“Why?” she asked.
“Because I don’t want people to see me like this.”
“But what does it matter? Chances are you’ll never run into those people again.”
“Please, hon. It’s not just for appearances either. Have you ever tried putting suntan lotion on a hairy person? It gets the hair all matted and most of it never ends up on the skin, so you get sunburned anyway. And then the sunburn is all splotchy because each hair casts a tiny little shadow, and then you have to put on aloe and you run into the same damn problem again—”
“All right, okay, I’ll do it.”
He stripped and stood in the shower. She slathered the depilatory cream over a patch of his back, waited five minutes, then rubbed away the cream and the accompanying hair with a damp washcloth. The washcloth was rinsed under the tap, and a small pile of thick blackish hair started to accumulate at the drain. She repeated this over and over, making her way slowly across and down his back, then to his shoulders, his upper arms, parts of his chest, his legs above the knee, his ass. The bathroom was pervaded with the chemical cucumber smell of the cream. It took a long time. They worked together, with him applying to one section as she was wiping away another.
They talked about Wrightsville Beach and the stretches of shops there, about body image, about her parents and his, about their plans for the future. Halfway through, she noticed he had an erection, and she asked how this could possibly be turning him on.
“All the touching, I guess,” he said. “And I am naked here.”
When they were finished, he turned in a circle, modeling his newly bare skin. She gathered all the discarded hair in a paper towel, and dumped it in the small trash can next to the toilet. It almost looked like a wig. He leaned down, whispered, “Thanks,” and turned on the water to wash away any remnants of the cream still on his skin. Dale shrugged out of her tee shirt, shorts, and underwear, and joined him under the water. She rubbed his skin lightly, the feel of it so strange to her, smooth and a bit pink. Kenneth gasped a few times as her fingers ran over an area of particularly sensitive skin. He caressed her breasts and kissed her neck as she jerked him off, and he quickly came with a shudder and a long moan. She kissed him on the lips and stepped out of the shower to let him finish cleaning.
When he’d flopped into bed a bit later, and promptly dropped off to sleep, still naked, it had struck her how vulnerable he’d looked in that moment. He had trusted her completely, opening up more than she had ever known. She’d stayed awake for about half an hour more, running her fingertips over his bare arms and back.
She now blinked, and the vision of Kenneth disappeared from the ceiling. It was once again just an assemblage of dots. She turned to look at the clock; forty-five minutes had passed while she’d been entranced by the memory of that day. Dale rolled over onto her side, then up into a sitting position. The blood pounded in her ears, and a little knot lurched under her ribcage, but she didn’t cry. Couldn’t. She stood up, dumped a handful of food into Pepper’s cage, lurched down the hall, stripped to her underwear, and fell into bed. The sheets were at a near-perfect temperature, and she fell asleep in minutes.
~
Dale’s first marriage was to a bass guitar player named Stan who cheated on her with the groupies who attended his concerts. He never even tried to hide it. Six weeks after their wedding in Las Vegas, she filed for divorce.
~
The temperature dropped the night Allan took her to see the Land Behemoths. The dealership was on the edge of town, next to a horse farm, and they had to take a gravel driveway to the front gate. The dealership was closed, but the Behemoths roamed the lot, nudging each other with their large heads. Though they lumbered through the fields on their cloven feet, not a single blade of grass was trampled. Their bodies were vaguely ox-like, but thicker and bigger, and covered in a multitude of iridescent greenish scales, like those of a fish. Their heads were broad, vaguely dog-like, with a double set of stubby horns extending up, and a mane of fiery hair that flowed even in the absence of breeze. Their trumpeted barks echoed throughout the lot.
Allan and Dale approached the fence, breaths clouding in front of their faces. “Go ahead,” he said.
“What?”
“Tell them.”
“Tell them what?”
“All the things you’ve been bottling up since Kenneth died.”
“What? No. No, I’m not going to talk to a bunch of stupid animals.”
