tag. She’s still clutching the pricing gun.

Severe Bangs calls Michelle sweetie and says there’s nothing to cry about. Michelle’s phone is blowing up. She silences it. Severe Bangs asks if Michelle would like to see any dresses from the back room. Michelle says don’t bother.

~ ~ ~

Jen runs through the door just as her professor is shutting it. She has made it. She is sure she will pass the test with a low C, good enough, just. She sends one last text to Michelle, telling her for the millionth time to get home. She shuts off her phone and writes her name on the top of the test: Jennifer McCarter. She still can’t believe she has made it.  

~ ~ ~

The bird lands on the fence before Lucy’s chubby feet land on her own lawn. Lucy freezes. “Hi, bird, hi!” she says. The bird flies from the fence to the raft. Lucy follows. She wants to float on the raft with the bird, feel the sunshine on her bare legs, drift away, across the pool, to the other side, where she will be able to look inside Emma Johnson’s bedroom, glimpse the puffy pink bedspread, the organized art desk, the prim wallpaper, the seashells Emma collected last summer at the beach that Lucy’s family never goes to because it’s far and gas is expensive.

She steps on the pink raft and it slides out from under her foot. She’s in the water, which is nothing like her bed. The duck drifts toward Emma’s bedroom. The bird squawks, flies up, finds purchase in a branch of the old oak that Emma Johnson’s father wanted to cut down until Emma cried and begged him to let it live, to lash to it a tire swing that Emma never uses. Cocking and twisting its head, the bird squawks at the scene below, all that splashing. A minute, two, three, and then it’s silent down there, all calm floating: purple, pink, orange, floating, drifting. The bird swoops down, flies a few feet above the pool, lands on the fence, cocks and cocks its head, alights, lands on Lucy’s windowsill, hops inside, onto the white chair, the rug, the stuffed elephant’s trunk. The bird pecks Ellie’s button eye until it chips and becomes untethered.

~ ~ ~

Severe Bangs tells Michelle her name is Tina, pointing to her own nametag. She says Michelle shouldn’t fret, that Michelle would be surprised at what she can pull out of the back. The old lady drops the gun, and agrees that the back room will definitely have something for Michelle. Michelle lets them help, lets them lead her back.

# # #

Amy Lyons writes fiction and non-fiction. Her work has appeared in No Contact, (mac)ro(mic), Literary Mama, Lunch Ticket, The Independent, LA Weekly, Backstage, and more. Her short story manuscript won an honorable mention for Miami Book Fair’s 2021 Emerging Writer Fellowship. She’s a 2020 Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net nominee and has participated in workshops and residencies at Tin House, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Millay Colony. She holds an MFA from Bennington.

A Rare Evening Out

Two-thirds of the way through the picture, he notices that there is someone else sitting there in the dark with him—right at the part where the heroine, Fawnia, accosts an old lady in the produce section of the supermarket with a vivid description of how she’d fingered herself at the behest of her dinner guests the night before—how she’d done it right there at the table in front of her humiliated husband, whom she reviled—and then, overcome, throws her face into her arms and barrels into a pyramid of cabbage heads and bursts into tears. He steals a peek toward the back of the theater and catches the unmistakable waffle-board soles of Chuck Taylors vacillating together and apart atop the seatback four rows behind him. A pair of feminine hands tapping the knees of too-perfectly torn jeans. A blanched forehead and dark pits of eyes in the glow reflecting off the screen like she is part of the movie but has been projected out into the world, into the theater and into her seat. She must’ve snuck in during the teeth-rattling thunder of the coming attractions when he was too rapt in the promise of the latest Liam Neeson revenge thriller to notice that somebody else had, of all things, paid $12.50 to see Jean Baptiste’s Une Carte Postale Malade on a Thursday evening. And now that he’s noticed her, he can’t help but hear her breathing beneath the foreign burble of the dialogue, snickering to herself at its most unbelievably affected overextensions.

After the movie mercifully ends, he watches the credits until he hears her shuffle to her feet and out the door and into the searing fluorescent lights of the real world, the soft haze of the movie giving way to the concrete walls of the hallway and lobby and the rest of the five-story mall below them. She curls around the corner into the ladies’ room, and he follows and peels off into the men’s. He only washes his hands, and when he comes back out, she is standing there on the backs of her heels, studying the poster for the movie they’d just seen, maybe in the hope that it would reveal some notion of what her experience over the past two-and-a-half hours ultimately amounted to.

When’s the last time you saw a movie poster without any writing on it? she says as if speaking aloud to herself.

It doesn’t? He steps beside her and examines the poster like he needs to see for himself something so improbable.

What’d’cha think?

He gets a good look at her for the first time. She’s looking up at him, a lively, pretty face—sparkling brown eyes beneath thick, black rectangular spectacles, nearly imperceptible freckles sprinkled across her lush, elegant, nose. She is wearing makeup, but it is so subtle it looks more natural than if she’d gone without, red and black and lavender against the warm brown of her eyes and her medium-length hair tied back in a ponytail. Her smile ripples across her mouthwash-ad teeth so that he can see every single one of them.

