Track Mangoes

When Mrs. Klimbacher asked me whether or not she should worry that her four-year-old son asked her to buy him an Easy-Bake oven, I told her that she probably didn’t have to but that it might feel nice if she did.

I started babysitting for Mrs. Klimbacher’s fraternal twins, Richie and Hans, three years after she divorced her husband. From an early age Hans exhibited a fondness for football, while Richie preferred far more delicate endeavors. On a crisp fall day I recall seeing Hans on the front lawn, red leaves stuck to his black fleece and woolen cap. He circumambulated the grass, tossing a Nerf ball and reciting football penalties. Now I don’t claim to know much about football, but I know the things Hans belted out into the autumn air had absolutely no meaning whatsoever; they were simply a hodge-podge of phrases referees might say, like “First down!” and “Five yard penalty!” I then recall going into the house, setting my shoulder bag on the kitchen counter, and scouring for Richie. I found him sitting at his mother’s vanity and applying her makeup to his face. He had one of her silk scarves wrapped around his forehead like a turban and smelled distinctly of her Crabtree and Evelyn sandalwood perfume.

The thought crossed my mind then, and it would continue to cross my mind as I babysat for the Klimbachers, that Richie may have been—brace yourself—gay. When I watch Richie lavishing in beautiful things, the necklaces and the Sunday hats, I cannot help but contemplate the inborn difference between him and his brother. While Richie was pretending to be cat woman Hans was killing Nazis in the backyard. How, at such an early age, could two boys differentiate their tastes so stridently?

Richie never has expressed an interest in men or in anything technically homosexual. Yet I cannot help but observe my tendency to color him thus. He was born, I think, not as a homosexual, but with a hyper-sensitivity to color and form, smells and sensations. I know he will grow up with homosexual tendencies, but I also know he was born with good taste. Is it a coincidence that so many of our brothers are tainted with such a cursed flaw?

When I babysit for Richie I never discourage him from playing with beautiful things. I think it might traumatize him if I did. Instead, I tell him that, yes, that smells delightful, and yes, that looks fantastic, and yes, he does look dashing in fire engine red. I do this because, to him, the vanity is a temple—a sanctuary from a world that discourages his odd form of expression. Why should I hinder him from playing with his mother’s makeup, which, to him, is essentially paint on the canvas of his face.

It was eight o'clock in the morning when Cooper walked past him, sitting at the base of a fat clay colored column outside the library doors, waiting for them to open.

No one had ever known the library to open on time. All anyone ever knew was that a woman named Kathy would turn the lights on in the foyer and walk up to the doors, and you'd stand on the other side, watching her bony hands rummaging through the pockets of her tech jacket for a giant ring of keys you knew couldn't be that difficult to find.

The first Minnesota snow had fallen the night before. It came without a real warning (other than that one on the weather channel) and it fell late at night while most of the students on campus had been asleep. Cooper would have missed it, but he was rolling on Vivance from 2:30 in the morning until then, writing a paper whose thesis seemed to slip farther and farther away from him the harder he rolled. When he put the little white pill on his tongue in the middle of his empty room, it was snowing then. When he sat himself on the sofa in his living room, it was snowing then too.

No one had ever known if her name was really Kathy either. It just said that on her jacket. Cooper had a jacket that said Kathy on it too. He bought it at a thrift store for a few dollars because he thought it looked good and funny because it had the name of somebody else on it. It was a green puffy thing with white stripes and little snap buttons. It took him a moment to remember that he was wearing it. He wondered if the real Kathy would get upset. But she just opened the doors and let three freezing students scurry inside where they shook the snow from their jackets. Kathy stepped past them and pulled a box of Marlboro's out of her jacket, shoving the keys back inside. Cooper wondered if there was a particular kind of person who smoked those cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked enough in his short life to know. But if there was, he thought, I think Kathy would be the kind of person who would.

Cooper’s breath curled up in the air as he watched Kathy pull a white lighter out of her pocket and hold it for a minute, starring at the snow falling off a tree way off in the center of the lawn. She was a short woman with a boy’s haircut. She must have been about 52, but then, Cooper thought, if she's been smokin' for awhile she could be 30 and I wouldn't think any different of it. Kathy was skinny. Her waist, perhaps, was about the circumference of a frying pan. You wouldn't know that though unless you looked at her legs, which stuck out from her jacket several sizes too big. Yeah, Cooper thought, several.

