by John Klima
He’d rather not consider the last time they’d met. It was the sort of thing he wanted to put completely from his mind.
“So, what’s troubling you, Michael?” she said.
Michael frowned. “Um, I don’t know that anything is particularly. Do I look troubled?” This time he reached for his coffee and took a tentative sip, watching her carefully.
She shook her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s just a…sense I get. As if you’ve forgotten how to be joyful.”
Michael’s frown deepened. Claire was attractive enough, perhaps a woman that he’d like to spend time with, but this was just weird. He wondered if maybe she was some sort of cultist and any minute she’d start talking about self-actualization or something equally absurd.
She’d apparently noticed his reticence, because she lowered her gaze and instead stared down into the depths of her cup.
“So what do you do, Claire?” he said. “And van Maren, right? What’s that, Dutch?”
She looked up with a smile at the sound of his words. “Yes, way back, but not for a long time. And what is it I do? Good question. This and that. Always passing through. Sometimes I feel like a ghost.”
This brought another frown from Michael. “I’m not sure I—”
She cut him off with a little shake of her head. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Ignore me. I’m just in one of my moods. Let’s see if you can do something about that, Michael. So, what about you?”
“Well,” he said. “I live in a house by the beach, but you know that. Apart from that, I’m a freelance artist. Commercial stuff, you know. Advertisements and the like. It means I do a lot of my work at home. It’s not the real work though. It’s just what I do to make enough to keep me doing what I really want to.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’m a painter. Oils.”
She looked down at his hands and blinked. He followed her gaze and then looked back up at her and grinned. “What, you expect my hands to be covered in paint or something? Not all artists aspire to that image. I don’t look that good in a beret and smock either.”
She nodded and half-smiled in return.
“So what are you working on now?”
“Well…,” he said.
Again, he turned his mug on the table without lifting it and lightly bit his lower lip. When he looked up, she was watching him expectantly.
“Not really anything, at the moment,” he said with a sigh. “I just can’t seem to…”
She was leaning forward, her hands crossed on the table before her. “Tell me, Michael. Tell me what’s stopping you.”
He paused for a full three seconds before answering, watching her half-open lips, and then it was a nonanswer. “Um, I don’t really know.”
He really didn’t know what it was, but he also didn’t know what made her think she had the right to be probing his life like this; they’d barely met. Now he was on guard. And come to think of it, she’d told him virtually nothing about herself. It was all pretty one-sided.
The small café seemed awfully quiet just then. Claire stared down into her tea, and Michael sat watching her, thinking about cutting and running, making some sort of excuse to get out of the situation. It was not a very auspicious start. After a few moments, he cleared his throat, breaking through the awkwardness that lay palpable between them.
“Look,” he said finally. “I’ve got a couple of things I need to do.”
She looked up at him, the touch of disappointment barely discernible on her face, but there all the same. Awkwardly, he stood and fumbled for his wallet.
“Let me get this,” he said, dragging his gaze away and heading for the counter. He paid quickly, self-consciously, aware of her eyes on his back.
“Good to see you,” he said at the door.
She merely nodded.
The taste for browsing the old man’s stall had gone, so instead he headed back to the house.
All the way, he was pondering what had just happened, wondering about what motivated this woman, this stranger.
He would have written the whole incident from his consciousness, but the thing was, Claire’s face just wouldn’t go away. He’d be making a cup of coffee, and he’d remember her, the mug of spicy tea held between her pale, long-fingered hands. He’d be looking out of the window at the sea, staring at the waves rolling in and crashing against the sand, and he’d remember her eyes, changeable as the ocean itself, and with the eyes would eventually come her face and her hair. What had she said? That she’d felt like a ghost? Well maybe she was, because she was starting to haunt the spaces in his days.
A few days later, he was walking on the beach, discovering random patterns in the sand and the shapes hidden in the swirling waters, when she appeared again. He saw her from a distance, and this time, there was no mistaking who it was. The casual dark sports clothing were back, and she was standing by the waterline, watching him. It was funny, but Michael hadn’t seen her walk down the beach. All of a sudden, she was just there.
Right then, he was in two minds. Should he ignore her? Should he acknowledge her presence? The last time had been such a disaster that he just didn’t know. She took the decision away from him, striding purposefully across the sand in his direction. Michael shrugged to himself. The Fates seemed to be throwing this woman into his path at every turn, so he might as well go with the flow. It only took her about ten seconds to reach him and she stood before him, barefoot, looking up into his eyes.
“Michael,” she said, reaching up with one hand to touch the side of his face, a fleeting contact, but one that initiated a spark of electricity through his nerves. “I was hoping I’d see you here. I’ve been thinking about you.”
Had she been thinking about him in the same way that he’d been thinking about her?
He hadn’t noticed it before, but on one side of her hair, there was a clear white streak running back from her left temple and intertwined with those red-brown locks. Funny that he hadn’t seen it.
“How did you know I’d be here?” he said.
She reached for his hand. “Lucky guess.”
