Kelly looks up, her eyes red and ringed with tears from nearly vomiting. She smiles. It’s weak, a little embarrassed, but it’s there. She waves the Minotaur in.
“She’s sick,” Kelly says, eyeing the tank. “My baby is sick.”
The Minotaur looks. Despite the fact that all the fish are bred for various mutations, for odd or frightening body shapes and colors, there’s no mistaking the sick fish.
“Dropsy, I think,” Kelly says. “I’ve got to change the water.”
She’s genuinely upset; the Minotaur can tell. And justifiably so, because at the bottom of the tank, near the front, her calico oranda is bloated, its stomach so distended that the scales stick out pine-cone fashion. It floats upside down, bumping against the glass. If not for the gaping mouth and the minute flicker of desperation in the black eye, the eye barely visible inside a mass of fleshy multicolored ornamentation, he would think the six-inch-long four-inch-wide fish dead.
When the plastic bucket is nearly full she pinches the siphon tube and hands it to the Minotaur; he holds it clamped while she lugs the water—sloshing it only once in the hall—to the tub and empties it. The second time around the Minotaur offers to carry the heavy bucket. Together they empty three-quarters of the tank, then Kelly runs a hose from the sink to refill it. While the other fish move at will in the current from the flowing water, the inverted oranda pitches and rocks helplessly.
“Maybe I should set up a hospital tank,” she says. “What do you think?”
“Mmm,” he says, having no idea what she means. The Minotaur wants to be helpful but doesn’t know what to do.
“Keep an eye on her,” Kelly says. “I’ll be right back.”
The Minotaur kneels and fixes his sight on the sick fish, ready.
From a closet somewhere out of sight Kelly brings a much smaller aquarium—eight gallons, the Minotaur decides—empty of water but holding several things. He recognizes the clear plastic box stuffed with cotton batting and charcoal as a filter. The long thin cylinder made of glass and topped with a dial must be for heating the water.
“Let’s do it in here,” she says, carrying the aquarium into her bedroom. She squats to set it on the floor, then moves a stack of neatly folded laundry off the top of the dresser to make space for the aquarium there. Kelly sets up the hospital tank, fills it with warm water.
“Salt,” she says.
Kelly comes back from the kitchen with a box of salt and a puzzled look.
“I can’t find my measuring spoons.”
“How much?” the Minotaur struggles to ask.
“A tablespoon for every five gallons,” Kelly says. “I think that’s it.”
The Minotaur cups his palm and uses the other thumbnail to pry open the spout on the saltbox. With practiced concentration he pours a small white mound into the creased depression of his hand; he scatters the salt over the surface of the water, then repeats the process, making a slightly smaller mound.
Kelly opens the top drawer of the dresser—the sock drawer—and takes out a black lacquered chopstick that the Minotaur has seen her wear wound in her hair. She stirs the salt into the water with it, wipes the chopstick dry on her T-shirt and puts it back in the drawer. In the mirror the Minotaur can see himself standing behind Kelly. In the mirror the Minotaur can see the wrought-iron bed, its thin bars painted eggshell white; he can see the wicker nightstand and the incense burner made of jade. In the mirror the Minotaur can see the clock that sits on the nightstand, its round face emerging from the belly of a plaster Buddha. Ten o’clock. How can that be? It takes him a second to realize he’s seeing a reflection. It’s two o’clock. He should be at work in an hour and a half.
Through the bedroom wall, from the adjoining apartment, comes the sound of TV cartoons. Boing. Screeeech. Schhhplattt. An explosion and canned laughter. There’s something else the Minotaur can see in the mirror: the closet door, mirrored itself. The reflection of him and Kelly caught between the two mirrors grows smaller and smaller infinitely into the distance.
When the filter is hooked up and air is bubbling in the corner of the hospital tank, Kelly goes for her sick fish. The Minotaur isn’t the least bit surprised when, instead of using a net, she reaches in with her hand and gently scoops up the oranda. The big fish more than fills her palm. Carefully, lovingly, Kelly eases the fish into its infirmary, places it upright at the bottom of the tank.
“We have to watch her for a while,” Kelly says.
“Mmm.”