About the movie?

Duh.

To tell you the truth, it was so pretentious, I don’t even know what to say.

Didn’t you expect it to be pretentious?

Yes. Duh. But what happened in there managed to defy my expectations.

Now, see, I disagree.

You didn’t think it was pretentious?

I did. But I expected it would be even worse.

Well. I suppose I’m just too naïve. Which probably explains why no one else is here.

She rocks forward on the balls of her feet. I’m here.

Right. What’s wrong with us, anyway?

They walk out of the place together, down a series of wheelchair-friendly ramps arranged in Escher squares spiraling down to the street level of the mall. Their not-talking is thick and heavy between them, and he clears his throat and says, You know, I’m sort of new to Chicago. Do you know of any coffee places open late around here?

Isn’t it a little late for coffee?

Not for me. It just feels too early to go home.

She bumps his arm with her shoulder. I’m just teasing. I drink coffee late, too.

He gestures above his forehead like each word is on a marquee in front of him: If you can’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk.

Oh, my god! That’s Christmas in July, right?

Yes! You know it?

Uh, it’s only one of my all-time favorite movies.

Mine, too. It doesn’t get nearly enough attention. From Preston Sturges people, even. I just threw that out as a non sequitur. I can’t believe you know it.

She grins down at her Chuck Taylors. I like how nice he is to his mother in it. And now you tell me what you like about it, and I’ll show you where to get coffee.

He leans into the door to the outside with his forearm and pushes it open, and she squeezes past him and out into the damp October night.

I like how nice he is to his mother.

She leads him a few blocks north to a Starbucks, which is open, shit, might as well be all night. He orders a black coffee, which is handed to him at the counter, and she orders something that, by the complexity of the dubious Italian of the name of it, he can’t believe exists as an option. He pays and secures a table for two by the window while she waits for the harried barista at the espresso machine to construct it for her. He peeks over at her a few times as if to make sure she’s still there—that she’s not some spirit of a girl who haunts the theater and walks boys down to the coffee shop and then disappears at the door. She catches him looking at her, and he shrugs like what’s the holdup? Then he turns and gazes out the window at all the kids bouncing around on Belmont, ten on a Thursday, and he slides his left pinkie down the side of the finger next to it to make sure he hadn’t put his ring back on when he’d come up from the shitty gym on the third floor of his building and showered and headed out.

She slips into her seat. Her drink is very white in a clear, plastic fast food cup with gossamer jets of brown like clouds between the walls of a thunderstorm. It is beautiful.

So, where were we?

You were telling me all about what it’s like breaking steers, growing up in Omaha.

She laughs. Do I look like I’m from Omaha?

That’s a loaded question. I have no idea what people look like in Omaha.

She pulls something metallic-looking out of her purse and holds it up to his face. You want to split a Twix with me? She shakes it like his last chance is going fast. I got it at the theater.

Ok. I guess you only live once.

She tears open the wrapper and gives him one. It’s warm from her purse, and it’s rather too hard and too soft in all the wrong spots. They chew across the table as if it’s glass and they’re pretending it’s not cutting up their gums, their faces both showing the awkward understanding that they are thinking the same thing.

So. This is kind of intimate, isn’t it. Me eating your Twix.

She flushes. Don’t think this is weird, but I love talking to strangers. I mean, I want you to know, I don’t usually start gabbing like this with just anyone off the street. But I mean at parties. Hanging out with someone else’s friends, and I don’t know anybody. At a bar or whatever.

I don’t go to parties much these days. Or bars. Or anywhere.

I read once that interacting with new people, new ideas, is what keeps the brain alive. Keeps it vital.

Well, no wonder I’ve gotten so stupid. Damn, you know where we should have gone is that crepe place down the street.

She scrunches up her face. Where?

A crepe sounds good right now. It’s across the street from the theater. Looks like a house. You should check it out sometime if you’ve never been. I used to go there all the time when I lived up here, but I haven’t been there in years. I think it’s still there.

Uh, excuse me. I thought you were new in town. She gives him two thumbs down. Busted.

It takes me a long time to adjust to my surroundings. He says it like a question.

How long have you lived here then, liar?

In Chicago?

Yes.

Uh, let me see. Oh…seventeen years.

Oh, you are so busted.

I moved out of this neighborhood ten years ago, though. Eleven. He looks around the room. The Starbucks have all changed so.

Her giggling subsides, and they look at each other, and the weight of their looking is too terrible.

Ahem. So. It’s an Olympic year.

I know. I’m so excited. I was into gymnastics when I was young.

Really.

Yeah, for years. Like competitive. I have really muscular legs.

He almost buys it, but then that grin creeps across her face.

No, you weren’t.

She cackles and rocks back in her chair from the force of it. I still have nice legs, though. Really strong thighs. I could crush you with them.

He intends to retort with something clever, but his awareness that his face is becoming red turns whatever he would have said into a sort of bark. Not a laugh, something less human.