Kathy wasn't glancing at him, nor was she glancing at Cooper, even though he was still sitting there long after the doors had been opened. The three of them lingered outside the doors in silence. He stood up and disappeared behind the glass doors. Cooper followed him in, but before he walked through he checked his reflection in the glass. His face looked pursed and angry, and he wondered if it was the Vivance or if he was just constipated with schoolwork. The jacket still said Kathy, alright, although the white letters were begging to peel off of it. And through the faint image of his face in the glass he could see the boy taking a sharp right and heading off to the computer lab. Cooper chuckled to himself and laid his bare hand on the door handle. If it was anything but metal it would have been frozen, but metal in Minnesota just gets colder and colder to the point where you can't even touch it anymore. Metal gets so cold in Minnesota you wish it was ice, because ice would be warmer. Holding on to the door handle, Cooper looked at his reflection one more time, only this time he saw Kathy, peering over her shoulder, smoke hanging on her lips, starring at the back of Cooper's head. Cooper shook off a notion that suddenly popped into his head and walked through the doors. By the time he was in the library he had forgotten completely what the notion was.

He worked at the desk in the computer lab, though he usually just read books and didn't know the answer to questions. He was a tall boy, skinny, with a swooping pompadour that looked like a tsunami wave. He had a constant smirk on his face, as if at any moment he might break out into a monstrous grin or a bellowing laugh, bearing his teeth, several of which stuck out at frightening angles. A bright green name tag hung from his neck, strung up by a white cord.The boy's name was Lenox Marcuse.

"Excuse me," Cooper said, laying his frigid hands on the desk. "I'd like to check out a lap top."

Marcuse looked up from the computer screen in front of him, blankly. "What kind?"

"The working kind," Cooper said. Marcuse was silent for a moment before telling Cooper that he had meant what kind meaning Mac or PC. "Oh. Um. Mac, I guess."

Marcuse disappeared underneath the desk and brought up a white computer. Cooper slid him his ID and Marcuse held it under a small, flashing red light which beeped. "All set."

Cooper removed the card from the boy's fingers and saw that he was grinning. "Do you know that woman who works out there?"

"Kathy?"

"Yes that woman."

"I know of her," Marcuse said.

"Where is she from?"

"She's native."

"So I she doesn't care 'bout the cold? Right? Natives don't care about that kind of thing."

Marcuse's grin faded away. "No," he said, as if he had been wronged, as if someone had asked him to do something he did not want to do. "I'm a native," he said. "I care about the cold."

"You do?"

"I'm not some rock. I'm not some unfeeling piece of fat. I care about the cold. I hate the cold. I hate it. I hate how it kills the leaves before they even get a chance to die."

Cooper picked up his laptop and prepared to leave. Before he turned around he told Marcuse, "I meant. Well. I meant. Okay."

CHOP CUP from :weareom: on Vimeo.

Stellar and the Search for God is a periodical short story. Please check back for future installments.

Stellar and the Search for God

Part 1_1: a death in Portland happened.

Johnathan Newman Finster stood on the city corner starring up at the clock tower of the Union Station. The little white man appeared on the crosswalk signal and people began to push their way past him. He was fixed to the pavement like a piece of gum that had been spat out and stepped on multiple times. He kept his gaze glued to the massive clock examining its two gaunt hands, both facing upward. His jaw hung slack and his lips suddenly began to part like an opening pod. A small woman with a rolling backpack shuffled past him, swearing loudly. It was unclear whether or not Newman heard her. The sun was out that day. It hung in a cloudless sky, directly above Newman's head, like a single lightbulb in a dark room. The minute hand on the clock tower jerked to the right and positioned itself directly in line with the stubbier one. The bells rang in the air and Newman knew it was noontime.

It may have been at that moment that Newman saw a small figure standing under an awning, directly below the clock tower. It was a young man of average height. He was deathly skinny and had his head tilted toward a glowing sign that read “GO BY TRAIN.” The figure wore brown leather loafers and incredibly dusty, yet pressed pair of brown pants and a bright yellow polo with small breast pocket and a strong red stripe across the chest. The figure's eyes were hidden behind a pair of black sunglasses that slanted downward in the middle, giving him what looked like angry eyebrows. The figure's hair, which was floppy, straight, and greasy, was so dark that it appeared to have little to no texture.

