Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 15

by Kelly Link Gavin J. Grant

  The transmission was in neutral, the parking brake was on. Parker eased on the accelerator and listened to the engine clamber slowly up out of its sonorous idle and into the tenor range. Then, for some reason, he pushed it on. The tack soared easily to 1200 revs, then 1800. By 2000 it had climbed on through counter-tenor to a pitched whine so shrill and emphysemic that Parker had to squint and grit his teeth. This was better, he thought. It seemed to burn off the congestion in his head. It seemed, in fact, a kind of detonation. The tachometer topped out at 2100. He wanted to push, wanted the release, whatever it meant, but he did not want to be stupid.

  He eased off, and for a long while merely listened to the idle but then began to experiment again with the accelerator, racing the engine in short bursts. The cab pitched back and forward slightly with the changing torque of the engine. Parker rode the swell and watched the living room below him, watched the furniture, the hanging plants, the Woolworth's curtains for some sign of movement, of cause and effect, of synergy or sympathetic vibration, any sign at all that the enormous diesel tractor in which he sat was connected as well to the house in which he lived. But nothing moved. Nothing. Not even a breeze through the open window stirred the curtains. On the narrow sill where the curtains parted stood a bud vase, a high, slender horn of fluted milk glass. Parker fixed his eye on the vase and goosed the engine. Then he did it again and again. This created a kind of gentle bucking motion as the cab lurched and rebounded, back and fourth by turns with the shrill clattering and groaning of the diesel. At first nothing moved. The room stood stock still. The curtains fell leaden from their rods while Camilla's plants hung as rigid as stalactites from the ceiling. But the vase? Hadn't the bud vase begun to move, to quiver? He blinked and leaned forward to make sure, pushing the engine to the limit, then again, watching the slender lip of milk glass first tremble, then wobble, sort of, then start, in fact, to totter.

  Parker gave it up. Camilla loved that vase. He shut off the engine, but in the following stillness found he was no longer certain of the movement. Maybe he had merely projected the truck's intense vibration onto the vase. The observer biases the observation. He knew the drill. “You wanna break vases, you wanna be sure,” he lectured himself in the drawl of the trucker, “you're gonna have to release the parking brake, cowboy. You're gonna have to put the goddamn thing in gear.” There was something out there waiting for him—he understood this—some unimaginable call, but he was still back here piddling with the controls, watching the tacometer, the curtains and milk glass, terrified to take hold of the wheel and just let out the clutch. He was gutless, he knew, and was stalked by a premonition that soon ineptitude and hesitance would cost him his chance. He would rise up one morning to find the thwarted Kenworth gone, his cluttered living room free again of chrome and steel, the smell of diesel, the metallic taste of obsession. He would be safe. But also trapped behind the plywood-gypsum shell that held the Kenworth so barely, so ludicrously caged. The thought made him frantic. He reached for the ignition again. He fastened his seatbelt.

  At this moment he heard his name called, heard Emily start up the basement steps. And he was breathless and not a little disoriented when they met near the kitchen.

  "When are you coming downstairs, Dad? You promised you'd come watch TV."

  "I'm reading,” he held up the book he'd grabbed from the coffee table.

  Emily took it from him. “Hey, this is my book. You hate this stuff. If you're going to read my junk, you can come down and watch my show. It's a horror movie. I'm scared."

  "If the movie's scaring you, then turn the television off. You ought to be in bed anyway."

  "No, I want to be scared. But with you."

  "It's late, Em."

  "It's Friday. There's no school."

  "No, but you have your music lesson."

  "Aghhh!” Emily groaned. “I hate my lesson."

  "What do you mean? You begged us. We're spending a fortune."

  "I like the flute. I hate Mrs. Hurley. And I hate waiting around all afternoon for Mom to pick me up.” Her cramped expression tightened and then softened into compromise. “You could come and get me."

  "Your mother needs the car. She picks you up as soon as she can."

  "But you could get me on your bike. You could ride me on the handlebars."

  "That's dangerous, Em.” Parker took her book back.