So. You have a lot of gray hair, huh.

He brushes his hand across his forehead like fixing his part. Does it bother you?

Uh, I sorta like it. It’s like having coffee with a senator or something.

He laughs out his nose mid-sip of his coffee. I’d be a young senator. Like JFK young.

Does it bother you? Being this old? Back in your old neighborhood.

No, I guess not. It’s not so much that I feel old in this neighborhood. It’s that everyone else feels so young. How old are you?

Too young for you, that’s for sure.

He slumps in his chair and props his face up with his elbow on the table. I don’t know, all this worrying about aging…your mortality…that’s kid shit, anyway. The older you get, the more things come apart, the more seeing the end out ahead feels like...I don’t know. A relief. And then you go away, and then what? Your friends go on with their lives, eventually forget all about you. The spouse finds a replacement. The kids, they get over it, leave home, have families of their own. So, I guess the question is, is that a comfort? Or does that make it all worse?

She lifts her eyebrows and peers over her glasses. You sound like you’ve seen one too many Jean Baptiste movies.

Anyway, I’m only like five years older than you, if that. So, don’t give me that senator bullshit.

She watches him for a while and shakes her cup around. The ice rattles against the plastic.

I have a confession to make.

And what’s that?

I didn’t buy that Twix at the theater. I have no idea how long it was in my purse. But it was a very long time.

That explains a lot, actually. The caramel was like biting into a sheet of paper. I didn’t want to say anything.

At least the chocolate hadn’t turned white.

I suppose that’s something.

You ate it, anyway, didn’t you. You ate my Twix.

He coughs into his fist even though he didn’t particularly have to. Well. Since it’s confession time, I suppose it’s my turn.

Ooh, this ought to be good.

But I think it’s only fair to tell you before this goes any further that, uh... He coughs again. Sorry. I’m sort of married. With a kid and everything.

She rolls her eyes. Duh...

What, you knew?

Please. You only have an I’ve-got-a-wife-and-kids nametag on.

He looks down at his chest. Well, that’s embarrassing. I can’t believe I forgot to take that off. These goddamn conventions.

And what...dear, sweet wifey didn’t want to come out to see Une Carte Postale Malade with you?

They’re out of town for a week at her sister’s. It’s funny, I haven’t been out to a movie rated north of G in six months. Longer, maybe. I hate to admit it, but I was excited to see that piece of shit before it left the theaters.

She leans in over the table and slides her left shoe between his feet. And why did you feel you needed to tell me you’re married? Did you think we were going to fuck tonight?

He manages to choke down the coffee he’d just sipped without spraying it out on the tabletop. He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist. I had planned on it, yeah.

You know...it just so happens I only live a couple of blocks from here.

Uh. Are you sure? A wife and kid and all?

She slides her shoe so gently up the inside of his left calf that it almost isn’t there.

What kind of person are you, anyway?

I was just going to ask you the same question.

~ ~ ~

She finally finds her keys and opens the door for him—one of two apartments on the second floor of a brown, brick three-flat.

That’s very gentlemanly of you.

She shuts the door and twists the deadbolt. He turns and wraps his hand about her waist and pulls her to him, and the warmth of her body explodes onto him. She rests her forehead against his and just keeps it there. In the soft sheen of the streetlamps through the window, her omnipresent, star-spangled smile has vanished.

What’s the matter?

It’s just…

What?

It’s just I don’t know whether to…I have something I should tell you.

Don’t tell me you’re married, too.

She laughs a laugh she hasn’t shown him yet. One that doesn’t find anything all that funny. A naked kind of laugh. Nothing, just...never mind. It’s stupid.

No, what.

I have a rule, I tell everyone who comes over here. I mean, I don’t have friends over very often. I usually go to their place just to be safe.

What is it?

You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I think it’s only fair to let you know...

What?

She draws and holds her breath and then blows it out through her cheeks. There’s a monster here.

He laughs out his nose. A monster? What do you mean?

I mean a monster.

Where?

In the apartment. I mean, in the building. Downstairs, we think. Like in the basement where the storage is. No one is sure where.

What are you talking about? A monster. Are you serious?

It’s not a monster exactly. I say monster. More like a creature. It’s no big deal.

What, do you mean like a dog? A stray dog?

No, not a dog. A lot bigger than a dog.

Like a bear?

Sort of, I don’t know. I only saw it once real quick, out back by the alley. Or I thought I did. It was dark. But everyone else in the building has seen it, too. And since you’re here…I thought you should know.

Holy shit. Did you call the police? Animal control?

The police don’t believe us. They looked for it a few times, all over the building, in the alley. But it hides—look, I don’t even know why I mentioned it.

She glides back into him—his arms down at his sides—and places her wrists on the back of his neck and pushes her face into his until her wet mouth presses against the general area of his chin.

Is it dangerous? Are we in danger? I mean—

Uggggh, god. No, it just, I don’t know...keeps to itself.

She licks his lips like a key unlocking them. It hasn’t attacked anyone or anything.

