The man recalls the tenderness of his love for his wife and the constant desire that used to go with it, so fierce it was like a pain in the center of his being. It was a marvelous, indecent pain, which gave him no respite. That desire which he thought would last forever has dwindled, like a big catch cooked on a slow fire. Where did it go, that paradise of lips, teeth and tongue? Now kisses are avoided whenever possible; it is in the lips and tongue that love begins to spoil, where distance makes itself apparent.
He thinks that he wouldn’t be able to live without her, that he owes her his life and everything he has. Gratitude and who knows how many other tangled sentiments have taken the place of passion. Indecency has been replaced by respect. He only wishes that his lips would lose their lush appearance and settle rather into the smile of a man who has realized all his plans.
Each night he finds a different excuse not to go to bed with her, or not at the same time, because what is the body’s surrender without desire? It’s well known that in the dark bodies seek and open to one another, revealing and discovering the secret that terrifies them.
And then down on the street it happens as he knew it would: the dark-haired girl coming along, so young, her skin alive, breasts brimming; it’s all coming up at him from the street, emanating from these two. She is the one the window-cleaning boy is waiting to embrace.
The man just wants to see them together, to see the moment when the boy takes her about her waist, when she puts her arms around her lover’s shoulders, to know from them the forgotten happiness; and maybe a caress will fly off and make its way to his own back and heal, at least for a moment, this ache. But the umbrella that is opening suddenly breaks the line of his gaze; it doesn’t matter, he can move left and when the man with the umbrella passes, he’ll be able to see the embrace anyway, or just after the crucial moment, but both of them will still be there. Except that now another umbrella is opening, and another, and the rain is not about to let up, and of course with this wet and all these umbrellas his back will go on aching.
Translated by Penelope Todd
and Georgia Birnie
ANCIENT ROME
The Young Widow
Petronius
A YOUNG WOMAN IN Ephesus was famous around town for being faithful to her husband. How sad when he died! It was only expected in the funeral procession that her hair would be tangled and she would wail and beat her naked breast before the crowd. Yet many were surprised when she even followed her husband’s body down into the tomb. For days she continued to weep and tear her hair over him. No one could drag her away, not her parents, not the city officials, who were worried she would starve. But what could they do? Finally they left her with only her favorite slave-woman, who stayed by her side and refilled the lamp whenever it dimmed.
Meantime, the governor of the province ordered robbers to be crucified nearby. A soldier was posted to guard against families stealing any of the bodies to give them a proper burial. On the very first night he saw a light among the tombs and heard weeping; curious, he approached, looked into the vault, and was shocked to see a beautiful woman, like an apparition from the underworld. Then he saw her tears, her face gouged by her nails, and the corpse beside her, and understood—she was simply a young woman devastated by the loss of her husband. Moved, he brought his own supper into the tomb and offered it to her. It’s no good to starve yourself, he said, gently consoling her. You must live, what good is sorrow? Don’t we all come to the same end? The young woman only groaned, but the soldier did not retreat. Finally it was the slave-woman who put out her hand. She was famished, and grateful. As the food and wine began to restore her, she took the soldier’s side. She begged her mistress, Why end your own life before fate demands it? Do you think the dead hear your cries? If he could, your husband would tell you to live.
At last the young widow gave in. It was like a fever breaking. She ate and drank and allowed herself to be taken into the soldier’s comforting arms. It was clear how attracted they were to each other, and no surprise, since the soldier was young and handsome. The slave-woman smiled and started to leave them, but the young widow looked up, uneasy, so she sat by her mistress again and whispered, Let him console you. What’s the harm? Will you fight even the healing powers of love?