For now, he wasn’t questioning. He watched her face, studied her lips and her eyes and hair as she led him to a spot where the wet sand met the dry and sat him down, facing the incoming waves. She sat beside him, hugging her knees and staring out into the depths.
“Can you feel the power?” she said.
“There’s a force there,” he said in response.
“Hmmm.” She nodded her head slowly. “Do you watch the waves often, Michael?”
“Yeah, I guess. You can see things deep inside the waves. Things moving, if you look hard enough. It’s more than just the sand.”
As each wave slid up the beach towards them and then sucked back into the darkness, Michael felt the apprehension drawn away from him. There was something comfortable about having her here, sitting beside him. He stole a glance at her face, but she was staring at the water. He turned his head to follow her gaze, wondering if she was seeing the same things he was.
“So, Michael, tell me about yourself,” she said quietly. “I want to hear it all.”
He was silent for several seconds before answering. The waves crashed in front of them, beating out the time.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything, Michael. Everything.”
He had to lean closer to hear her answer above the sound of the water; she’d said it so quietly. He straightened again, randomly brushed away some sand adhering to the leg of his trousers and cleared his throat.
“Okay,” he said.
He lost track of how long he spoke for. Once he’d started, the words came easily and they kept coming—his frustrations, his disappointments, the darkness. The solitude he didn’t mind. The aloneness, that was another thing. All of it came out and she listened, not saying anything, just staring out with those grey-green eyes into the ocean depths.
Eventually, the words ran dry, and left them sitting there t
ogether, both hugging their knees.
Claire pushed her feet into the wet sand and leaned back. “So, that’s Michael,” she said.
“Pretty much all of it,” he answered, feeling slightly foolish and exposed.
“So, don’t you think it’s time for you to ask me back for a cup of tea?” She turned to him and smiled. “I like you, Michael,” she said. “I think I could be very good for you.”
Later, back at the house, she helped him out of his clothes and lay beside him, fingers tracing patterns on his skin, the half-finished mug of tea sitting forgotten on the bedside table.
Afterwards, she wandered around the house naked, picking up pieces and examining them, poking through bookshelves, peering at this and that, while he watched her appreciatively, propped up on one elbow, barely daring to question how they had come to this.
Over the next few weeks, Claire became almost a constant companion, spending more time at the house than away from it. Michael didn’t mind at all. He still wasn’t painting, but making love to Claire was more than enough to keep his mind off it. Somehow, she was filling the empty spaces inside him.
One day, he noticed that the white streak had disappeared from her hair. He wasn’t quite sure when it had gone, but he dismissed it. She’d probably dyed it when she was away, though she didn’t seem to be that self-conscious about her appearance. Not that she had any reason to be. White streak or no, Michael thought she was beautiful. He had ceased questioning how she had come into his life. The body on the beach seemed to drift out of their consciousness as if it had never been there at all. They could just as easily have met in a bar or in that first café, or at a party at somebody’s house rather than across a corpse at the water’s edge, for all the impact it had on their time together.
“Do you believe in the supernatural, Michael?” she asked him one day. The question had come completely out of the blue. She was sitting on the back steps looking down at the beach across the road. The air was full of the scent of summer grasses and the tang of seaweed. “Like demons, vampires…that sort of thing?”
“I don’t know. Not really,” he said, moving to sit beside her. “Why?”
“I just think it’s an interesting idea,” she said. “Taking from someone’s life to sustain your own. Isn’t that what people do to each other?”
He stared at her for a long time, but she didn’t meet his gaze.
“Never mind,” she said finally, pushing herself to her feet and disappearing through the back door into the comparative dimness of the back room. She had said something else as the door closed behind her that he didn’t catch.
Later that day, he stood before a blank canvas for the first time in weeks. His studio felt unfamiliar, the brushes awkward in his hand. The first tentative stroke was wrong, the second worse. In the end, he put down the brushes, taking the time to clean them before putting them away. He stood for several minutes staring at the off-white surface, a couple of dark blotches of formlessness marring the clean surface. The smell of linseed was heavy in the air. Creativity was joy, and somewhere along the way, it was as if the joy had gone. Had they taken it with them, his failed relationships, the partnerships gone nowhere, the career leading to nothing? Thinking those thoughts, the emptiness filled him and settled in his chest. When he finally turned from the canvas, Claire was standing in the doorway watching him.
“Come on,” she said, holding out one hand. “We need to go for a walk.”
“What’s the point?” said Michael.
“Oh, there’s a point,” she said, taking a step closer and reaching for his hand. “Come on.”
Michael didn’t really feel like it, but he let himself be led out of the house, across the road, and down to the beach. He could feel the squeak of sand beneath his feet, the breeze and the salt around his face, the stirring of the waves.
She led him right to the water’s edge, without saying a word.
He looked down as the very edge of a wave splashed over his shoes, giving a slight frown.
Claire took his face in her hands and turned him to face her. “I told you once, a long time ago, that the ocean was a great healer.”
He nodded. He remembered.