He opens his mouth—her lips and tongue pricking tiny fireworks upon his—and then engulfs her like devouring her. Then they break off and his sandpapery chin nestles against the downy silkiness of her cheek.

I mean, we’re pretty sure. Mrs. Crenshaw from downstairs, she sort of vanished a few months ago, but we figure she just—

Mrs. Crenshaw?

Yeah, she’s pretty old. Mrs. Hyde, the woman across the hall from her, she says Mrs. Crenshaw was telling her that her sister in California has been having medical trouble lately, so we think—

The monster ate Mrs. Crenshaw?

No. She laughs like he’s so silly. No. We’re pretty sure. I’m so sorry I mentioned it, I just thought...

She traces the interior of his hamstring with the tip of her finger and then grabs onto his crotch and squeezes it a little and jams her mouth back onto his. A little clarity on the subject of the disappearance of Mrs. Crenshaw would be nice, but her technique for distraction is very effective. He leads her over to her couch and lays her back onto it and begins working her clothes off, an urgency swelling into something like a frenzy, her hands and fingers and fingernails everywhere at him. Their mouths suck at each other, wide open, throaty gasps. He finds her more sensitive areas with his hands, and she reacts like she can’t believe he had any idea where to look. They tumble over onto the floor, and in the struggle, he’s somehow been completely stripped, and she stands astraddle over him and removes the last of her clothing—strangely enough, her left sock. She certainly doesn’t have the legs of a gymnast. She’s skinny and girlish but not especially lean—sexy in the way any beautiful, willowy, young woman standing naked over you is sexy, but she’s not nearly as much his type as his wife, who is long and sculpted and lusciously buxom. But it’s not like it’s a contest.

She falls on him, her hot, feral eyes penetrating him. She guides him in, and he rolls over on top of her, their rhythms so frantic he doesn’t even begin to consider how different it all is and how long it has been since he’d been inside someone else. Well over a decade. Writhing back and forth now, finding a tempo, trying not to dwell on the fact that, accustomed as he is to the nonchalance of marital sex, using a condom hadn’t even occurred to him. And then he lurches back and freezes, and his head jerks up and toward the back of the place.

What was that?

Wh—what? What what?

A noise. I heard something. Like something in the room.

What? No. Come on, baby. Come, come, come...

He resumes humping. Ok, it was nothing. Just apartment noise. Something from upstairs. A book falling to the ground or a picture frame got knocked over. And then another sound but on the other side of the room like something moving fast across the floor. Moving closer.

There it is again.

God, don’t stop, goddamnit.

I think...I think it’s the monster.

What?

The monster.

Oh, Jesus, don’t be such a pussy about it.

I think it’s in here.

She grabs his ass with both hands and squeezes it hard, spurring him back into order, and he pumps faster and faster, whimpering softly with the effort, trying to finish as quickly as he can before the noises in the room come any closer to them, naked and prostrate on the floor—a low growl out of drool-drenched jaws, the skitter of claws scrambling against the hardwood floor, gnashing teeth bared at the flesh of his neck, the swipe of a giant, razor-tipped paw across his back, serrated blades sinking into him, his limp body dragged outside and down to the basement amongst the storage bins and tossed in a pile atop the fetid, half-eaten corpse of Mrs. Crenshaw. He can only hear his own screams when she rolls him back over and collapses on top of him, only vaguely aware of her ass pounding down on his hips and smothering him under one last adrenaline-powered squeeze, a ragged groan spilling out of her. All of her spent weight heaped on his chest, he scrambles up on his elbows and looks about, his frenetic eyes now fully adjusted to the dark. The room is as still as uncorrupted emptiness, the air heavy with quiet beyond their labored breathing.

~ ~ ~

You are very good at that, she says, a satisfied glow about her.

Pfffshh…. He waves his hand at her like he did it all on purpose, like every aspect of his performance wasn’t conceived and executed out of the worst kind of preoccupation—thinking about baseball but multiplied by the mortal panic that he was about to be torn to shreds and eaten.

I like you.

Her intoxicating smile has returned. She is sitting on a leather slipper chair twisted partway against the wall adjacent the couch, a white men’s undershirt at least one size too big obscuring the panties atop her long white legs. Her hair is draped down about her shoulders, corn-silk limp and flat from its day in a ponytail. The look reads bedtime, but the smile says she could do it all again if he were so inspired.

He’s not naked anymore, either, slumped on the couch and feeling paunchy and saggy and old. He looks at his watch, thinking about an Uber. Or a cab should be easy to get out on Clark, and then there would be no record of the trip. Or maybe take the train home, mix in with the crowd and dissolve into obscurity. He peeks at his phone. There are several texts awaiting him, which he saves to read later, but before he blanks his screen, he spots the name of his young son in the alert banner, and his son’s pale, triangular face and earnest eyes—big and green and brown like caramel apple lollipops—emerge out of the dark noise of his thoughts, watching him. It’s the first he’d thought of his son since the gigantic visage of Liam Neeson was growling into a phone at the volume of a jet engine that NOBODY FUCKS WITH MY FAMILY!!!