“I think it might help.”
“So, what, are you a psychologist now? Did you read that in one of your fucking books?”
“I didn’t have to,” he said. “I just know from experience. You’ll feel better when you let it all out. Look over there. One of those ‘stupid animals’ might have been the one that killed your husband in that accident. Don’t you want to tell it how angry you are?”
“The Behemoth that killed Kenneth was put down,” she said. “I purposely stayed away when they did that.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not like it killed him on purpose, right? It wasn’t malicious, there was no motive. It was just a stupid animal that got spooked by something and its handler lost control of it.”
Allan sighed and looked through the fence. “I’m worried about you, Dale.”
She breathed through her nose and said nothing.
“You can’t seem to move on, and it’s eating you up. I want to help you, and I thought this might be the thing.”
“Just stop it. Stop trying to help me.”
“But I’m your friend.”
“Fuck you! Where were you after high school? Where were you when I was getting drunk and taking home a different guy every night? Fuck you, you’re my friend.”
“Don’t tell me,” Allan said quietly. “Tell them.”
Dale screamed and shot both middle fingers at the fence. “Fuck you, you fucking stupid dinosaurs!” The nearest Behemoth raised its head and barked its trumpet call in response.
She stomped down the gravel drive back toward the highway, and was nearly to the road before she heard Allan’s car roll up behind her.
~
It had been raining the morning of the car accident, Thanksgiving morning. Unseasonably warm, Dale had left the bedroom window open all night to admit the breeze, and she awoke to the sound of water through the leaves. It was only a half-hour before she’d been planning to get up anyway, so she put on a pot of coffee, and walked out onto the covered porch to watch and listen to the rain.
There was something about the sound that had always soothed her. She felt cleansed somehow, though she was untouched by it physically. It quieted any voices of stress in her head, it relaxed her. It was early enough in the morning that most people in the condo block would not have been awake yet, so it felt as if the rain was just for her, a magical present, and that feeling made her deliriously content.
She had been standing out there for about fifteen minutes before she heard the sliding glass door open behind her, and then Kenneth’s strong arm wrapped around her midsection with a steaming mug in his hand. He lightly kissed the back of her neck, in the spot that always drove her crazy, and she sank back into him. Dale took the cup from his hand.
They stood like that, the apotheosis of the loving couple, for countless minutes, the experience suspended in time, as the rain pattered down around them. Then Kenneth took a deep breath, and the spell was broken.
“We should get cleaned up,” he said. “We’ll need to get to Charlotte by 11:00.”
Dale separated from him and turned. “Why do we need to be there so early?”
“Mom has a whole day of stuff planned for us.”
“But that’s the problem isn’t it? She always has stuff planned, and she absolutely expects us to be cheerfully involved. Why can’t we just do a quiet Thanksgiving here this time?”
Kenneth rolled his eyes and slid the door open to step back inside. “We’re not talking about this right now. We said we’d be there, and
we need to be there.”
Dale stood outside for a few minutes more as the rain slowed and then tapered to a halt, leaving the trees to drip and glisten. In a couple of hours, the sun would burn away almost all traces of the brief shower, as if it had never happened at all. She took a sip from her coffee, then went inside to get ready for an awkward and uncomfortable day with her in-laws.
Later that week, at the funeral, her mother-in-law approached her during the reception and, in muted whispers, accused Dale of causing the accident just so that Dale wouldn’t have to spend Thanksgiving dinner with her. The bluntness of it shocked Dale into frustrated silence. Instead of retaliating, she stood up, walked out of her mother-in-law’s house, and disappeared down the trail that led into the woods. She sat on a tree stump and screamed herself hoarse, hoping it would help the tears come, but they never did.
~
She worked at the yogurt shop for a week before she saw her first customer. Early November, the weather more appropriate for hot chocolate or apple cider, but in strolled this older Chinese woman, somewhere around sixty, her overcoat pulled tight, her cheeks pinked by the wind. She unbuttoned the coat, then walked directly up to Dale, eyeing her over the counter.