The figure stepped out from underneath the awning into a small patch of sunlight. Newman must have been at least a hundred feet away, but even from where he stood, with the width of a street and the decorative garden of the Union Station between them, Newman couldn't help but notice the placid expression of the figure's lips, mangled into a sneer. The figure set his small brown suitcase on the pavement and sat on it, crossing his legs. He lit a cigarette and took off his sunglasses, exhaling a plume of blueish smoke in front of him. And as the figure slipped his sunglasses into the small pocket on the breast of his shirt he glanced, for a moment, toward Newman, who subsequently felt a pang run through his spine, as if the liquid encasing his neurons began to boil. He shuddered and wanted to turn away, but thought that if he did the figure might notice and coming running after him. He was to stay perfectly still.

But this did not seem to work. The figure stood up, the cigarette dangling from his lips, and starred, intently, at Newman. It raised a hand, to shield his eyes from the sun, to his eyebrows in what looked like a militant salute. It was then that the figure picked up his suitcase and started to walk in Newman's general direction at an alarming pace. Newman stood still and watched the figure get closer.

Newman had not seen or heard from David Goldstein for two years. They knew each other in high school and had been close friends at a time, until David started a sordid affair with a girl named Bridgette Slaughter. Bridgette was the daughter of a single catholic mother. She was fourteen when she met Newman, who sat across from her in Biology. She spoke with a dryness that could only come from someone who had been wronged, many times, by someone they loved. Her voice was loud and shrill, yet tonally pleasing, like a humming turbine slicing the air.

The day that David disappeared Newman ran into Bridgette in a park near their school. She was tripping on Mushrooms with two other girls Newman didn't recognize. Newman, unaware of this fact at the time, approached her and told her that it had been a long time with no see. Newman was confused to find that the acidic and bubbly girl he knew now looked quite glazed over. Bridgette sat, slumped over, starring at a trashcan across the sidewalk, saying “uh, trash, trash, Trash,” while her girlfriends were examining contours of a dandelion underneath the bench. Newman had to say her name twice before she looked up and smiled at him.

“Do you know where David is?” he asked her. “He hasn't been answering my phone calls.”

“David,” she said lovingly. “David. He's gone? Where did he go?”

“I thought you would know. You are, you know, his girlfriend.”

“Am I?” she asked, her smile fading. “I suppose I am that.”

“So?”

“How are you John?”

“I'm fine.”

“Fine. Fine. Trash.”

“Well, sometimes I feel like trash. Yes. But it's a nice day today and the sun is out. So I'm fine. How are you?”

“Trash,” she said sternly.

“Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but, look...”

“Trash,” she said again, groaning. “Trash.” Bridgette paused momentarily slumping down further on the bench. Her hair fell in front of her face and then she shot up, straight and tall like a fence post and starred at Newman intently. He noticed that her eyes looked darker than usual. “I miss David,” she said finally. She pushed her hair back behind her ears. She wore a ratty tee shirt and a pair of denim cut-offs. She had skinny legs that jutted from the bottoms of the shorts like noodles hanging from a sock. “He left so long ago. He was never really here to begin with. He started getting into drugs, John. But he left yesterday with his family. They just moved. He didn't tell anyone. He just left.”

“What do you mean: he just left?” Newman replied, his tone growing impatient.

“Don't yell at me, John. Uhg. TRASH. Why don't you go home I can't talk to you right now.”

“What are you talking about.”

“I have to leave,” she said. Bridgette starred off into the more forested parts of the park. She stood still for a moment, seemingly lost. The anger faded from her face and she looked as though she was trying to smell something that was being drawn away into the park. “What?” she uttered, shaking her head. “Oh. Around. I've been around.”

“What?” Newman said.

“I've been trashy. Just trash. I have to go, John. I have to go now.”

Bridgette disappeared into the park and the two girls followed after her. Dazed, Newman sat down on the bench and set his backpack aside. He rubbed his head and felt as though he might begin to cry, but this feeling was stymied; for when he looked down at his feat he saw a small pile of dandelions that had been ripped from the ground. Some of them still had their roots.

The next time Newman saw Bridgette was at a concert in the basement of an old, run down bungalow on the Eastside. She had been jumping and thrashing her thick hair up and down in the air. From his spot in a dark corner, Newman watched her. She wore a tight tie dye tee shirt with nothing underneath it. Her legs were skinny, about the size of a saucer in diameter, and the color of peach flesh. A ratty, pink silk shawl was draped haphazardly over her shoulders.

Newman's head turned sharply around. Something had hissed behind him. It was then he realized that he had been leaning against a water heater, three inches taller than him. It was warm. It was white and fat, like a giant, pearlescent coffee can. His head fell, limp to one side where his cheek smooshed into the metal. The metal burned his face, but only after a moment.