“And so it is,” said Claire, looking deep into his eyes, her hands holding either side of his face. “Sometimes,” she said, “the time just has to be right. Listen to the waves, Michael. Let them fill you.”
Her hands were cool upon his cheeks. Cool and wet against the summer heat.
The sun was slipping down over the edge of the world, swallowed by a sea tinged with orange fire. The dying light was catching in her curls, and if he hadn’t known better, he could have sworn that her hair was moving with the rhythm of the waves.
She kept hold of his face. “Listen to the water, Michael, just listen.”
He felt the joy well up within him like the surge of the surf. And he knew that feeling was not his own, that it had come from her.
But that didn’t really matter to him. All he felt was the joy.
He was barely aware of the damp sand coming up to meet his cheek. Somehow, it was comfortable. And as he closed off the world, finally, Michael was smiling.
The last thing he saw was the slight blur of Claire’s fingers, as she moved to close his eyes.
* * *
M•A•C•E•R•A•T•E
mac·er·ate 'ma-se-'rāt
verb transitive
1: to cause to waste away by or as if by excessive fasting
2: to cause to become soft or separated into constituent elements by or as if by steeping in fluid
verb intransitive
: to soften and wear away esp. as a result of being wetted or steeped
* * *
Softer
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
JONATHAN LILLY SLUMPED in hot water up to his neck and studied his dead wife. She half-floated at the far end of the bath, soap bubbles wreathing her Nordic face. Blond hair clung to bloodless skin. Her half-lidded eyes stared at the ceiling. Jonathan rearranged his position, shoving Pia’s tangling legs aside to make more room for himself, and wondered if this peaceful moment between crime and confession would make any difference in his sentencing.
He knew he should turn himself in. Let someone know that the day had gone wrong in Denver’s Congress Park neighborhood. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. He might not even be in prison for so very long. He’d read somewhere that pot growers got more prison time than murderers, and he vaguely remembered that murder laws might provide leeway for unintended deaths like this one. Was it manslaughter? Murder in the second degree? He stirred soap suds, considering.
He’d have to Google it.
When he first jammed the pillow over Pia’s face she hadn’t fought at all. She might have even laughed. Might have mumbled something from under the pillow’s cotton swaddle: “Cut it out,” maybe, or, “Get off.” Or perhaps she told him he wasn’t getting out of dish duty. That was what they’d been arguing about: the dishes in the sink from the night before.
She rolled over and said, “You forgot to do the dishes last night,” and gave him a little nudge with her elbow. A little push to get him moving. The words. The elbow. And then he jammed the pillow over her face and her hands had come up and gently pushed against him, coaxing him to let her go, and it was all a joke.
Even he thought so.
He’d meant to lift the pillow and laugh and go start scrubbing dishes. And for one fragile crystal moment that had seemed possible. Purple lilac scent had slipped in through the half-opened windows and bees buzzed outside and lazy Sunday morning sunshine streamed in between shade slats. They lived lifetimes inside that moment. They laughed off the incident and went out for eggs Benedict at Le Central; they got a divorce after another fifteen years of marriage; they had four children and argued over whether Milo was a better baby name than Alistair; Pia turned out to be gay, but they worked it out; he had an affair, but they worked it out; she planted sunflowers and tomatoes and zucchini in t
heir backyard garden and he went to work on Monday and got a promotion.
He meant to take the pillow off her face.
But then Pia started struggling and screaming and beating on him with her fists and children and tomato plants and Le Central and a hundred other futures blew away like dandelion seeds and Jonathan suddenly couldn’t bear to let her up. He couldn’t stand to see the hurt and horror in her grey eyes when he lifted the pillow, the rancid version of himself that he knew he’d find reflected there, so he threw all his weight onto her struggling body and jammed the pillow hard over her face and rode her down to Hell.
She twisted and flailed. Her nails slashed his cheek. Her body bucked. She almost squeezed out from under him, twisting like an eel, but he pinned her again and buried her screams in the pillow as her hands scrabbled at his eyes. He turned his face away and let her rip at his neck. She thrashed like a fish but she couldn’t force him off and suddenly he wanted to laugh. He was winning. For once in his life he was really winning.
Her hands whipped from his face to the pillow and back, an animal’s panicked, thoughtless movements. Gasping coughs filtered through the down. Her chest pumped convulsively, striving to suck air through the pillow. Her nails nicked his ear. She was losing coordination. She’d stopped bucking. Her body still writhed, but now it was easy to keep her trapped. It was only the muscle memories of struggle. He pressed harder with the pillow, putting his entire weight into killing her.
Her hands stopped scratching. They returned to the smothering pillow and touched it gently. A querying caress. As if they were a pair of creatures utterly separate from her, pale butterflies trying to discover the cause of their owner’s distress. Two dumb insects trying to understand the nature of an airway obstruction.
Outside, a lawn mower buzzed to life, cutting back spring greenery. A meadowlark sang. Pia’s body went slack and her hands fell away. Bright sunlight traced lazily across her blond hair where it tangled in the pillow and spread across the sheets. Slowly he became aware of wetness, the warmth of her releasing bladder.