The Minotaur goes into the kitchen and returns with two ladder-back chairs, one painted blue, the other red. He and Kelly sit in front of the tank. For a precious few minutes the oranda remains plumb and upright as a fish should. But very soon it begins to list a little to its right. After a half-hour, the Minotaur and Kelly watching quietly, the fish lies on its side at the bottom of the tank desperately sucking water through its gills. Twenty minutes later it’s dead. There’s no gaping mouth, no life in the tiny black eye. Dead.
Kelly cries. She puts her forehead to the glass and sobs. The Minotaur can think of nothing to do, so he sits upright in the chair with his hands resting on his thighs. The woven cane seat creaks with his every move, and the harder he tries to sit still the more his body twitches. He should be at work in forty-five minutes.
“I’ve had that oranda for almost three years,” Kelly says. “I can remember the day I bought her.”
She pulls the back of her hand beneath her nose, which leaves a glistening stripe of mucus from wrist to knuckles.
“Sorry,” he says.
Mustering his courage the Minotaur makes a gesture of compassion. He reaches out and puts his hand on her shoulder. Kelly, of course, is too upset to notice the sweat from his palm seeping through her T-shirt.
Kelly turns in her seat, leans forward, lays her head on the Minotaur’s shoulder and sobs mightily. The Minotaur, of course, is unaffected by the clear watery snot that seeps through his shirt. The human ability to attach so much emotion to things not human is baffling to him—baffling, enviable and tinged with hope.
Kissing is difficult for the Minotaur. It’s something he has little experience with. There are the rubbery black lips and the bristly snout to work around. There is the tongue, thick, long and unruly. It’s difficult enough to control in speech, and making it adhere to the subtle intimacies of a kiss is nigh impossible. The great distance between his mouth and his eyes and the blind spot in his vision are also disconcerting; the Minotaur simply cannot see anything directly in front of his face. Kissing the Minotaur is perhaps even more difficult, for all those same reasons. It may be that kissing is a privilege of the fully human and should be left to them.
Apparently Kelly feels differently. It’s not hard to guess who makes the first move toward an embrace. As well, it’s not hard to see how moments of acute emotion can blur at the edges, how a particular feeling, say grief, can spill over—or metamorphose, even—into something different, say desire. One minute Kelly is crying on the Minotaur’s shoulder with her arms around his thick bullish neck, and the next her brackish mouth is seeking his. The Minotaur is surprised, but he doesn’t pull away. No, he welcomes the insistent warmth of her kiss along the underside of his long chin, where his bull skin is the softest, then up to his lips.
“Unng,” the Minotaur says.
“I know,” Kelly answers.
Kelly turns her blue ladder-back chair to face the Minotaur; he turns the red chair. There, in front of the hospital tank with its bubbling air stone and its lifeless patient, they kiss again. What would compel a woman to kiss a man with the head of a bull? Pity? Curiosity? Genuine attraction? Maybe Kelly recognizes the freakish parts of her own self and is drawn to the Minotaur through that alliance. Most likely it is a fluctuating merger of all these things that moves her.
She doesn’t balk when the Minotaur responds to her tongue with his own fat organ, which, despite his tentative probe with just the tip, nearly fills her mouth. Kelly stands and pulls the T-shirt over
her head, reaches back with both hands to unfasten the frayed cotton bra.
“Oh.” It’s all the Minotaur has time to say before she leans into him.
She takes a horn in each hand and pulls him close. The skin of her belly is warm against his black snout, as are the heavy breasts hanging on either side. Kelly strokes the back of his head, scratches at his leathery ears and around the base of both horns. When she backs away and lifts her breasts, pushes them together toward his mouth, the Minotaur cocks his head just enough to see them wholly—the spidery blue veins, the nipples the color of milk chocolate, from which curly black hairs sprout—before going to work with his tongue.
The Minotaur has had lovers in his lifetime. That is not to say that he is an accomplished or even sensitive lover, but just that he isn’t completely ignorant of pleasure, and pleasuring. But a first encounter, a new intimacy, is usually awkward, wrought with apprehension and false starts. Forgiveness, or at least tolerance, is necessary. Kelly winces when the flat plains of his thick front teeth accidentally clamp down on her right nipple.
