Mr Pickering stood up. He was watching me too, his permanent look of surprise more focused than I’d ever seen it. “James?” he said.
But I couldn’t be stopped. I took off my workboots and socks and flung each in a different direction. I was wearing one-piece denim coveralls, and my hand found the zipper and tugged it down, lower and lower. When I got the zipper to waist-level, I stood straight and let my coveralls fall to the dirty floor in a heap. The ladies gasped audibly, and Mr Pickering looked as if he wanted to say “James” again but couldn’t summon the strength. I was wearing nothing now but a pair of paisley boxer shorts – not the most powerful effect, I’ll grant – and I meant to shed those as well. So I sashayed around the room twice more, tossing my arms, tossing my head, and pranced into the restroom. Out of sight, I yanked down my shorts, chucked them back into the stripping room and hung my naked leg out the doorway.
A moment passed, and Mrs Deffinbaugh said in a scattered, winded voice: “Well!”
Another moment passed, and Mrs Seilhamer put in: “There you are.”
I waited to hear Mr Pickering’s comment, but he never said a word. He didn’t have to.
One evening a week or two later I was pushing my shopping cart through the Superfresh lost in thought. My former job was just a fading memory at this stage, and I was concentrating more on what lay ahead for me. I was venturing back to school in the fall, and not the community college either; I’d been accepted into the state university two hours away. The chemicals had left my head – I felt natural again – and I was thinking more clearly than I had in ages.
I was rolling along toward the meat section when suddenly wham! – my cart collided with one being pushed by a young woman. I said excuse me, though it was my impression that neither of us had been watching where we were headed. She had shoulder-length auburn hair and warm brown eyes that said nice things to me just in the way they blinked. She was wearing a pink tank top and tight denim shorts, and something about her hair, her golden arms, the way those shorts molded themselves to her hips … She looked like someone I’d known years before, and she was staring at me in the same hesitant, quizzical way.
She said: “You’re one of the guys in the parking lot.”
Astonished, I took a step backward to have a better look at her. She seemed shorter, more petite, from this angle. “You’re the –” I didn’t know what to call her “– the girl in the window. The dancer.”
“Lisa Broadwater,” she said, and offered her hand.
“Jimmy Long.” Like her eyes, her hand was warm. “I haven’t … seen you lately.”
“I quit.” She shrugged. “Retired. It was fun for a while, but you can’t build a life on stripping in a window.”
I nodded. It occurred to me that you couldn’t build a life on watching someone strip in a window either.
“What you did was artistic,” I said. “Communal.” I fumbled along at some length trying to convey my notion that there’d been more going on with her dancing than met the eye, but I don’t know if she took my meaning.
She said she was going back to school to become a veterinarian. “I want to help sick little animals,” she said.
I told her I was going back to school myself.
“To study what?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” At the time, I really didn’t know, and it was fun just pondering the savory menu. “Something worthwhile.”
The moment had come for me to strip away my inhibitions – to get down to the naked wood. In this regard, I was more capable than some people would’ve believed. She gave me her phone number, and in the days ahead we’d get together again, more than once. But the important part of what would happen between us had already happened, and that was enough.
Hands on her cart, she tossed her hair in a way that made my blood jump. “It was nice seeing you,” she said.
I watched her as she pushed the cart up the aisle. “It was nice seeing you,” I said.
Only When it Rains
Rose B. Thorny
Why it happens only when it rains, I have no idea.
Well, that isn’t totally accurate. I have a few thoughts on it, but it doesn’t really matter. I don’t actually care, and no one else would understand, so it’s of no consequence.
In the winter, when it snows, it doesn’t feel the same at all. Perhaps, because it is just too cold and cold is invasive, cruelly invasive. Or perhaps, because, in the snow, I would leave behind footprints, evidence, and my mind has made that adjustment to facilitate self-preservation.
In the winter, I like to closet myself. Push the doors tight against the gusting winds and freezing draughts, frame the windows in heavy drapes so I may observe the drifting white fall of chiffon snow without actually feeling its frigid caress, watch the sweep of wind-driven flurries, and listen to the crystalline glissandos of sleet against the glass, without suffering the needles of icy pain piercing my skin.
In the winter, I like to build a fire in the wood stove and kneel before it to warm my hands.
I like crumpling the old news and tossing it on to the blackened, ash-stuccoed iron grate and building little pyres of kindling over it. I arrange them, just so, tiny wooden structures, like frail stick houses that a huffing, puffing big, bad wolf might blow down without a second thought. What a silly tale; fire is so much more effective, so effortless by comparison, and so much more gratifying.
I grasp the box of wooden matches in one hand. Sometimes, I think of them as lucifers, a name by which they’re still known, the reason for such a name being apparent to anyone familiar with brimstone, black magic and the fires of hell. God and his minions – or are they cohorts? – are delightfully inventive in their destructive tortures. They know how to create and feed the punishing flames.
The match rasping against the encrusted side of the box offers a gritty, satisfying sound and the flaring tip excites me.