You see where the story is going—why delay it? The widow and soldier lay together that night, and the next day and the next, keeping the doors of the vault shut, so anyone who came by would think the famously faithful wife had already breathed her last over her husband’s corpse. As darkness fell each night the soldier slipped out and brought food and drink back to the tomb. As it happened, on the third night, the family of one of the crucified robbers saw the soldier had abandoned his post and they took the body down to give it last rites. Early the next morning the soldier saw the empty cross and knew what his fate would be. It was far better not to wait for the judge’s sentence but to die by his own sword. He explained this to the young widow and asked only that she give his body a place in the tomb with her husband. May the gods forbid, she said, that I look at the same time on the corpses of two men I love. Better to make a dead man useful than send a living man to his death. Then she ordered that her husband’s body be taken out of the tomb and fixed upon the empty cross. The soldier was saved, since no one was the wiser, although eventually some of the townspeople recognized the dead man and wondered how he had ascended the cross.
UNITED STATES
Fun House
Robert Scotellaro
SHE’D GOTTEN THE fun house mirrors at an auction and had them put up in the spare bedroom. He found them strange, even a little disturbing, and thought the buy extravagant with the kids away at college and the big tuition bucks spilling out. But she’d insisted on a “well-deserved splurge” after all that straight and narrow. A side of her, new to him.
So he went along. Even following her one night, with a bottle of Marqués de Riscal, into that room with the lights dimmed and candles she placed on both dressers, adding to the mix. In bed, she began taking off her clothes, then his. “No way,” he said, draining the last of the wine, gazing into one of the mirrors overhead, at their stretched-out, undulating forms; fleshy waves of them in the sheets.
He started to sit up, but she pulled him back. “This is weird, Connie,” he said.
She reached out a zigzaggy hand and ran it down his zigzaggy middle. Looking left, she was squat and condensed, her cheeks bulged as if she had two apples stuffed in her mouth—her breasts large, wobbly globes. She guided his hand to them.
In another, the two of them were amoeboid, transforming silvery strangers. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said. She smiled. And at a glance it was an astonishingly wide curl, liquid as mercury. He continued shifting his vision.
“My God!” he said.
“What?”
“The size of that thing.”
She leaned over and whispered something. A name, he thought—not his own. Perhaps an endearment. She shook out her hair—jagged bolts against his chest. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, she was wriggly and rosy. A stick figure, a block, a fleshy smear—strange and elegant. He heard some low, guttural sounds—his own.
She bit his shoulder and he pulled her close. His eyes banged against each corner of their sockets. The room was cluttered. It was ablaze with candlelight—squat fiery balls, elongated licks of light, and all their odd and flagrant infidelities in every piece of glass.
NEW ZEALAND
Squeegee
James Norcliffe
I SQUEEZE THE MOP. I push the squeegee. The fine oil of humanity shines and rainbows on the tiles. I push the squeegee. All slides and slithers before me in a broad detergent smile, in a swathe of suds and scurf and tired bubbles. I squeeze the mop. I squeeze the mop’s wet afro into the maw of the bucket. I push the squeegee. Sweet-scented steam clams on my brow. The mop’s damp dreadlocks flip and flop. Body hairs curl, they shine like little springs of brightness, like crescents of bantam feathers. I push
the squeegee. Bantams run before me in a frightened eccentric scatter. Behind them, behind the squeegee all is shiny, new. Before me sweat puddles and puddles, stains and stains. Behind me gloss glimmers. Hopes skitter before me with bright eyes, with frightened little feet. I push the squeegee. I squeeze the mop. I press the treadle and squeeze the mop. I move the bucket. Silence. Wide empty boulevards and broad leafy suburbs behind me. Quietude, the beatitude of sheen, shimmer and shine. Mess before me. Shambles, seepage and dreams. I push the squeegee. Squeezed foam filtered and flecked like wet feathers flows before me. I hear the cries of birds, the squeak and scrape of black rubber on shiny tiles. The scatter and fear. Blood flows before me red-feathered red and bubbly. I squeeze the mop. I move the bucket. I push. I push the squeegee.