“Ouch,” she says. “Not so hard.”
Kelly reaches to unbutton the Minotaur’s shirt, and he pulls her hand away. But Kelly is insistent, and this time when she takes the button in both hands he doesn’t stop her. After pulling the shirttail out of his pants Kelly unfastens each button slowly.
Much to the Minotaur’s surprise Kelly doesn’t turn away in disgust at the sight of his division, that purplish scarlike line along his chest where he goes from one thing to another. Rather, she seems drawn to it. With her index finger she traces the path of the scar beneath his left arm and under the pectorals to the other arm. Kelly then licks her fingertip and runs the scar in the opposite direction, circling each black nipple in passing. The last time anyone saw, much less touched, this place on his body is so far gone that the Minotaur has no clear memory of it. Sweet rapture is Kelly’s soothing tongue along the full length of the purple scar.
“Ummha,” the Minotaur says. He’s saying, Thank you. He’s saying, What have I done to deserve this? He’s also saying, because he can’t help but see the clock in the mirror, I’m supposed to be at work soon.
Kelly, lost in thought, doesn’t respond.
“Unng.”
Kelly steps back, smiles at the Minotaur. She gives a nod in the direction of the bed and raises her brow.
“Want to?” she asks. There is mischief in her voice, mischief and a strange distance.
Yes, the Minotaur wants to. He’s wanted to for weeks.
When she bends at the waist to pull her shorts and underwear to her knees, then stands and at the same time lifts her right leg free of the clothing, the Minotaur is stunned by the beauty and grace of the motion. Standing erect, Kelly kicks the shorts and panties from her foot and reaches to help the Minotaur up.
Hirsute. The Minotaur could not have imagined a woman more beautifully haired. The border of her dark pubic thatch rides high up on her belly, tethered to the navel by a thin band of hair. Hair bushes out over the creases where her thighs meet her trunk, and spills down on to the thighs as well. Hair fully obscures the folds and flesh of her sex in its black fire, though it cannot conceal the smell of arousal. As ancient and primal as salt or olives, the scent of her desire fills the dark wells of the Minotaur’s nostrils and clouds his mind. Asspussyhole, the Minotaur thinks, and is immediately ashamed of his crudeness.
The bed doesn’t squeak at all when Kelly sits, but the sound of the Minotaur’s belt buckle, as she unfastens it, is deafening.
“Oh,” Kelly says. “Oh, my god.”
The pizzle of a bull is an impressive thing, a tight fibro-elastic corkscrew of three-plus feet. In life it is capable of plowing deep the wombs of one estrous heifer after another. In death, for those with a particular taste, that same organ can be lopped off, stretched, tanned, shellacked and made into a very nice walking cane.
“Oh. My god.”
Alas, the Minotaur isn’t so generously endowed. Five thousand years have rendered his very human penis merely adequate.
“Oh, my god,” Kelly says.
So it’s not the Minotaur’s sex organ Kelly responds to when she undresses him. Rather, it is the tail, which her hand finds as it comes down his back and beneath the waistband of his pants. Vestigial, little more than a remnant. Her fingers brush the bony little whip that emerges from the base of the Minotaur’s spine.
He feels Kelly pull away and almost reaches to remove her hand. More than anything else the Minotaur is ashamed of his tail. On good days he is able to convince himself that he is not so different from people, that everyone has something left over, something unneeded and in the way, something kept hidden. On good days. Thin and less than six inches long, the tail is easy to conceal tucked in the cleft between his buttocks when at work or in public, but it is impossible to deny once discovered. When he feels Kelly’s jolt of surprise the Minotaur is consumed with shame. He thinks immediately of leaving.
“Oh. My god.”
Kelly’s retraction is only momentary. Her hand comes back to the tail. Kelly pulls the Minotaur’s pants to his ankles, then off. With her hands on his waist she turns him around.
“Wow,” she says, and takes the tufted appendage between her thumb and forefinger. “This is amazing.”
Kelly attends to the Minotaur’s tail, to his buttocks and thighs, to his meager penis. He’s late for work. He wants to kiss her again. He wants to do the things he’s heard about but not recently had the chance to try.
