We Don't Listen to Them

by Sean Johnston

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Answer it,” she whispered.

  I let go of her and she let herself fall back onto the bed.

  It was a pair of suits from the city, and they were there to see her. One had a briefcase, one had a clipboard.

  “I don’t know her name,” I told them.

  “Believe us,” they said, “you don’t need to. The expert in your bed is the one we’re after.”

  “Leave us alone, please,” she said from behind me.

  How could I? But I did what I was told, and went to the kitchen. I had four glasses of water on a tray when I came back to the room. The city people sat across from her on the loveseat. She sat on the chair by the window and signed a paper on the clipboard, then handed it to them and smiled at me.

  “Some water?” I asked, and set the tray on the coffee table in the middle of the room.

  We all drank from our glasses, me standing and looking at them all in turn, they only interested in the form on the clipboard. Finally they nodded and stood. One of the city officials took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to the expert.

  “Everything is changing,” he said, sadly.

  “We are just not sure,” the other one said.

  “We have to evaluate,” they both said.

  “It’s okay,” the expert told them, then stepped toward me and took my hand. “I’m not sure myself.”

  We walked to the door and they left without another word.

  In this day and age you don’t ask questions. It was cooler than it had been in weeks. I was still amazed at the new woman walking perfectly on my arm. I was amazed by her abilities, and by the beautiful way she rolled with the punches.

  “This is a good severance package,” she told me. “I’m happy.”

  “Me too,” I told her, and she leaned on my shoulder as we walked.

  As we walked down the tree-lined street she let her right hand stray, touching the fences by our sidewalk lightly, making them sound first like breath over a half-empty bottle, then like a chorus of bagpipes miles away.

  I told her I couldn’t believe it. I said touch everything, and she smiled and quietly turned parked cars into steel guitars, trees into bass choirs.

  The poor news anchor nailed to the church door was growing weary as we walked by him. He was having trouble breathing. This was his last job too, and my beautiful expert couldn’t take it anymore. We pulled the nails out and laid him at the church door. She wiped the forehead above his closed eyes with a cold cloth, and I wept as her ministrations made the sound of a wet finger on a wine glass.

  Another blue-haired lady ran down the street and shook her head no.

  We walked slowly home, her hands clasped around my arm. She was leaning into me. Then we were naked, there in the cool dark room. You can trust me, I said, and I waited in silence to feel her, my elegant, unemployed expert.

  Acknowledgements

  JackPine Press originally published “A Long Day Inside the Buildings” as a chapbook, with illustrations by Drew Kennickell.

  “It Cools Down” appeared in The New Quarterly.

  “Big Books Shut” and “Leave Her Alone” appeared in The Fiddlehead.

  “Have At It” appeared in The Vermillion Literary Project Magazine.

  “We Don’t Celebrate That” appeared in Prairie Fire.

  “The Expert” appeared in stonestone.

  “How Blue” appeared in The Danforth Review.

  “He Hasn’t Been to the Bank in Weeks” appeared in The South Dakota Review.

  “We All Considered This” appeared in The Nashwaak Review.

  “You Didn’t Have to Tell Him” appeared in Grain.

  “Whose Origin Escaped Him” appeared in Eleven Eleven.

  Thanks to the editors of all of the above, and to the following people whose conversation and readings have helped me with these and other stories: Alana Wilcox, Mark Anthony Jarman, Brian Bedard, Corinna Chong, Andrew Pulvermacher, Alix Hawley, Frances Greenslade, Matt Kavanagh, Colin Snowsell, Michael Kenyon, John Lent, Renee Saklikar, Al Forrie, Jackie Forrie, Lee Ann Roripaugh, and some people I must be forgetting in South Dakota, and, of course, Janeen, Finley, and Lucy.