And there he was, in all his absurdity, in the same baseball cap and in the same corduroy jacket that came down to his knees. He was directly beneath the window where the boy had used to receive petty errands from me.
Alarmed, I ducked out of view behind the corner of the building and waited a moment, feeling my heart racing in my chest. But I knew he hadn’t seen me because his back was turned. I wondered if I should circle around the building or simply lower my head and walk in casual strides across the entrance of the alley.
But first, I needed to peek at him again.
Apparently, he had taken the milkcrate—upon which the gross woman had used to sit and hum and watch her clothes drying on a pair of lines—and he had placed it beneath my window.
Still with his back to me, the shadowy figure was fidgeting with something near his waist, and then pulling his hand out from the interior of his jacket, he revealed what appeared to be a hammer. Although the darkness prevented me from descrying the crooked nails driven into the top of it, I suspected it was the very tool I’d seen on his kitchen table. He almost seemed to brandish it for an instant above his head, as though it were some glorious and primitive weapon.
Then, in a gesture that was much sprightlier than I’d imagined the man capable of, he stepped up onto the milkcrate and scrambled the upper part of his body through the window. And before I could fully register what was happening, I watched his legs kick out once, with a tiny jerk, and then slither themselves through the opening. He was gone.
I stood for a second, aghast and terror-stricken.
The cold air bit at my face.
And not yet, not until I plunged my hands into my pockets and started across the opening to the alley, did I envision him walking silently through my living room. I had no idea if my apartment was new to him or if he had frequented it a thousand times before. Perhaps it was just as much his as mine. And I wasn’t even thinking yet, not until I increased my pace and reached the end of the block, that a woman was sleeping in my bed. In my surprise, I had forgotten about Vanessa Somerset. I abruptly stopped in the slushy crosswalk and looked in the direction I’d just come. But there was no going back now. There was nothing I could do.
As my brain played out the various scenarios that were possibly being enacted in my old home, I continued forward. I had to gaze down at the fouled sidewalk. In some scenes, the madman realized his mistake and crept away without making a sound, but in others, the hammer fell before he knew what was beneath the covers, and still more, in other scenes, he peeled back the covers first—and since these were the worst, I tried not to allow myself to imagine them.
I walked for a long time, but eventually, not far from the bright early hours of the morning, I approached the subway that would take me to the train station. Fretful over the weather, I hoped that everything was still on schedule. I stepped off the sidewalk and began to descend the staircase. Halfway down, a crumpled pile of rags was heaped against the wall, and if not for the solitary hand that reached out of the mound and held onto the metal railing, I wouldn’t have known that I was passing at least one, if not two, human beings. Yellow bulbs glowed against the wet walls, but even so, it looked darker at the bottom. Shortly, commuters would be crowding along the passage in their morning rush. My God, I thought, but I went down nonetheless, aching with every step.
THE END
Michael James Rizza has an MA in creative writing from Temple University in Philadelphia and a PhD in American Literature from the University of South Carolina. He has published academic articles on Don DeLillo, Milan Kundera, Harold Frederic, and Adrienne Rich. His short fiction has recently appeared in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Switchback, and Curbside Splendor. He has won various awards for his writing, including a fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. His current projects are a book about the theories of Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault, and a novel tentatively titled Domestic Men’s Fiction. He teaches at Kean University. He lives in New Jersey with his wife Robin and their son Wilder, who was named after a character in DeLillo’s White Noise. He welcomes you to visit his website: mjrizza.com.
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All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The first chapter of Cartilage and Skin was performed at Playwrights Theatre in Madison, New Jersey. An excerpt also appeared in Atticus Books Online.
This book is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council for the Arts, a state agency. Starcherone Books thanks the Council and New York State taxpayers for this support.
Copyright © 2013 by Michael James Rizza
Cover design by Julian Montague
Cover photograph by Mark Hillringhouse
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