Newman peeled his greasy cheek off the water heater and turned back to Bridgette who had taken the microphone from the lead singer and was screaming at it. It wasn't a blood curling scream or anything like it. It was a cry, so loud Newman thought her vocal chords might split in her throat. She'll choke on her own blood, he thought, rubbing his cheek. Bridgette dropped the microphone and returned to the crowd where she tried to start a mosh pit. She was pushing on the shoulders of the people next to her, who batted her back towards the keyboardist.

Newman worried that she might hit her head on one of the rafters. They all hung down quite low, near the crown of everyone's skull. When the music stopped playing and the lights turned on Newman followed Bridgette outside where he found her puffing away on a clove and laughing. The clove was poised in her fingers, her wrist limp, her head tilted back like a dead child's as she exhaled a thick plume of smoke.

Bridgette Slaughter only had one arm, though, from the way she acted, one might never know that this was the case. She had been born with a withered limb that cut off at the elbow. Despite this handicap she made good use of her stub. She could even strike a lighter with it, if necessary. She often preferred to have men light things for her. Between that and her collection of old silk shawls, That was how she kept her deformity a secret. She chose not to draw attention to it, always having it down by her side while all her raging gestures seemed to funnel into her right arm, which was usually floating in the space above her head, her fingers balled into a sturdy fist.

Brief excerpt from the novella "A Shibboleth." A work in progress.

The two of them arrived in his classroom early. He told the mother to take off her clothes and handed her a white bathrobe. When she inquired as to the location of the proper changing place Menashe laughed and left the room, brushing his collar bones with the tips of his fingers. She found herself in a corner next to the craft sink, deep and dotted with paint, where she removed her belt and pants and shirt and panties and wrapped the robe around her body. She laid her clothes, folded neatly, next to a black box on top of which sat a gaunt burgundy stool. There she would relay posture after posture to his students.

Menashe came in a few moments later in a heated conversation about contemporary aestheticism with one of his students—a skinny boy in a blue plaid shirt with a lip ring and floppy hair. And then they started to trickle in, like ants marching up the side of their mound, first in a single file line, punctuated every so often with an emptiness; until, five minutes before class, a storm of twenty six tried to push their way through the door.

When Menashe began to explain the agenda a heavy silence fell upon the room. After he finished speaking he rubbed his hands together and said, “Ready to get down to it, then. Let’s get down to it." The mother removed the robe and he took it to the back of the room. “Gestures,” he crooned. “Twenty second gestures.”

The students started scribbling before the mother had even struck the pose she intended. The pencils and charcoal against the paper sounded like a herd of miniature garden snakes slithering across a field of dead grass. The mother breathed slowly, staying absolutely still until Menashe yelled “Switch!” and she changed poses setting her elbow on her knee. “Switch!” he cried again. She crossed her legs and put her hands behind her head. “Switch!” She put her feet on the stool. It was almost athletic, holding. Her body even worked up a satisfyingly cleansing sweat.

And then something unpleasant happened. The mother spread her legs open wider than she had intended and by the time the students began scribbling it was too late to change positions. The skinny boy who had entered the classroom first was sitting directly in front of her and peering deep between her thighs. He held his thumb up with a pencil next to it, measuring her proportions, and for a moment, the mother felt as though he was touching her with that raised thumb, as if the thumb was up in her, gauging the width and breadth of her innards, estimating the size of her. She tried to close her legs. Menashe cleared his throat. She stopped.

A familiar sensation began to weld up in the pit of her stomach, a snowball that amassed with fury. And though she stayed very still she swelled with rage. She was like the calm serenity before an avalanche. Her muscles tensed and she stared at the boy thinking, that pencil better be sharp enough to puncture the skin because when I leap off this stool …

“… Switch!”

Two weeks later she was walking down a hill in a trendy spot of town, on her way to the next sessions, when she ran into one of her friends from Menashe’s ceramics class entitled “Shattered Ethics: Pottery, Penile Systems, and Power.” The girl looked like the mother. She was tall and thin, with thick brown hair piled onto her head like a wad of dough, kept in check by a paisley scarf. The two, standing next to each other, looked like a pair of cypress trees, and when they laughed it was like the wind had moved them to do it.