  "We could come home along the canal. There's no traffic.” Emily put her arms up around her father's neck and kissed him sweetly on the cheek. “Please, Daddy,” she implored in the soft coloratura voice that always dissolved him, “I'll buy us a coke."

  "Ohhh,” he crooned, disengaging and turning Emily by her shoulders toward the bedrooms, “so, you think you can bribe me."

  "Sure,” she said airily, yielding to his pressure, “and...” Suddenly Emily froze. “Oh Daddy,” she began again in a slow, foreboding whisper, “I didn't do it. I'm sure I didn't.” Warily she pointed across the room toward the window where Camilla's bud vase lay shattered on the sill.

  It was very late when Parker slid carefully into bed. Camilla had to be up before seven. But before he'd even settled under the covers, he sensed alertness across the mattress.

  "Where have you been?"

  "Working,” he lied reflexively.

  "You work at the wrong things, Gary."

  "What do you mean?"

  Camilla waited, as if deliberating, but then moved closer across the stretched linen, sliding a hand up underneath his T-shirt, then drawing it slowly downward in a long established declaration.

  "You could be right,” he conceded.

  "Of course I'm right. Your priorities are a disaster."

  "Don't you have to get up in the morning?"

  "I have to get up every morning."

  Camilla put her free hand over his mouth to silence a response he hadn't begun to formulate, then she pulled herself above him to kiss him, first reflectively, then hard. Parker relaxed, or tried to, but Camilla was not interested in relaxation. Her energy startled him as, straddled above him in the moonlight, she roughly removed his T-Shirt, then took his resisting hands and kissed them before moving slowly down his arms to kiss him again on the mouth, deeper and more insistently. He tried to struggle up off the pillow, but was no match for his wife, breathing when he could and through his nose until she moved on to his throat, his shoulder and then slowly, methodically down his body, drawing out alertness he'd forgotten or hadn't even known he had. When he answered her with a reflex or a moan, she bore in like a lawyer, making him respond to the same query again and again. His wife of seventeen years was taking him back to school.

  "Camilla,” he whispered and reached for her face through the hair twined damply along his stomach, but before he could find her, Parker came abruptly up off the bed at both extremities, eyes cramped open with pain, toes separately and sharply pointed into the air.

  "Camilla!” he bellowed, “what are ... what...?” When he got his voice back, he let out his congealed breath all at once and tried not to whimper. “Ow!” he said. “Ow!"

  The silence was crystalline. Camilla rose up and looked at him. “I just wanted your attention, darling.” She smiled and moved over his graceless sprawl to settle in his arms. “Are you paying attention now?” She accepted his silence as assent and rolled them both onto their sides. “Good,” she said, “then be attentive."

  When some time later, sweating and wincing, Parker came, the pleasure was wrapped brightly in pain. He opened one eye at a time. “That was amazing.” There was neither abandon nor amazement in the eyes that looked back at him.

  "What is it Gary? Where are you? Are you fucking one of your students? Some junior faculty member? Are Em and I in your way? You must think I don't notice anything, but I do. I notice everything. And I'm tired of waiting for you. I want to know what's going on."

  Parker looked away through the window. Camilla was painfully right. He'd been a fraud, an impostor for weeks. He needed ... everyone desperately n
eeded for Gary to come clean. The fledgling hillside thicket, the woods, the long, greening valley glowed softly outside. Suddenly, it all seemed so amazingly simple.

  "There's a truck in the living room,” he said in a cautious but optimistic voice.

  She stared at him for a long time. “There's a truck in the living room? What do you mean, Gary, a truck?"

  "Hell, Mill, I don't know. It's just a truck.” He knew the “just” was a lie, and he looked down again nervously at his wife, but she'd averted her face, was looking off sideways into the darkness.

  "You're not going to tell me, are you Gary?"

  Even in shadowed profile, he saw cold anger in her face.

  "At least...” she closed her eyes and a kind of weary pleading crept into her voice, “at least tell me it's not a boy."

