by Ted Sanders
Far out in the wet open, a few feet from the edge, the sausage link sat. The ants were gone, exposing it. Seeing it startled me so much that I just stood there, staring at it, Evan at my side. My stomach turned a little, sinking. What was left, lying out there in the wet, was a ragged chunk the size of Evan’s finger, spindly and torn, nearly severed in the middle. It looked pale, much paler than I’d pictured it the night before. Its color and texture looked so foreign to me, given the circumstances—so real—that I thought for a moment that a mistake had been made. A mistake on someone’s part. Staring at the thing I even discovered, and could hardly discard the idea, that I could discern parts comprising the imagined whole. Specific parts, I mean, jutting broken from the remains. Bones, touches of skin, the stub of a tail.
“Daddy?” Evan had my shirt in his hand. “Daddy?”
“Go to the couch, Evan.” I stepped outside, pulling my shirt out of his grasp. “Go sit on the couch.” I waved him away behind my back, not turning to look. Wet, the concrete felt even colder underfoot now, none of the water’s warmth sticking. I walked across the patio. Here and there, a few sodden ants staggered. I avoided them. I went to the sausage link and—holding my breath—I bent and picked it up, pinching it between my thumb and finger. It felt much harder than I’d expected, and cold, like a piece of apple. Wetness dripped from it. I held it far from myself. I stepped up to the patio’s edge and I flung the thing underhand out into the yard. It spun end over end through the air and dropped into the grass, thirty feet out. It bounced back into sight again, broken in two, the pieces cartwheeling apart even more wildly before falling back into the lawn, swallowed in the pink morning light, in the gray grass.
I turned back to the door. Evan still stood there, his hand in his crotch.
“Evan?” I said, and then he turned and ran, his little penis wobbling.
I went inside. I wiped my feet on the mat. “Evan? Evan?”
“Daddy?” Evan knelt on the couch, peering over the back of it at me, the shoulders of his white shirt shining.
“Are you okay?”
“Why did you do that?”
“Evan, that wasn’t really Rafael.”
“What?”
“That wasn’t really him, not the real Rafael.”
“It was just body?” he said.
I went to him. I knelt on the floor in front of him, the couchback between us. My head came to his chin. “No, no. That’s not really Rafael at all, Evan. It’s…it’s like pretend.” He stared out over the top of me, down the hall, maybe. I looked over my shoulder with him, deeper into the house. I glanced back at the patio. Both of the cats stood there on the threshold, peering out through the open door, their heads bobbing up and down.
“Evan. Evan.” He didn’t answer me. “I put that there. It’s just pretend, I put that there. It’s not Rafael, not his body. Evan?”
“Then what was it, Daddy?”
I sighed. “Meat. Just meat. Like from the store.” And I thought then that I would have to explain myself, the entire thing—the absurdity of the act, the sausage link. Shame speckled my face, flushing. All the little hairs on my arms stood up and tried to leave me. I tried to muster an explanation as to why things had happened as they had.
But Evan said, “So he didn’t die?” He spoke flatly, his face dull with exhaustion, smooth and permeable, his soft gaze still floating somewhere overhead and aside. My chest began to deflate. After moments, watching him still, I discovered that the muscles in my own face were trying to model themselves after his, their strange intelligence burbling under my skin.
“No, he did die. Rafael did die, but that wasn’t him. He was gone already. All the way gone.”
Evan bent over the couch and into me. He dropped his head into the crook of my neck, dropped his arms around my shoulders. He smelled like sweaty sleep, hung out to bleed into the breeze. He talked into my shoulder. My shirt moved under his mouth and my skin went warm. “He did die?”
“He did die, baby. The real Rafael died and they buried him for us already, for real.”
“What did they do?” He lifted his chin and turned his head toward me. Some part of his face brushed my ear. He whispered at me. “What, Daddy?”
“They buried him for us already,” I said.
Evan patted my back. He sighed into my ear. “Okay, Daddy.” He went on patting me, on and on with both hands in rhythm, a steady beat. After a minute he stopped, and I just kept on holding him. He plucked at my shirtback. He began to hum a loose tune, and after a while that stopped too, and then when a few minutes more had passed, just as I thought he might be asleep again, just as I became aware of how the light in the room had grown, he pulled his head back suddenly, looking me in the face, and he said: “Did they come in the night?”