You know, my boy—I have a little boy—he was standing in our bedroom the other day, just standing there as still as a statue. And I walk over to him, and it turns out he’s looking at our wedding picture, a framed eight-by-ten out on my wife’s nightstand. And I said, what do you think of that picture? And he looked up at me and said, It makes me sad. And I said, Why does it make you sad? And he said, Because it was so long ago.

Heh. Cute.

She lights a cigarette from a pack that had been lost in the random clutter on the end table. She lifts the cigarette up for him to see. Do you mind?

It’s your house. I wouldn’t have pegged you for a smoker.

I’m not really. But I’m sitting here thinking...

What.

I wonder if we’re going to run into each other again. Somewhere in the city. You out and about with your little family.

He watches her smile spread across her face and shrugs.

What do you think?

He shrugs again.

What neighborhood do you live in?

Uh. Downtown.

Like River North?

No. No. The Loop, actually.

Oh, yeah? That’s weird. One of those new places near the park?

Uh...yeah, something like that. Can I use your bathroom?

When he comes back out, he finds her in the kitchen leaning against the counter. The butt of the cigarette smolders between her knuckles.

Hey, I should be going.

Yeah, it’s getting late.

Yeah.

Well. It’s been real. She crosses the floor to him and folds her fingers behind his neck like they are slow dancing. She kisses him deeply and ends it with a flick of the tip of her tongue against his upper lip. Could you do me a favor on your way out?

What’s that?

Could you drop this garbage at the dumpster out back?

His lips curl over his teeth. Out back?

She nods at the door out to the back stairs. Yeah, just across the alley. The garbage comes tomorrow morning. I’d take it down, but you’ve got all your clothes on.

But can’t you just take it in the morning?

They come too early. I’ll miss it.

But it’s the middle of the night.

...so?

What about... He glances over his shoulder at the door. What about the monster?

Oh, pfft. You’ll be fine.

But I don’t—

I was making all that up anyway. Like a joke. To break the tension.

It sure didn’t seem like you were joking.

Pleeeease? She pouts her lip and pushes her hips into him. Don’t make me get all dressed to go down there.

~ ~ ~

It’s very dark out, and he takes the uneven planks of wood one circumspect step at a time, the neck of the trash bag clenched in his hand, his other gripping the unfinished handrail. His eyes on his feet. Only one streetlamp at the end of the alley and a porch light midway up the back of the building, neither making much of a dent in the misty gloom, only managing to cast angular, spidery shadows off the wooden scaffolding up the façade, which create the illusion that each step is further away than it is. The garbage bins are clustered together up against the fence on the other side of the alley. Two small trees loom above the fence and a big feathery bush beside the bins. God-knows-what hiding in there.

What is her game here, anyway? Did she bring him home and fuck him just so he’d take the garbage out? Did she regularly cruise Thursday night screenings of terrible art movies to recruit lonely, impracticably cerebral men to serve as carnal sacrifices for this mysterious creature? Was he merely the bait in an elaborate scheme to achieve its capture, the denizens of this building waiting in the shadows with nets and flashlights and shotguns for it to attack him and draw itself out into the open?

But, come on. That’s just stupid. There’s not any monster. There’s nothing hiding in the closet. No serial killer lurking behind the door. She had seen a big dog or a rat or a raccoon one time, and her imagination had gotten away from her. The old lady downstairs wasn’t eaten. She’d left town to visit her sick sister. It’s an alley and it’s dark here, but this is the middle of Chicago Fucking Illinois. All these buildings full of people. Cars prowling the streets, windows open, radios on. Cop cars, ambulances. Just go throw out the goddamn garbage like a grown-up, turn around, and go home. Go to sleep, wake up in the morning, get some breakfast. Pick up the place so the family can return to a nice, clean home.

He reaches out to the garbage bin lid like he expects it to be hot to the touch. He lifts it a quarter of the way up and peeks inside. There’s a rustle in the bush and a dull thump against the side of the bin and what might be a rush of breeze or the brakes of a car out front or the choked, blood-lust gargle of a hungry beast relishing the anticipation of that first soft bite into him, and he gulps air into his lungs and yells it out as loud as he possibly can, and it rings out in perfect resonance with the bones of his sinuses and the asphalt of the alley and the brick walls of the buildings. A good, hoarse, manly yowl like his ancestors would use to ward off leopards and shit at the dawn of humanity. He drops the lid and the garbage bag and sprints toward the narrow gangway past her building. Wanting only to get there and through and burst out onto the sidewalk on the other side. Before he reaches the mouth of the gangway, something grabs him from the side and digs hard into his shoulder and ribs, and, ignoring the jolt of the pain, he churns his legs, unyielding and powerful, and he overcomes the force pulling at him, which, with an ungodly loud groan, gives like a tooth pried free of its root. And he runs through the gangway as fast as he ever had for any reason. Probably at that moment as fast as any man has ever run.