“Mmnn,” he says, and Kelly comes to his mouth.
“Mmunna,” he says, and Kelly lies back on the bed. The Minotaur climbs up; his monstrous head looms over her. They kiss.
“M,” Kelly says when his tongue is not filling her mouth, and the Minotaur thinks she means that he is pleasing her.
“M,” she says again in a few minutes, a little weaker, more distant. “M.”
The Minotaur kisses her mouth, kisses and licks at her breasts and belly until they are covered with his saliva. If the Minotaur weren’t such a slobbery creature by nature he might notice Kelly’s excessive drooling. But because she is slavered from nose to navel from his leaky tongue he can’t see the spittle trickling from her mouth.
“No.” She says it once, clearly, then mumbles something else a bit later.
The Minotaur works his way down her belly and presses his snout into her groin. He breathes her in. He reaches under and takes her hips in his hands. She doesn’t resist. So lost is he in the ecstacy—his own and, he supposes, Kelly’s—that he doesn’t see that her passion is ebbing into something less voluntary. He welcomes the abandon.
When he puts his tongue between her legs Kelly stiffens. Her whole body becomes rigid, then relaxes for an instant, then contracts again. The Minotaur looks for her eyes, happy, in fact proud, of the pleasure he is giving her. However, it is not ecstasy the Minotaur finds in Kelly’s eyes. Only vacancy. They’re open and looking in his general direction, but he can find no sign of cognition. What he has mistaken for compliance is something totally different. Lying there on the bed with the Minotaur’s tongue inside her, Kelly’s body goes into spasms. Her eyes roll back in her head, leaving only pearl-white sickles. She loses control of her sphincters. The Minotaur tastes urine.
The Minotaur doesn’t balk at the by-products of the human body. He didn’t long ago in his days of eating virgins, and he doesn’t now. But the Minotaur knows nothing about seizures and has had little experience with care giving of any kind. Standing there beside the bed watching Kelly’s naked body jerk, he grows more and more anxious. Afraid. Afraid that she will die from this.
Kelly doesn’t die. After five, maybe ten, minutes, the seizure increasing and decreasing in intensity with a regular rhythm while the Minotaur paces the bedroom naked, it’s over. The bed is a mess; Kelly is a mess. She lies motionless in a state of utter exhaustion. The Minotaur puts his pants on, paces some more.
“Umm,” he says.
&
nbsp; “Mnnnuh,” he says, a bit louder.
But when the Minotaur tentatively shakes her foot Kelly is unresponsive. She is beautiful, even in this condition. It makes the Minotaur a little sick to think this way, but he can’t help himself. He bends over Kelly, cocks his head and leans close. Her breath is shallow but regular against his cheek. That must be a good sign.
“Unnh.”
The Minotaur is more than an hour late for work. Though he is ashamed that this selfish concern arises in the moment of Kelly’s crisis, the fact remains that he’s never been late before. And there is little point in going in now. This kind of irresponsibility doesn’t sit well with Grub. In the bathroom the Minotaur washes his face, neck and chest with Castile soap from a plastic squeeze bottle. He doesn’t mind the taste of her in his mouth. Back in the bedroom it takes him a few minutes to find his right shoe. When the Minotaur finally locates the shoe—propped on edge between the wicker nightstand and the bed, half covered by the cup of Kelly’s bra—and reaches for it, his horn knocks the telephone receiver from its cradle. It lies silent for half a minute, then begins to beep. Not once has it occurred to the Minotaur to telephone for help. Besides, whom would he call? The Minotaur withdraws physically and emotionally, believing himself to be in the midst of one of the countless number of pivotal turns of fate that he’s endured in his endless life. To some, if not most, leaving Kelly in this naked, filthy, exposed state would seem the cold-hearted act of a wretched creature, but the Minotaur is not a callous being. In the face of his own inadequacy he simply has no other recourse. He sits in the red chair buttoning his shirt, thinking about the dead fish lying motionless at the bottom of the tank and watching Kelly breathe. She moans softly. Her right arm jerks, and a wave of goose flesh sweeps across her body; her nipples harden.
The Minotaur: Takes a Cigarette Break Page 23