CHINA
From the Roaches’ Perspective
Qiu Xiaolong
AROUND TWO, WE begin to shudder underneath your tossing, turning over in the massage bed. Still dazed, hardly capable of thinking in coherence, your body sore, your legs weak, you stare into the darkness. What a day and night! Apart from four foot-washing customers outside, you had three other massage customers inside, particularly tough with the last one. An acquaintance of the salon owner with connections both in the black and white ways, he rams into you nonstop for hours, both from the front and from the behind. Afterward, he stays on, sprawling on the massage bed, apparently for the night rather than for a quickie as you have hoped. Covered in cold sweat, you feel as if numerous insects were crawling over your naked body.
“Cockroaches!” you curse between your clinched teeth, rising to massacre us.
We stampede in the terror of the night.
You grope down, marching barefoot through the curtain into the kitchen area, grasping the plastic slippers. Sure enough, you detect us rushing everywhere for shelters in the moonlight slashing through the back window. You start seeking us above the spill of moldering bowls and pots in the sink, chasing us among the bottles and jars of soy sauce, oyster oil, and fermented bean curd in the shelf above, driving us out of the rice bag. Then kneeling by the sink, as if in prayer, you launch an intensified search over the floor littered with our bodies, your thighs and legs dazzling through your unbelted nylon robe, still reeking of sex.
The scarlet slippers in your hands swooping down, jumping the chopsticks up into crosses, wreaking all of your fury at us, you pounce over to grind our bodies under your soft, round toes. Flashing against the bare wall, your black hair turns the dark night into delirious memories of the human refugees fleeing from the disastrous mudslide devouring your home village under the shadow of the Three Gorges Dam, all the trees and weeds removed from the hills and dales like your shaven armpits, all the paths turning into puddles with days drowning like bugs . . .
O God!
The light on, we see the man taking you from behind on the floor, savagely, just like one of us.
SOUTH AFRICA
Not Far from the Tree
Karina M. Szczurek
TOO TIGHT. STRAPPED round her throbbing head, the swimming goggles leave oval marks on the flesh around her eyes. Underwater, with every stroke, arms stretched out, palms cupped, willowy fingers pressed firmly together, she focuses on the wedding band on her left ring finger, distinctly golden in the aquamarine translucence in front of her. Underneath, the skin pale, indented like a chained oak. Otherwise her hands olive-tanned; nails short, moon-skirted.
Like all women back home, her mother had worn hers on the right hand for nearly thirty years. According to custom only widows change to left, she’d liked to remind her daughter after Madolyn married a foreigner. And then, she’d switched the sides herself to manifest a silent protest. Not against death, but the crueler form of bereavement: an affair.
Madolyn had understood. Her father, in love, again. Her mother unable to accept her part of the responsibility; left alone, bitter: “One day, Maddy, you’ll know too—I don’t wish it on you, but you’ll see. They’re all the same.”
Froglike, her feet come together, sole to sole, as she slides through the lukewarm blueness of the pool. The sun rises reluctantly into the sweltering sky above their empty house; her husband away on business.
“Grass widow,” her best friend had said last night at the party, pointing accusingly at her wedding ring. “If it wasn’t for that, one wouldn’t know you’re married. We hardly ever see him.” Madolyn’s hand around another freshly mixed piña colada, the ring clinking against the icy glass.
“Could somebody take me home? I had one too many.” She’d put the cocktail down on the yellowwood table next to her, readjusting the strap of her linen dress which had slipped off her shoulder.
Madolyn had got in behind the driver, his eyes watching her carefully in the rearview mirror. Crystal blue, she’d noticed in the light of the front passenger door opening to drop one other party guest somewhere along the way. Their eyes had locked a split second too long before she’d turned her head sideways and asked him not to take her home.