I brushed my thumb across the corner of his mouth. His earnest eyes were so open and dark that for a moment I fumbled for a fingerhold on where I stood, where the days had led, where Evan had me under his hands. A sliver of something like panic slid through me, cooled me. I held my son. I lifted my head. I thought of answers.
The Lion
SHE SEWS HIM FROM HER DAUGHTER’S BEDSHEETS. THEY ARE camel, and though she has never seen a camel, she has seen the lion at the zoo, and she knows that parts of him are this color. She makes careful, clumsy stitches around the whole childish shape of him, sometimes tugging her red thread too smartly, then fussing back to smooth puckers she’s pulled into the cloth. The needle weaves a long path, doubling back often to close impatient gaps, making a scribble of itself. She breathes down onto her work, into her hands. When she is finished, she pulls the lion right side out around his bulging seams and closes him, sews onto him a tail made from her bathrobe sash. She does it all from her chair, stooped over her lap, in the middle of the bright bathroom in the heart of the dark house.
IN THE MORNING, WHEN HER HUSBAND HAS GONE TO WORK, she takes up the lion and folds places for his eyes. She cuts moon shapes from the folds with the curve of her nail scissors. She makes his nostrils, too, and teases out tufts of thread around his ears. Willie the cat comes into the bathroom and makes eights around her ankles. He bats at the bathrobe tail hanging between her knees.
“Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town,” she sings to him. She hangs her hand and runs a knuckle up his cheek. He prrumbles and chirps. The sounds are just his size. He pushes his face against her hand again, and when his chin drops she wraps a finger deftly around a whisker, gives a sharp tug. It comes away with a soft pop that surprises her. Willie barks and darts to the doorway, where he stops for a moment, blinking and crouching, his anger fuming through his tail. She feels a little something because he looks everywhere but at her. He startles again for no new reason and runs away.
She rolls the whisker between the flats of her fingertips. It is a marvel. She presses the stiff bulb of it into her skin. It is only hair, and what is hair? She remembers the story of an Indian prince who murders his infant nephew by dropping into his milk the thick milk-white whisker of a tiger. She rolls and rolls Willie’s whisker, the thin tip flaring. Finally she threads the fat end of it into the muzzle of the lion. She lifts him by his chops, gazing into his face. His eyes are empty, his countenance made more ragged by the lone whisker. But it can’t be helped; Willie won’t come back now. She holds the lion by the cheeks and examines him. She worries the whisker won’t stay. She shakes him once, very gently, like a breeze shakes out sheets, and the whisker drops free, falls into the sink. It lies there. She reaches out and puts her hand on the faucet. Where will the whisker go from here? Maybe it will stick in the pipes, these pipes or someone else’s. She runs the water hard. She drapes the lion into her lap and watches the water fight itself down the drain.
IN THE AFTERNOON, SHE MAKES HER DAUGHTER’S BED. SHE uses the dolphin sheets. The sheets do not have dolphins on them—only mottled, oceanic blues—but lying on them meant you could be in the ocean, could be a dolphin. Always a dolphin. Putting the sheets on exhausts her: a new, sma
ll ordeal. She cannot reach the far front corner, and so she scoots herself across the bed and back. She does the fitted sheet, flat sheet, pillowcases. She folds the purple velour blanket across the foot of the bed. Willie has come to slap at wrinkles as she works, and when she turns to leave, he swipes at the lion hanging from the back of her chair.
WHEN HER HUSBAND COMES HOME FROM WORK, SHE SITS IN the front room in her chair, with the lion beside her on the couch. Her husband pretends not to see. He bends at the waist to kiss her on the head.
“Good day?” he asks her, going by.
“Yes. I managed.”
“Yes?” he says from down the hall.
“Yes. Productive, even.”
“Oh yeah?” Maybe he makes a plausible space for her to say how. The lion curls on the couch. The husband returns, squeezing her shoulder between his fingers and his palm. He takes her by the handles of her chair and struggles to turn her, keeps trying even though she has set the brakes. She is not as new at it as he is. He struggles and finally tilts her, pivots her. Chopping out a laugh, he comes around her to sit on the couch beside the lion.