  "What? No, Camilla. It's a truck. An eighteen-wheel truck.” He was mortally serious, but the words sounded loony and concocted even to him. Suddenly he needed very much to rush to the door and make certain the Kenworth was still there. But he couldn't do that, of course. And while he hovered on his arms, trying to concentrate, trying to think of some way to rephrase, the moon clouded over, became pale and plastic; the room crosshatched with shadows. Nothing, absolutely nothing seemed simple. He was still inside his wife, still wet with her, but she lay mute and dark and solitary beneath him, receding like an asteroid into space.

  Gradually he lowered himself, settling carefully down over her and whispering urgently into Camilla's ear. “There isn't anything else, believe me. You can trust me on this.” His face was wet and cold against her plaster skin. He was in trouble, he knew. He was crying. But there was no way back, no way ahead, and no way in the world to explain.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Writers Who Writ Large & Small

  Gwenda Bond advises the public from Lexington, KY. She can be found online at bondgirl.blogspot.com. Despite the title of said web journally thing (Shaken & Stirred), she'd generally prefer a glass of white wine, thank you. And a book. She liked that NBA finalist Godless, have you read that yet?

  * * * *

  Neal Chandler is a former soldier, missionary, emergency room orderly, furniture store owner, German professor, editor, and chauffeur. He teaches in the English Department at Cleveland State University, coordinates creative writing, and helped create NEOMFA, a new graduate writing program spanning four universities. He has published essays, short stories, and a story collection, Benediction. He and his wife live in Shaker Heights, OH. Their eight children live everywhere else.

  * * * *

  Stepan Chapman, sub-chairman of research for the Institute for Further Study and manager of the Aphasia Gorge Wild Insect Preserve of Waxwall, Arizona, has published historical studies in such scholarly journals as The Baffler, Happy, and McSweeney's Quarterly, and in such anthology series as Orbit, Leviathan, and Polyphony. His major works are The Troika and Dossier.

  * * * *

  Suzanne Fischer lives in Minneapolis, where she bicycles all winter long. She is currently writing a dissertation on wax museums.

  * * * *

  Nan Fry teaches in the Academic Studies Program at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., and is the author of a book of poetry, Relearning the Dark. Her poems have also appeared in Plainsong, Calyx, and the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and Poetry in Motion (Coast to Coast).

  * * * *

  Sometimes the stories Geoffrey H. Goodwin touches get a little messed up.

  * * * *

  Steve Lieber is the cover artist. His groovy comics includelots of big-company things, Family Circle with Sean Stewart, and Me and Edith Head with Sara Ryan. He's very nice and will illustrate for you if you ask nicely and so on. (stevelieber.com)

  * * * *

  Bruce McAllister has had fiction in Omni, Asimov's, F&SF, literary quarterlies and “year's best” anthologies since the ‘70s. He was away from writing for most of the ‘90s, and is happy to be back. He has three wonderful children (Liz, Ben and Annie), is married to the choreographer Amelie Hunter, and, after an eternity in academe, now works as a writing coach and book and screenplay consultant.

  * * * *

  Sarah Micklem worked as a graphic designer for twenty years but was pestered by the idea that she ought to write something. She wrote on and off for more years than she cares to admit before completing a novel, Firethorn. She is now working on the sequel. “Eft” or “Epic” is her first published short fiction. (www.firethorn.info)

  * * * *

  After twenty-five years, Sarah Monette is no longer a student. What, she wonders, will she do with herself now?

  * * * *

  Michael Northrop grew up in the northwestern corner of Connecticut, which is very nice, before inexplicably moving to New York City, which is fraught with peril. He works as an editor at Time Inc., and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Snake Nation Review and McSweeney's (web).

  * * * *

  Richard Parks’ first pro sale was published in Amazing Stories in 1981. In 1994, after a 13-year hiatus, his second story appeared in Science Fiction Age. Since then his work has appeared in Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Black Gate. His first collection, The Ogre's Wife: Fairy-Tales for Grownups, was a World Fantasy Award finalist.