UNITED STATES
Family
Jensen Beach
SOMEONE SUGGESTED SWIMMING and someone else said that in this weather all we need is another incident. Someone recalled that there was an expression that perfectly explained this very moment. Someone said that yes they remembered it, lightning doesn’t strike twice, and someone else said that as a matter of fact that’s happened to a friend. Someone said that no one believed this story the first time and why should they all believe it now. Someone said that they’d read an article on the Internet about this topic and someone else said that, well then of course it’s true. Someone suggested that everyone just calm down immediately. Someone began to walk away and someone reached out an arm to stop someone. Someone turned and said that they begged someone’s pardon, but could they please release their grip. Someone struggled to hold on until someone else suggested that maybe lunch should be served, which turned the subject to food, which as usual had a calming effect. Someone prepared lunch and someone else set the table. Someone opened a bottle of wine and someone else accused someone of drinking too much. Someone lifted a phone to call someone about this and someone said, could you please put the phone down, lunch is served. Someone sat near the kitchen so as to fetch items from the stove and to refill serving dishes as necessary. Someone made a comment about someone’s cooking and someone else found this indulgent, and someone else found it simply untrue. Someone said that it was raining now. Someone left the table and then the house until someone was in the yard and looking up at the rain, and the storm was large and billowing in the distance and the rain was still light above the house and in the yard as it rained on someone there. Someone pointed to the approaching storm and someone else remarked at how dark it had suddenly become. Someone said that someone had better be careful out there and someone else pointed to the clouds, now thick and black and seeming in some way to breathe if such a thing is possible, and the rain fell in enormous drops and someone started to run for cover. Someone saw a flash of lightning and someone else said that, yes we all saw it. Someone no longer appeared to be in the yard and someone remarked upon this change and someone else looked intently and rapidly at every part of the yard visible from behind the large window, which was now streaked with water. Someone else ran to the kitchen for a similar, but slightly enlarged, view of the yard. Someone sat still and hoped that someone was uninjured and someone else attempted to determine the likelihood of real life violating our most tested truths in this way, and as someone sat and considered this question someone seemed to recall that the expression someone had previously mentioned further qualified the circumstances of two lightning strikes with location. Someone said out loud that this was a variable someone had very foolishly forgotten and someone else said that that was no big surprise. Someone else said, what do you mean by that? Someone said that as a family we’re always forgetting important details, and someone else said, do you mean forgetting or ignoring? Someone said to look out the window and someone else
did, where they saw that someone was now lying on the grass near the house in a wet heap of someone. Someone said, did it happen? Someone said that it had and someone else said that it hadn’t, and they all gathered there before the window in the kitchen through which they had all looked so many times but never together like this, and they looked for some evidence of the event they feared most, and they looked in every direction but could not see the past because time doesn’t move in that direction, and so they looked for a long while and nobody saw anything at all.
COLOMBIA
Honey
Antonio Ungar
MY SISTER IS alone on this side of the post fence, standing on the red earth, under the noonday light. I am looking at her from next to the columns on the patio. She has done something forbidden and without hesitating for a second she has walked right up to the fence in order to show everybody (me, the silence of the garden) her limitless strength and seriousness. My sister is four years old. I’m six. She has smeared herself with the honey mama left in the kitchen: her arms, her legs under her short dress, and two blobs of honey on her cheeks. And now, alone, in the middle of the garden, under that totalizing light, deformed by the heat that rises from the earth between us, separating us, she defies the world, she smiles and waits. Little by little her body begins to transform, getting thicker and darker.
Thousands of bees from the neighbors’ gardens, from the honeycombs at the tops of the silk cotton trees, from the guava trees, head for my sister’s body that stands as still as a totem pole, defying the sun and the clouds of smoke, defying the entire tropics with her stillness and her serious little-girl smile. I feel like I’m going to choke from fear and the good fortune of being able to participate in this ritual, that I’m going to faint out of admiration for that girl who is no longer a girl but rather a stiff body thousands of bees are walking on without stinging her (not one attacks her, as if they know how powerful she is), bees who are enjoying the honey, piled on top of each other, a swarm of restless little living beings, crazed, who deform my sister and make her magical, awesome, standing and still in the middle of the garden.
Flash Fiction International Page 13