I gasp every time kindling ignites.
I peer into the flames, grip the poker and jab at the dry fuel. It pops and snaps. I imagine piles of brittle old bones being crushed underfoot in some ancient, cavernous crypt. As the inferno expands, waves of heat envelop me. The fire crackles with the intensity of ravenous, snapping jaws and I’m mesmerized by the darting orange and yellow tongues licking at the hapless wood, devouring it. The little house is in ruins, but the fire is alive, searching.
I feed it. Showers of sparks explode; a beast straining to free itself, to gorge on fare more sumptuous and juicier than dead wood.
When the blaze is roaring, when I have it controlled and contained within that iron prison, I stand and turn my back to it. Can I trust it not to consume me?
I slip off the clothing covering my legs, let the garments fall and rest around my feet. The heat assaults my buttocks, seeks ingress, and I close my eyes, inhale deeply, and contemplate what I do once winter is past, when the rains come.
In the winter, in my house, the urge to venture forth and indulge does not overcome me. Oh, it’s there. I cannot deny that. It’s alive, I can feel it, but quiescent, germinating. The anticipation builds and I let it.
I think about my bliss and the heat radiates. My gut clenches, tingles. The frisson spreads lower and I get hot between my legs. Hot and wet.
My house is old, the oldest one in the neighbourhood. I bought it years ago with a small inheritance and some insurance money, the only silver lining, some people said, of a tragic dark cloud that deprived a young woman of her only remaining family. It sits on a rise at the end of a cul-de-sac, an old Victorian looking down on a clutter of mismatched post-war bungalows; a stoic dowager standing apart from its youthful kin.
And when it rains, only when it rains, does the wealth of those houses present itself to be plundered.
Once winter has passed, I study the sky. I watch for the storm clouds.
Thin April drizzle won’t do. A soft rain is too transparent and most people do not find it unpleasant to don their raincoats and rain boots and open their umbrella
s to walk in an April shower. In fact, they welcome it, that harbinger of flowers, those splashes of colour bursting from the neat gardens framed in manicured lawns.
It is not the light spring rainfall I await.
I bide my time, until the sultry, charged air of ponderous summer heat pulses and swells as a fecund belly, then births the relentless deluge of a thunderstorm. The rumbling stirs my blood and the bolts of lightning explode in my brain, tearing me open, even as they rip the sky apart, exposing my innards to the elements. This is what I wait for throughout the crisp brilliance of autumn, the glacial chill of winter, the fresh vibrancy of spring. I wait for the cloudburst and the torrents, the terrifying power of Thor himself, that drives even the bravest of ordinary souls indoors.
I am not ordinary.
But the time must be right, too. Mornings and afternoons are not the right time. Too many people rushing about trading whatever it is they have to offer in payment for their lives. They look like so many staccato raindrops stampeding across the pavement. And there are way too many children running back and forth, stomping in puddles, laughing and shouting and making more noise than the heavy raindrops beating a tattoo on my tin roof. Even during a daytime storm, there is too much light for me to indulge myself. Even in an ominous daytime storm, there is not enough darkness for me to watch the keepers of all those other hearths.
Only when it rains at dusk and in the night do I allow myself the pleasure of making sport of their imagined safety. I wait until they’re all ensconced in their little dwellings, their tidy little homes, with the frilly curtains and the polished hardwood floors; their little stick houses.
Many people favour the easy-to-spot yellow raincoats, the colour of sunshine and daffodils and fresh lemons. Others prefer the pretty paisleys and popular multi-hued geometric designs. I choose black, of course. Black doesn’t reflect the sweeping beams of random late headlights turning into driveways.
If the conditions are just right – which is what they are this evening – if the summer storm is such that the heat of the day is not dissipated by the sheets of rain, I wear little, if anything, under the slicker.
I am not without humour.
Barefoot, I slip into my tall, black rain boots and stand before the full length mirror in the foyer. I perch the wide-brimmed rain hat atop my head and, otherwise naked, strike the cheesecake poses that made Bettie Page a hot chick. I am not a hot chick and that is obvious, even to me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t drink in my own reflection. I poise one hand on the hat and place the other on one hip, bend one knee and thrust my pelvis forward. I make a face and stick out my tongue and giggle, sounding quite girlish, though it has been a long time since anyone has thought of me as a girl.
I’m not sure that they think of me very much, at all, and that suits me just fine.
To everyone in this little suburb, I’m that just past middle-aged spinster, who works at the library and lives alone in the old house at the dead end. At work, I’m quiet and pleasant and just stern enough to have earned some respect and obedience from the children, yet not frighten them unduly. It wouldn’t do to frighten the children. At work, I’m friendly and even-tempered enough to encourage trust.
At home, I smile and wave at my neighbours and chat with them when our paths cross. I’ve practised being as ordinary as possible when I’m with other people. It’s advantageous to be thought of as ordinary. If the Christmas cards I find in my mailbox, during that festive season, are any indication, I’m not considered some kind of pariah, which is just as well, of course.