Similar as they were, the two were not twins by any stretch of the imagination. Even at the tender age of twenty-two, the mother had sagging breasts and a sunken face. She wore cotton sweaters and leather shoes, full length dresses that masked the curves of her body and the points where her bones jutted from her flesh. The girl, on the other hand, wore colorful skirts and cardigans of silk and cashmere. She had a nose ring and her cheeks were the color of a nectarine. The mother walked lopsidedly; a flap of her shoe had come undone that day, causing her constant irritation, and the only way to have her shoe not come off completely was to gimp. How like life! she thought throughout the day. My shoe My shoe How I Need You and yet how broken you are. Oh oh oh oh oh my shoe. Shoe bee do.

The two sat down for coffee.

“I loved that thing you did with the lines and the shapes and that delicious red thing that ran through everything. What was that set called again?”
“Feminist Variations on Mapplethorpe,” the mother said.
“Fantastic!”
“Menashe had a lot to do with that project," the mother said bashfully.
The girl chuckled. The mother, slightly confused, sipped her coffee and broke off a piece of her scone, dropping it into the cup, fishing it out with her spoon and eating it.
“I hear you’re living with him?”
“I am living in his studio," the mother said. "So, yes, I suppose I am living with him.”
“So you’re living with him." The girl said this as though she had not believed the mother the first time she had said it. The mother plopped another piece of coffee-soaked-pastry in her mouth.
“Yersh,” she mumbled with scone on her tongue. The girl chuckled again and the mother frowned her eyebrows, unsure if the girl was laughing at her coffeehouse etiquette or something else. The mother swallowed and continued. “It’s really not that strange or bizarre. I just keep to myself in his studio. I paint sometimes. I clean sometimes. Read.”
“Have you two done it yet?” The mother’s eyes got wide.
“Excuse me? Done what?”
“Have you had sex.”
“Oh no, our relationship is not really sexual in it’s nature.”
“Don’t you know? Didn’t you know? That’s what he does.”
“Menashe?”
“Yes!” she tittered.
“Why would we do that?” the mother asked. “Menashe is my mentor.”
“Because,” the girl said, “You can’t get something for nothing. You can never get something for nothing. This is what he does. It’s probably why you’ve gotten—” the girl paused and touched her saucer. “I mean he does it for sex.”

The girl had also lived with Menashe, she explained, while interning at a photography studio run by one of his ex-wives. “First. He lets you stay with him. Then he gets you to model for his drawing seminar—have you modeled yet?” The mother nodded her head. “I’ve modeled before, but, Oh, isn’t that the worst? The way he looks at you. You know why he does that, right?”
“No,” the mother said plainly.

“It’s so that he can see you naked.” The mother put her forefinger up to her lips. The girl looked over her shoulder. Then, turning back towards the mother she leaned in and spoke in a whisper. “It’s so that he can see you naked. And if he likes what he sees, if he does, then he’ll get with you. He invites you into the house, beckons you from the studio and asks if you want to see his ‘woodblock prints.’ He keeps those in the attic, up in his house. He’ll probably invite you over for dinner. There’s this ratty sofa with Afghani fabric on it. He asks you to sit on it and he wines you up showing you his prints and, and something happens.”
“No!” the mother gasped.
The girl took a swig of her coffee, finishing it, and set the cup on the saucer rather loudly before whispering “Yes!” She looked at her watch and took a compact out of her purse.
“Something happens?”
“Yes,” the girl said, opening the compact and fixing her mound of hair.
“What happens?”
“There’s a box of condoms, a wooden thing with a creaky hinge, that he keeps under the sofa.”
“What happens?” the mother repeated. She dropped the rest of her scone into the coffee.
“Condoms” the girl said, “Condoms.” She closed her compact and shoved it into her purse.

That evening the mother was sitting at a desk in the studio trying to fix her shoe. She was fastening the flap to the body of the shoe with a safety pin when a tress of her hair fell in front of her face. The piece of hair enraged her. It seemed as though it had a vendetta against the mother, to impede her work, to sabotage the job she was trying to do. The mother kept set of hairpins, among other things, in an ornate dish on the desk. She reached into the dish and pulled out a pin. Her other hand slipped and the safety pin jostled and stuck her in the finger. She cursed and drew her hand close to her body. “Fuck,” she whispered, holding her hand in front of her face. A small dot of blood began to form. She stuck the finger in her mouth and sucked on it.
There had been many others, the girl in the shop had explained. The mother was not the only one. Each girl had fallen in order to have a dalliance with an artist—a famous artist. He was desirable, or rather, provoked desire from the girls he aided. The girls he aided were fools. The girls he aided were hussies and tramps, desperate dilettantes so hungry for sex they would eat it out of a dumpster.