“I shall have the chocolate and vanilla swirl,” she said.
“Waffle cone or regular?”
“Regular, please.”
Dale grabbed a cake cone from the plastic cylinder on the counter, turned, and pulled the middle lever on the yogurt machine. It still amazed her how the machine could perfectly mix the two flavors, equal portions, neither overpowering the other. She oozed the bipartite frozen yogurt into the cone, twisting her wrist like Allan had taught her, not trying to control the flow, but to ease its way into the cone. She traced the spiral up to a point, then lifted the lever to cut off the flow from the machine. It wasn’t perfect, one half was more lopsided than the other, but it was good enough.
She handed the cone over the counter to the Chinese lady, punched in the keys on the register, and said, “A dollar fifty, please.”
The woman reached into her blue and purple brocaded handbag, and extracted six quarters. Dale dumped them in the register’s tray.
“The Qilin was not responsible for your husband’s death,” she said.
“What? What the hell’s a chee . . . a chee . . .”
“Qilin,” said the old woman. “The animal that crushed your husband’s car.”
“You mean the Land Behemoth?”
The old woman nodded. “The Qilin only punish the truly sinful. Your husband must have done something terrible to bring on its wrath.”
“How do you know about my husband?” Dale said.
“I know because I was meant to know.”
Dale exhaled. “Look, I didn’t ask for fortune cookie nonsense. Just tell me the truth.”
“That is the truth.” The woman licked at her cone, which was already starting to melt. The quick movement allowed Dale to see how small the woman’s tongue was. “We are all here for a reason, however small. I am here to tell you that your husband did something terrible in his life, and he was karmically punished for his actions. The Qilin are sacred animals, and their decisions are not to be taken lightly.”
“Saying I believe you, what did Kenneth do?”
Another lick. “I am sorry, but I don’t know that. What I do know is that your husband is responsible for his own fate. We can’t escape our karma, none of us.”
The Chinese woman smiled, then turned on her heel and exited the store.
For the rest of the afternoon, Dale thought about the encounter. Allan had left mid-morning for some errand he couldn’t tell her about, actually doing the same for the past few days, so the store was quiet. Dale wasn’t sure what to think. The Land Behemoths were intelligent? And worse yet, they were punishers of bad karma? She couldn’t get past her conception of them as dumb beasts, existing only for transportation purposes; you couldn’t even eat them because their meat was so tough. Was it possible Kenneth had done what the Chinese woman had said? Could he have really done something so bad that it warranted his death?
Dale closed her eyes and massaged her forehead. She couldn’t deal with this right now. There was a small desk in the back room with a rickety wooden chair, and she sat down. Allan had left his ragged library copy of Best Serbian Short Fiction on the desk despite finishing it, and she opened it to somewhere in the middle, yearning for escape. She started with a story about a man talking to God but not remembering the conversation later, and kept reading for another three hours, until the sun had set and it was time to close.
As Dale’s hand hovered over the light switch, the adjacent pneumatic tube thunked with an incoming cylinder, and she let out an involuntary startled squeak. She picked up the cylinder, movement inside, a twitching nose, salt-and-pepper fur.
“Pepper?” Dale said. “What the hell are you doing in there?”
She opened the cylinder and the dwarf hamster tumbled gently into her hand. It performed a rapid face-washing maneuver and then sat still, waiting for Dale to carry her home. As Dale looked closer, she saw that the cataract in Pepper’s blind eye had vanished completely.
~
The day before Thanksgiving, nearly a year since her husband had been killed, Dale opened the frozen yogurt store, wondering why Allan hadn’t been there before her. Even when he’d left in the middle of the day, he’d still arrived first, unlocking the doors and getting things ready. She prepped the yogurt and the toppings, and started a batch of Otis Spunkmeyer cookies in the tiny toaster oven.