  * * * *

  Ellen M. Rhudy just bought a guitar. She knows how to play three chords and spends most of her time playing these chords or fondling her guitar. Her fiction has appeared in Hanging Loose and Smokelong Quarterly. She edits a lit zine, Frothing at the Mouth, and is currently writing a zine about working in a Christian bookstore. She lives in a very very small room with some books and dirty clothes.

  * * * *

  Mark Rich writes, “Mark Rich writes all the time but still has that basic insecurity that he is not really a real writer. He is the author of some books (Foreigners & Other Familiar Faces, Lifting, Funny Gace, Baby Boomer Toys, Toys A-Z), but that's something different. Right now he's writing about himself ... a further cause of discontent. Is this what he should be doing? Is all writing this unsettling and unbalancing?” He draws pictures, too, and has little to say about that. (sff.net/people/mark.rich)

  * * * *

  Karen Russell is a girl who lives in New York and likes to write about alligator wrestlers and sleep-disordered kids and the moon. She hopes you like her story. It's the first one she's published.

  * * * *

  Lawrence Schimel & Sara Rojo have published over a dozen children's books in Spanish and/or English such as No Hay Nada Como el Original, Andres and the Copyists, & Misterio En El Jardan. They also create graphic novels for older readers, such as the full-color Mixed Blessings (Germany, Fall ‘05) and the b&w romantic vampire comedy A Coffin for Two (U.S., Spring ‘06). They live mostly in Madrid, except when Sara is in Cadiz or Lawrence is in New York. (livejournal.com/users/desayunoencama) (sararojo.com)

  * * * *

  Amy Sisson is a librarian of the non-shushing variety who was recently transplanted to Houston, TX, where she lives with husband Paul Abell and a collection of ex-parking-lot cats. She is a member of the Clarion West (2000). She invites you to visit amysisson.com for more about the unlikely patron saints.

  * * * *

  Before turning to fiction and poetry, Carol Smallwood's books such as Michigan Authors were published by Scarecrow, Libraries Unlimited, and others. Her work has been in The Detroit News and dozens more; forthcoming in Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry 2005, Mobius, Parnassus Literary Journal, Poetry Motel, Zillah. In 2004 she appeared in Who's Who in America and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

  * * * *

  John Trey attempts to exploit whatever meager talents he possesses from an old house in a suburb in the midwest, where he keeps all brooms locked safely in a closet. His fiction has appeared in LCRW, Spellbound, MarsDust, and Fortean Bureau. When not writing, reading, or critiquing, he often can be found playing with his daughter, listening to jazz, or pondering t
he mysteries of invisibility.

  * * * *

  Mary A. Turzillo's novel, An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl, was serialized in Analog from July-November 2004. She won a Nebula for her novelette, “Mars Is No Place for Children.” If you sense an obsession with Mars, it might be because her husband, Geoff Landis, is a Mars scientist. She is also obsessed with death, but she likes Mars much better.

  * * * *

  William Smith publishes Trunk Stories from Brooklyn, NY, where one day there will be a Grand Sichuan International. Until then, he will occasionally make the trip over the river. Besides publishing, managing a bookshop, and writing about films, he is a paper artist. (trunkstories.com)

  * * *

  Visit www.lcrw.net for information on additional titles by this and other authors.

  Table of Contents

  Help Wanted

  "Eft” or “Epic"

  Mary

  At the Rue des Boulangers Bridge Café

  FAQ

  The Beard of God

  Crown Prince

  The Half-Sister

  Dear Miss Wonderment

  The Film Column

  Mounds Keep Appearing

  In Kansas

  I Heard That

  Lord Goji's Wedding

  The Life of Saint Serena

  My First Lover

  Secret Histories of Household Objects

  It Tastes Bitter

  Jon Langford, All the Fame of Lofty Deeds

  THE WELL-DRESSED WOLF:

  Dear Aunt Gwenda

  Nicholas

  gray's boadicea: unlikely patron saints, no. 4

  The Truck

  Writers Who Writ Large & Small

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