But not you, a voice seemed to say.
“But not me,” she said to herself.
“But no what?” a voice said from the corner of the room. The mother turned around incisively to find Menashe standing in the doorway of the studio.
“I was fixing my shoe,” the mother said.
“What’s wrong with your hand?” he asked. She had not even realized that she still clutched the wounded hand with the other, close to her breasts.
“I was fixing my shoes,” she repeated. “And I just had a little accident.”
“Do you need peroxide?”
“No,” she said curtly. “Thank you.”
“I’ve made too much soup. Would you like a cup?” Menashe smiled in the doorway. There was nothing threatening about his stature and even something sweet in the way he smiled. She felt drawn to him.
“Okay,” she said switching off the lamp.
It didn’t take much to get him primed. She waxed lyrically about his “work” and filled him up with his own wine before asking to see his woodblock prints. “You want to see my prints?” he said, somewhat surprised. The mother nodded her head. Menashe paused and swirled the wine in his glass. He smiled and said, “Okay.”

When Menashe switched on the attic lamp dust began to unsettle, flying aloft in great plumes as if disturbed by the gentle agitation of the light. The mother sneezed as they entered. “Bless you,” he said. His woodblock prints leaned against all the walls. They ranged in size and character. Some came up to her waist, while others could fit in the palm of her hand. In the far corner of the room there was an old sofa with an extravagant cloth of white and burgundy. It was a thin cloth, dotted with little white spots. She sat down on the sofa and crossed her legs.

“Dusty up here,” she said. “I’m feeling parched.” She sneezed again. He sat down next to her, their thighs touching. He placed a hand on her knee and for a moment she wanted to take the pin from her shoe and thrust it right through his hand. “Get me a glass of water?” she asked politely.
Menashe got up and headed down the stairs, casting a great shadow on the wall in front of him. Once he was downstairs the mother leaned over and reached underneath the sofa. She swayed her hand back and forth in the darkness until it came across a little wooden box. She didn’t need to use her eyes to find it; it was right where the girl said it would be. The mother set the box on her lap. The top of it was inlaid with mother of pearl in the shape of a tree. She opened it and found twenty or so condoms and staring into the box, the multicolored squares, she began to get dizzy. The colors began to melt before her. She closed the box and looked at the tree. It seemed to sway with a gust of wind that came in through the open attic window. The gust blew up dust that blinded her, for a moment. In the darkness she saw herself standing in a clearing surrounded by trees of a thousand kinds. She was kneeling on the ground, one hand touching the earth. As she saw herself kneeling the skin on her knee fired up. Something was slicing through the flesh.

Remove your shoes, a voice said. For the place where you stand is holy.

The mother opened her eyes, still burning. A tear ran down her cheek. She wiped them with the hem of her skirt and when she did she noticed that during her vision she had removed her shoes. They sat in front of her, empty.

It was clear to her in that moment that she had left something behind that she had not intended. She was raised in the woods and there she felt she had to return. Something was lost. She had brought a part of herself to the city and that part of her had been extinguished like a flame, and it was smoking. The sight of the woodblock prints disgusted her. She wanted to take them, brake them, burn them in a great pile in the middle of his living room. She would take her own paintings, testaments to her failure, and burn those too. She had spent that past few years creating and now she knew that what she had to do was a little destroying.

But there was time to create one last thing. She noticed a safety pin peeking out from underneath the rouge flap that had been bothering her all day. She plucked it up and held it in the palm of her hand. From the rubble of what she was about to destroy she would take a token, back to the woods and back to her family, back to worship. She removed the string of condoms, all attached to one another like a ribbon and looked at them. “The Lord Giveth,” she intoned silently. “And the Lord Taketh Away.” She inhaled deeply and stuck the pin through the first condom. A satisfying sweat began to form on her brow, pushed through her pores like the bristles of a beast bursting through a peace of cloth. She stuck the second condom. It felt good. She picked up speed and began perforating each condom in a rage of ecstasy until she came to the end of the ribbon and there were none left. She collapsed backward on the sofa and grasped the cloth there. She was clutching it hard when Menashe came up the stairs.

She threw the pin back into her shoe. He was carrying a glass of water that he set on the table. He looked at her longingly and reached a hand out to touch her hair. He brushed a tress from her eyes and she looked up at him and began unbuttoning her dress, one by one, staring at him. There was something erotic about the rage of her vision, something that made his blood liquefy. It was as if there was something behind her eyes, something big, and something dangerous, waiting to burst forth.