He turns onto the sidewalk and, imbued with confidence from the sheer mundanity of the street—the streetlamps, the parked cars, the power lines, the trees—he peers behind him down the gangway. A satellite dish screwed into the first-floor balcony off the back stairs has been torn from its mooring and now hangs limp like a dead bird against the darkness of the alley. Probably Mrs. Crenshaw’s dish. Fuck it, anyway. Where she is, she won’t be watching any TV.

# # #

David Jack Sparks lives in Chicago and writes fiction, poetry, and humor. His stories have appeared in Typishly, Sundog Lit, 3:AM Magazine, and others.

Little Black Dress

My wife stands in the doorway of our garage, wearing a tweed jacket I bought at Goodwill for nine dollars, one you might see on an old man, or a lesbian. But my wife was neither of these things. I typically described her as stylish.

The cancer forced her to be this way. During chemotherapy, she leafed through fashion magazines while the drip of death folded into her bloodstream. After treatments, we used to go to Goodwill, and she would buy one new accessory. Once the treatment reached its poisonous climax, where she no longer had the energy to stop and pick something out, I started buying her something new to wear to the hospital. Something that made her feel confident.

I genuinely believe confidence stomps cancer cells.

“Are you ready?” she asks.

I release the hood prop and secure the hood of my ’78 Camaro. Wiping my hands on a yellow rag, I follow her into the living room.

We sit across from one another at the ottoman. Her legs cross on carpet. She bought a spiral notebook during back-to-school sales, pages smooth before ink pressed against them. She clicks her pen.

“I’m thinking pills,” she says.

“Do you have any pills strong enough for something like that?” I think of the Allegra-D in the medicine cabinet, tiny white capsules that barely relieve my sniffles.

“The pill itself doesn’t need to be strong. There’s power in numbers.” My wife jots the word pills down in perfect cursive.

“You want me to sit in the bathroom with you while you OD?”

“Why does it have to be the bathroom?”

In the movies, people are always popping pills in the bathroom. Maybe because it’s a private place. My wife wants her death to be anything but secret.

“You could make me dinner.” She jots down the word dinner and circles it. “Buy a bottle of that Rosé I’ve always loved. The one we drank on our honeymoon.” My wife taps the end of her pen against her chin. “Even prisoners on death row get to pick their last meal.”

“I could make fettuccini alfredo.” Alfredo is her favorite dish. I’m lactose intolerant.

“No. You have to share this with me. Make alfredo the night before.” She jots this down.

“How about steak?” I suggest. “We both like steak. We could have that fancy type of steak. The one they served us at the steakhouse in Hawaii.”

She doesn’t write this down.

“Or we could just go back to Hawaii.” At least euthanasia is legal there, I think.

“I want to do it at home.” She scribbles down the word home and fills in a heart beside it. The ink blots the page.

I guess I’ll have to move then. I imagine getting home from a long day at the garage, covered in motor oil and sweat, entering the house and looking at the dining room table where I watched my wife swallowed a bottle of Allegra-D. Eating every meal there. The smell of fettuccini alfredo always lingering on the silverware.

Maybe just a new dining set would be enough.

“We could get takeout.” I study her pen.

“I don’t want to spend my last night out picking up food.”

“Delivery?”

“Just our luck and the driver would get lost. Then my last meal would be SpaghettiOs or potato chips.”

“Then tell me what you want, since what I want doesn’t matter. Not like it would be nice for me to have one final homecooked meal from my wife before the end.”

She considers how a new car would be useful for both of us, how limiting gluten in our diets will make us healthier, how a vacation to Jamaica would be the best compromise for a vacation. It sounds like a conversation, but it’s not.

She folds the cover over the page, hiding our secrets. “Maybe we should stop for the night. Pick this up tomorrow.” She slowly stands up, shimmying the tweed jacket off her back, revealing knotted shoulders and skimpy arms.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You know I’ll do it.”

She turns back, worry creasing her tired skin. “How do I know? You’ve never killed somebody before, have you?”

“No, but I’ve loved somebody before.”

If she wasn’t so pale, maybe she’d be blushing.

“I froze lasagna,” she says.

“You want lasagna for your last meal?”

“No. For after.”

I bite my lip. That’s my wife. Always planning three steps ahead. “Can we sit together?”

She nods. Standing up, I settle on the recliner in the corner of the living room. Her boney ass digs into my thighs, shaped different than it was when we first married. She’d thinned out since her treatments started. It got to a point where we had to start thrifting clothes, otherwise nothing she owned would fit her right. Her clothes needed to fit her right.

Resting her face in the crook of my neck, I cradled her like an infant.

“What about suffocation?” she whispers beside my ear.

“I couldn’t.”

“We could do it one last time. Kill me in the bedroom.”

“I don’t think it’s physically possible for me to choke you to death.” I feel her slipping and hike her up on my chest. “It’s like how it’s impossible for you to bite your own tongue off.”

“Is that true?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“You could use a pillow.” Her lips graze my collarbone. “Or a rope. You don’t have to do it with your own hands, if that’s too hard.”