“Well, I’m glad you had a good day,” he says. “That’s great, really great.” He puts his hand on the lion absently, begins to pluck at it. The lion’s drooping eyes fall closed.
“Did you change Lara’s sheets?” he asks.
“I’m sorry?”
“Lara’s sheets. You changed them?”
She shrugs. “I did laundry.”
IN BED AT NIGHT SHE WATCHES THE CURTAINS CURLING LIKE the toes of waves. Her husband presses against her. He wants her, wants her to let him, and so she does; she has been waiting for it. He comes up over her, and she hears her legs being slid across the sheets. He goes heavy on her. She watches the curtains, practices the feel of her breath being pushed up and out from her dark parts in bits, and she waits for him to get close. She doesn’t worry. There’s no good place for it to go in there anymore. When he is done, she takes care as he withdraws. She already has her flat hands beneath her hips, and now she lifts with her fingers. After her husband rolls back across the bed, she reaches down and finds her knees, spread wider in the dark than she thought. Cradling them, she pulls them up onto her chest, nearly to her chin. She imagines that, below, only heat escapes her. Her husband nuzzles her shoulder like a sick child, wetting her skin. She waits for the sounds of his sleeping, then stretches an arm to the floor. She pulls the lion out from beneath the bed, flat on his back, his haunches splayed. She has already worried the stitches free from his belly, and now she fingers him open. She scoots to the edge of the bed and lowers herself onto the spot, sinking over the lion with her thighs against her breasts. Her triceps burn.
She looks up at the curtains and she imagines slow that she can feel his stuff sliding, passing from her—a tiny mass. She waits until she can’t hold herself anymore and then she bends her head to see it, but it is only a dark patch against the lion, no more luminous than her own skin, or the dull shine of curtains, the shadow of her chair nearby. She sits herself back on the bed and reaches down between her feet and rubs the stuff into the fabric where it’s fallen, lifts some apart on her fingertips and rubs it around the mouth of the lion’s split belly. Before it goes thick, she takes the lion to the bathroom and sews him shut again, her breathing quick and shallow, her fingers going nimble in the night.
LATER SHE HEARS A BREATHY RUSTLE ALONGSIDE THE BED, and she lies on her side with her eyes open, her hands beneath her cheek.
“Shh,” she says. “Shh.” She listens to her husband sleep.
Willie pads in, his claws snicking through the carpet. She meets his floating eyes where they pause in the doorway, and she knows he makes his quiet, quizzical snuffling. She hears him softly hiss, imagines she sees his needling teeth like torn bits of paper, thinning the dark between them. Her husband turns over, and under the sounds that escape him, sheets rustle. She looks back but sees only rising waterfolds of flannel draped over him into dark. She looks up at the ceiling, back at the door. Willie is gone.
“Shh,” she says. “It’s okay.”
SHE OPENS HER EYES AFTER SHE IS SURE SHE CAN’T HEAR THE car anymore. The lion is beside the bed, his muzzle draped across his paws.
“It’s morning,” she says to him, and she takes him into the kitchen where sunshine lies squared on the counter. He turns his head away as she lays him there, ashamed to be so light. She croons, “Don’t trouble yourself.” She picks the lint from around his eyes. “You’re improving.” With long shears she slices into his muzzle, working steadily down the length of it, and he smiles.
SHE SITS IN HER DAUGHTER’S ROOM, FOLDING A PINWHEEL from red paper. It is a school day.
“For your voice,” she says to the lion, pooled outside the door. He will not come in, nor has she asked him to. Her hands feel blunted, fingers tired from care, and she pricks herself with the pin. She squeezes a bead of blood from her finger with her thumb, lets it spread beneath the nail, curses to herself. The lion lifts his ears.
At last she gets the petals pinned down, gets the point through the straw and into the cork. She comes to him in the doorway, reaching into his mouth stretched wide, and pins the paper fan to the seams deep in his throat. She imagined it would be harder. She steps back and the lion rolls his jaw, lowering his chin to his chest, a soft, whickering growl rising from inside him. She sees his throat flutter, low down. He rumbles again, twittering low and slow like a monstrous bird.