The children aren’t afraid of me, but neither do I go out of my way to encourage their friendship. It is the one thing I find difficult to do; feign excessive amity towards children. I’m sure of many things, but I’m uncertain if, despite those wide-eyed, supposedly innocent stares, they detect the animosity behind my indulgent smiles. I’ve seen the way they study me, as they would some curious object, the purpose of which they are unsure. There is no real indication that it would harm them, but it’s an unknown, so they can’t be certain. I don’t allow them to look into me with any intensity. Children see things with a clarity unobscured by guile. And there are things that children should not see. When they stare at me, I avert my eyes.
I really don’t like children very much, noisy, spoiled little creatures that whine and cry, when they don’t get their way, and prance about as if the world, indeed, the whole solar system, revolves around them, as if the rules, my rules, don’t apply to them.
At the library, they obey the library rules, no doubt because the head librarian, Mr Janus, is commanding and enforces them and has been known to eject the unruly.
I’ve never ejected anyone. It serves my purpose not to be thought of as mean or frightening.
At home, there is no Mr Janus to back me up and the children obviously do not take me as seriously as they take him. Of course, he’s a man and they afford him that additional deference, because they think he is somehow superior to me. They’ve been taught that it’s a man’s world; that, Queen Elizabeth notwithstanding, men rule. They all believe that Mr Janus’s status as male, bestows upon him some inherent respect, as if possession of some thickened, generally floppy piece of flesh hanging between one’s legs is a definitive measure of worth. They don’t know the things about Mr Janus that I do.
Mr Janus doesn’t like thunderstorms any more than the rest of the people in my sphere do. I’ve visited him often enough to learn things about him, too. The children and their parents wouldn’t be quite so respectful of Mr Janus if I shared my knowledge of his habits. I keep that to myself, however. It’s enough for me that I know.
I resist marching out of my house and confronting the youngsters, when they encroach on my unkempt lawn. I may be harmless and ordinary to them, but I’m sure my yard is something of an extraordinary, even eccentric, sticking point with the neighbours, who offer to cut the lawn for me, when the grass grows beyond what they believe is proper, and I let them. If they want to do the weeding, that’s fine with me, too. Free labour; why not? But I think it is that very nonconformity of the landscape which attracts the children. I refrain from chastising them for trespassing, thereby not appearing to be a mean old crone, and they can’t resist the lure of the wilderness, pretending to be explorers in the untamed frontier masquerading as my yard. Much as they annoy me, though, I don’t really blame them for being wilful and disobedient. One of my mother’s favourite sayings, repeated frequently, right up to her untimely demise, summed it up: As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. I concur. It’s their parents’ fault.
And it’s their parents who interest me.
I shrug into my long raincoat and snap the fasteners shut. There’s a finality to the sound, a shotgun slide locking into position. I’m ready to hunt.
I have my favourite stands, of course. Some prey are just so much more attractive than others.
There is no sound but the storm; rain splashing on the leaves and the pavement, drumming on trash can lids, thrumming in hollow cadence on the carport roofs. The deep timpani of thunder rolling back and forth over the distant hills, punctuated by the occasional cymbal crash when a bolt of lightning hits close to home. Oh, yes, much closer to home than anyone might think.
Psychoanalysis is very much in vogue these days, along with a plethora of psychiatrists, who attempt to find explanations for everything. They have to know the reasons, all the whys and wherefores. They want everything to be neat and predictable. They believe that when someone, such as I, gets caught, it’s because, deep down, such people want to be caught. Because they want everyone to know how brilliant they are, or because they truly desire to be helped and “cured” of whatever it is that compels them to do what they do. The psychoanalysts believe they have it all figured out.
Needless to say, they’re full of shit. I don’t want to get caught. I’m having way too much fun. Of course, I am brilliant, but I prove it every time I don’t get caught. And I have no desire to be “cured”, because I�
��m not ill. People such as I only get caught if they get sloppy. And I’m not sloppy. Others, who do get caught, aren’t like me at all.
Earlier, as soon as I saw the thunderheads roiling, building upwards, further and further, climbing towards the stratosphere, I mulled over who would be first on my list if the conditions permitted an evening sojourn. I chose the Barkers. If time allows, if the storm lasts, and I have the energy, I’ll move on to the Johnsons.
I have to admit that the Barkers are my favourite prey, possibly because they are the exception to my parent rule. They don’t have children yet, and they’ve provided hours of uninterrupted pleasure – children can ruin the perfect moments – but also the most frightening moment, the one time I almost was discovered.
I was in no way culpable for that. It was not sloppiness on my part, nor any desire to be apprehended. It was raccoons getting into the trash, knocking over the galvanized cans and making a din, clearly distinguishable during the lull between thunder claps. Gerald Barker rushed out the back door to see what the commotion was. I ducked and froze below the window and it was the storm that protected me, for the lashing rain was relentless. He looked neither right nor left, his only goal to shoo away the marauders and return to the house. If he’d checked for other possible intruders, it is almost certain he would have spotted me.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 10 Page 46