I hold my breath, not sure what to say, wondering if this is what it would feel like. The gap of nothingness in her lungs. “All of this is too hard.”

“You don’t have to do it at all.” She sits up, looking at me.

“No, not just this. The situation. The cancer. The life we were supposed to live together.”  Whatever that means. We knew the life we had planned of endless travel was quickly out of the picture. The adventurous woman I married soon found herself needing to be grounded, tending to a flower garden in the backyard. A friend group she would go out with every Friday night. A primary care doctor.

“We can rule out the gory options, if you want. Like stabbing or shooting.”

A ball of spit drops in my throat. “God, you think I’d want to shoot you?”

“You can’t tell me the thought never crossed your mind.”

Maybe she’d wanted to pull a knife on me on the nights I held her by her wrists and begged her not to leave, headlights of her friend’s car spotlighting us though the blinds in our own living room. Nights I could see her nipples through her shirt, smell peach Schnapps on her lips, holding her down in a place we never planned to settle in. She made me so angry, I’d be lying if I said the thought of hurting her never crossed my mind.

She nestles back against my chest. “What should we talk about?”

“Aren’t we already talking about something?”

“No, I mean that day. We can’t talk about it all day. We’ll have to have things in mind to talk about. Things we’ve never told each other. Or things we’ve told each other too many times. Maybe I’ll make a list.”

I’d been creating a mental list of all the things I wanted to say to her before that day, memories to sprinkle into conversation, about how I loved the way her hands went clammy when she finished washing the dishes, or the way goosebumps fleshed across her skin when she was cold, and how thick her thighs used to look in denim. Hints of hope to keep her spirits up. Maybe it would help in the long run.

“Do you really want our whole last day to be scripted? You want to know exactly what we’re going to talk about, and eat, and how I’m going to end it? Don’t you want any surprises?”

“Have you ever cheated on me?” she asks.

“Of course not.”

She turns in the opposite direction in the chair, facing the wall. Her boney limbs poke my chest. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“You brought it up.”

Part of me thinks there’s no way she’d never cheated on me with the outfits she wore, and the late nights she was out. But there were some secrets I wanted her to take to the grave.

“It’s not up to me if you remarry. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life policing the way you carry out yours. That’s for you to decide.”

So I only get to make decisions that impact my life? Nothing for us? Is that what we agreed to when we were married? In sickness and in health, for better or for worse? I can’t imagine anything getting much worse than this.

“Are you going to try and find him?” she asks.

My wife barely left the house for a year. She went to the doctor alone. Drove forty-five minutes to the grocery store so no one would recognize her. Took a tape measure to her belly every day. Walked on the treadmill regularly. Only ate organic foods, trying to preserve the figure she’d worked for, attempting to control the pregnancy she hadn’t planned.

She told me I couldn’t be in the delivery room with her, that only the real parents would witness his birth. His adoptive parents. Maybe she didn’t want me to want him, or to convince her to want him, but she couldn’t stop me from thinking about him every day since.

I changed the wiper blades on the Camaro while our son was born. She had me rub lotion into her stretch marks for months postpartum. Her body never returned to its old form. Sometimes I wonder if she regrets giving him up too.

“Do you know what you’re going to wear?” I ask. “When we do it?”

She looks up at me and smiles. “I even know what you’re wearing.”

“Show me.”

She stands, interlocking her tiny fingers between mine, and lures me into our bedroom. I sit on the patchwork quilt at the foot of the bed.

Opening the closet door, she balances on her tip toes to unhook a hanger from the rack. It’s a little black cocktail dress with a slit on the side. She holds it in front of her. I’m afraid there won’t be enough of her left to fit inside.

“Try it on.” I insist.

“Only if you do.” She tosses kakis and a suede sweater my way.

Together, we strip in front of the vanity mirror. I see my wife’s ribs poking through her skin. I trace them each night in bed, feeling the indents of her breathing, living body. We stare a moment at our reflection. She still wears lacy lingerie every day. She’s lived two months longer than her original diagnosis.

Our bodies wiggle into the outfits. Her reflection spins with her, finding where the dress masks the ghosts of her curves. I kiss the top of her forehead. I dread the black dress.

“Maybe we should burn the house down.” She grabs my arm and spins underneath, collected in my chest.

“You want to?”

My hands settle on her waist, and we sway against one another, following a rhythm only a couple married long enough can feel.

“Then you could start new. Insurance check and everything. Wouldn’t have to worry about coming home and seeing me around every corner.” She spins out of my grasp.

“You’d want to burn to death?”

“You can roast a marshmallow over me and eat me up.” Her hips sway against mine. They don’t feel like my wife’s anymore. “I’d light the match, if that makes it easier on you. Then it won’t be your fault.”

“Doesn’t matter who lights the match. It might not stop me from jumping in the flames after you.”

My wife falls still. She sits on the hardwood, pulling me down to the floor with her. Our hands interlock.

“It would be selfish of me to tell you that you can’t kill yourself.” She kisses my knuckle. I’m afraid the gasoline residue on my hands will stain her lips.