“Hungry,” rasps the lion. When he talks, she can see he is blind. He bumps his whiskerless face against the doorjamb, the wheel of her chair.
SHE IS BY HER DAUGHTER’S BED WHEN HER HUSBAND FINDS her in the night.
“Baby?” The lion makes eights around his legs in the doorway, ice in his eyes.
“Don’t come in,” she says, but the husband does, stepping away from her lion, pretending not to notice him. The lion stands in the doorway. His new eyes gleam.
“Coming to bed soon?” He bends at the waist beside her.
“Am I?”
“I hope.”
“Do you?”
He comes around her, puts his hand on her head as he goes by. “I guess I do,” he says, but he says it like he isn’t guessing. He turns and sits on the very edge of the bed, his long folding legs trussed beneath himself to the floor.
“You’re a dolphin,” she says. He stands up again. He walks around her again, back the way he came. He goes to the wall and picks up the Morgan horse from the shelf of plastic animals, lifting him by the head. He makes a sound. “This horse,” he says.
“That’s Justin Morgan’s horse.”
“I know.” He rubs the horse’s nose. “This nose, all worn white.”
“That’s not for playing with.”
“What?”
“That was never for playing with,” she says, and she goes to him and grabs him by the wrists and tries to take it. He doesn’t fight her but won’t let her, and she pulls herself forward almost into him. His face is nearly flat, just lightly troubled, as though he were listening from far away. She peels his hands away from Justin Morgan’s horse, and it falls to the carpet between them. An ear snaps off dully into the pile, making a snick scarcely louder than the sound of Willie’s whisker coming free. The lion paces in the doorway, dragging out a growl like a stick along a fence.
The husband looks at Justin Morgan’s horse on the floor, looks toward the ragged, rangy lion rubbing his face against the door frame. The husband sighs. She knows he will say something strange, and he says, “You can’t take all of it. You can’t keep it all for yourself.”
“What?” she says, not to him but in his direction, and she feels a little sick thinking how much movement there could be toward him that would never reach him. She shakes her head. “What?”
“This, all this.” He doesn’t gesture around the room; he gestures in at her, at her belly. He sits back on the bed and then he does pluck at the dolphin sheets. “This,” he says.
Her head is still shaking. “You say that like there’s too little to be selfish about,” she says. Her head is shaking and her neck starts to hurt. Her voice comes out squeezing, spreading like blood. She says, “This is all still true.” She backs away, backs herself across the room until she bumps against the wall. She closes her eyes.
“Allison,” he says—another strange thing for him to say.
She waits. She waits until she hears him get up, hears him walk from the room. She hears the lion’s growl slow as he passes. She waits while there is no sound but the creak of her chair, her heart in her neck.
She sits quietly until she hears the lion come in. She thinks she has been waiting for him. He is purring through the paper fan pinned inside his throat. She opens her eyes and watches as he comes over to Justin Morgan’s horse, lying on the floor, watches as he works his helpless mouth around it, trying to pick it up. She watches his thin flanks working, his neck drooping, his useless jaws grasping.
“Stop,” she tells him, and he lifts his head. The ice is draining from his eyes. Dark rivers run from the sockets down his face. “Let me get you some more,” she says.
IN THE NIGHT, THAT NIGHT, SHE HOLDS THE LION’S MOUTH against her sleeping husband’s. The husband will not wake for just this. The lion’s eyes glitter into her own as she whispers into his ear.
“Don’t move,” she says. “Let it fill you.” And she reaches up and she takes the rind of the husband’s ear between her nails, and she squeezes. She watches his chest rise and fall faster and deeper, like the sea coming up into storm, watches as his struggling sludgy bewilderment blusters out of him slowly. It billows into the lion. She meets the lion’s marbled eye and she squeezes harder, wondering with a thrill how hard she can. The husband begins to turn his head, but she holds him and squeezes, grits her teeth. He doesn’t come awake until she has drawn blood, and she pulls her hands free just as he is jerking up from the bed. The lion slips away.