At noon, Allan burst through the door, an ecstatic grin on his face, resplendent in a pair of vibrantly colored wings. They stretched out from his back, in bright reds and greens and purples, just like the tattoo photo he’d shown her. The overhead ceiling fan caused individual feathers to ripple and ruffle, as if he were already in flight. Dale couldn’t believe it.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Allan said. The expression on his face was the happiest she’d ever seen on a human being. He seemed to glow slightly.
“Yeah,” she said. “Gorgeous. They really must’ve set you back.”
“Most of my life savings,” he said, stroking the tip of one wing. “They’re exactly what I’ve always wanted. I’ve been working with the avionic artisan the past couple of weeks, but they just got installed this morning. I actually flew over here.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “Wow.”
“I also came to tell you good-bye.”
“Good-bye? Where are you going?”
He shrugged. “Wherever the wind takes me.” The shit-eating grin was infectious. He was just so damn happy. “I need a change. Of location, of identity. There’s a flock that congregates in Tallahassee, and I may hang with them for a while. Who knows?”
“What about the store?”
“It’s yours now, kiddo. Take good care of it.”
He folded the wings, walked out the door, extended them once more, flapped twice, hard, then lifted up into the air. Dale leapt over the counter, rushed out the door, leaving it wide open, and hopped in her Prius. She peeled out of the parking space, and sped onto the main road, her head out the window. Allan was clearly visible, his wingspan out to its fullest, flapping, gliding, and she could hear a faint whooping, a joyous yawp. She followed him as quickly as she could, speeding through red lights, narrowly avoiding other cars. A flurry of angry honks followed in her wake.
She was abruptly envious of Allan, up there soaring through the skies. He was exactly who and what he wanted to be.
His flight took her onto Highway 401, past the Anheuser-Busch bottling plant, and the adult video store, and the car dealerships. This stretch always felt so empty to her, the spaced-out buildings appearing lonely, though there was never any lack of human activity. The grass along the median was dead and brown.
Allan abruptly swung one hundred eighty degrees, and Dale was forced to take a U-turn at a break in the median. She laughed out loud whe
n she realized where he was leading her. She even sped up. With the barest of movements, she nudged the steering wheel onto the left-side exit ramp of Fairview Road. Allan, above, seeming satisfied she was now heading where he wanted to bring her, flapped powerfully, and disappeared into the clouds, leaving behind no trace he had ever been there. Dale pulled her head inside the car, that familiar ache under her ribcage as she laughed, releasing a year’s worth of tension, unable to stop, stitches in her sides. Fairview Road rolled by, older houses, houses with character, a series of duplexes, Mom and Pop stores selling antiques or designer paper or blown glass sculpture, and all the while Dale was laughing, lost in apoplexy, wanting to somehow thank Allan but knowing she’d never see him again, laughing as she explored the unknown surroundings, her eyes filling with saline, threatening to spill over, dangerously on the edge, on the cusp.
Jimi and the Djinn
On a balmy evening in March 1967, Jimi Hendrix stepped into the British Museum. An off-night on his relentless UK tour, and needing some time to escape from his bandmates and hangers-on, he decided on high culture for a change. After an hour of wandering, he came across an exhibit of Southeast Asian sculpture and pottery. He was drawn to a glass container the size of a vase, frosted and etched with runes and symbols. It pulsed gently with mesmerizing blue light, an effect he put down to the shrooms he’d been given by Pete Townshend earlier in the day. Totally alone in the gallery, and so he lifted the glass container off of its display pedestal. It was warm.
“Man, I bet I could make a righteous bong out of this thing,” he said, before it jumped from his fingers and crashed to the floor, shattering into a hundred thousand shards and releasing the djinn trapped inside. The creature roiled up into a confusion of blue smoke, and roughly assembled itself into the shape of a man with glowing red eyes.
“My thanks,” the djinn said, its accented voice rumbling out from the center of the smoke. “I have been imprisoned for a very long time.”
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