“All of this is selfish. That doesn’t make it wrong.”

“According to the great state of Kentucky, it is.” She scans the bedroom. “I wouldn’t be mad, really. What I want won’t matter at that point.”

“Don’t say that.”

She crawls over to the marble top dresser, heaving herself up, and opens the jewelry box. Inside is a teardrop pendant dangling from a silver chain. “Put this on me?”

Passing her, I open my underwear drawer, the top drawer of the dresser, and remove a small velvet jewelry box. “Would you consider wearing this one instead?”

Asking a jeweler to help you find the perfect accessory for your wife’s death day isn’t an easy task. I explained the cancer to him, not our plan. He pressed the bridge of his glasses against his nose, up for the challenge, and showed me a collection of simple elegant jewelry. He expressed his condolences while cashing me out.

She takes the box in her palm and opens it, removing a rose gold necklace. The chain dangles in her fingertips. Looking up at me, she smiles.

“It’s beautiful. I want to be buried in this.”

Guess we ruled out burning in a fire. I wondered if I would have a say in what they dressed her body in, or if I would be allowed at the funeral at all.

She hands the necklace to me, shimmering over my calloused hands. She turns around, and I lace the chain around her neck, clasps meeting at the prominent lump where her backbone begins. It hugs her neckline elegantly.

Strangulation? I could never.

“You never answered my question earlier.” Her reflection locks eyes with mine. “Are you going to try to find him?”

Is this really my wife, standing here, asking me the questions she chose never to speak of? She hated the way he made her skin stretched, hated feeling him constantly kick her, hated her options. I watch her through a reflection that doesn’t match.

“I was thinking about it.”

“Zip me up?” She asks, bare back pale between the flaps of her dress. I do.

“Did you put him in your will?”

“I put you in my will.” She turns back around. “It’s up to you if he’s in yours.”

It didn’t make sense to our parents why we wouldn’t keep the baby. We were married. We’d bought a house. I worked over full-time as a mechanic. She had two months left of grad school. Pregnancy was right on cue. My wife glowed in maternity clothes.

The black dress outlines the curvature of her breasts. She spins in a circle, adjusts the necklace, stares at her own ass for a few moments, smiles.

“It’s time to make some decisions.” She turns again, the zipper at my fingertips.

“Go for a ride with me.”

Skepticism scuffs her expression. This wasn’t in the notebook. She reluctantly nods, and I carry her out to the garage.

Setting her on the hood of the Camaro, I open the camera app on my phone. She asks what I’m doing, and I tell her to smile. She rolls her eyes but obliges. She poses, rolling across the hood of the car, posing like a calendar model. Maybe I will make a calendar out of them. The pictures scream confidence.

I open the door for her, and she steps into the Camaro, running her fingertips down the leather seats. The engine roars as the car starts. It had been my father’s car before he gifted it to me. Every night after dinner, he showed me how to look under the hood. I test everything every day, even the radio. I tested it more than once on the nights she wasn’t home.

I wonder what song she wants played while she dies, but I don’t ask.

“We were supposed to drive cross country in this thing.” My wife stays, rolling the window down ever so slightly.

“We still can.” I shift into reverse, backing out of the driveway. Silhouettes of mailboxes line the street. Porchlights glisten like tealights around the block.

“I was always skeptical. You can never rely on an old car.”

I rested my hand on her bare thigh, tracing the seam of the little black dress. “You can trust this old car.”

She studies the rearview mirror for a few moments, curious in the way the house shrinks behind us. “How would you want me to do it?”

“Huh?” I flick on the turning signal.

“If you were the one dying, how would you ask me to kill you?”

The question buzzes through my mind. Maybe she does care about my side of the coin. “I would let you decide.”

“You trust me that much?”

Seriously? “I’ve been married to you for nineteen years.”

My wife rolls the window back up. “Then should I stop trying to control fate and just let you decide?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“It would probably keep you out of trouble. You could find a way that looks like an accident. You’re the one who has to deal with the repercussions, anyway.”

“I know.”

“He’s sixteen now,” she says. “You could teach him how to drive the Camaro.”

“Do you want me to find him? Is that what you’re trying to say?” I take a sharp turn. “You’re so confusing. I don’t know what you want. Why can’t you just tell me what you want, just once? This is it. Time’s almost out.”

I look at my wife. Tears well in the creases of her eyes.

“I want you to be okay.”

I don’t believe her. My grip tightens on the steering wheel. “I’m not going to be okay. No matter what we do. I’m sorry if that’s not reassuring for you, or doesn’t fit your outlined plan, but I’m human too. I can’t just decide I’m going to be okay.”

“I’m the last person you have to explain that to.” My wife hunches in the seat, fragile skin squeaking against polished leather.

“A car accident.”

“What?” she asks.

“I would choose a car accident.”

# # #

Misty Yarnall's fiction can be found in a handful of literary journals. She has won the Sixth Act Playwriting Competition, the Langlois Award for Short Fiction, and the POV Screenwriting Contest. She is currently working on a novel.