by Steve Berman
I rolled around on top of her, kissing her lips and mouth. The only reason I know where I was is that we hadn’t pulled the curtains.
Facing out to the highway like we were, I could see the neon green “Em rald Jung otor Inn” flashing for a moment while I took quick breaths. It was bizarre to be in bed with someone I’d just met—not even knowing where she came from, but feeling like she was all I’d been missing, like this was my lucky day.
I was on a roller coaster and even when my body slid to a stop, my mind whirled around for a few more loopdeeloops.
I woke up in my own bed, by myself, and it was three days later. I still had to go to the bathroom, even though I’d soiled the sheets. Friday night’s mindbender had gone straight through to early Monday afternoon. I knew by the three papers outside my apartment door. I wasn’t sore and nothing hurt too much, but my memory was completely fouled up. I started to feel uneasy. Gary, from the flower shop, had called to see if I was okay so I returned his message and told him I was sick. I started to tell him I was sorry for not calling sooner, but he was just glad to know that I was okay. And then it hit.
Marcie! Without her, I couldn’t matter. Something like a pretzel of flab started to knot itself in my stomach. I started choking on my breath and almost passed out before I found her note push-pinned to my kitchen corkboard:
Dearest Mark,
Everything is okay. Everything that you think happened actually did happen. And it was great! I just had to do some things, but I’ll pick you up around this Friday’s midnight. I know that some of this seems complicated or phony, but please trust in me for now. Explanations are forthcoming and all that . . .
Everything,
Marcie
The note was short, which bothered me. My thoughts were more cluttered than usual. I kept trying to dredge up a slightly better sense of whatever had happened, but I only managed to get three conclusions: Marcie was real even though I didn’t deserve her, something was so rotten in Devil’s Lake State Park that I wanted to cry, and that Friday was soon enough that I’d survive, but I’d better put my act in order.
This is where my feelings began to get weird-boiled. I went to the bathroom to clean my pee off myself and I was thinking about how much I wanted to be with her again. When I took off my jeans, there was muck all over me—down where Marcie’s mouth and face had been. I didn’t think about it much. Instead, I thought how Marcie didn’t look like she had been wearing that much makeup, but she had spent a lot of time down there. I was too caught up in waiting for Friday night. It washed off with water and looked like makeup as it went down the drain.
Friday did come, but the connecting days were torture. I’d wake up from the heart of sleep and reel my head around looking for her. I went to Sir Dance-a-Lots all four nights and sipped white wine. On Monday, the first night, I worried about having called in sick and getting caught at the club, but as the week progressed, I stopped calling and stopped caring.
Marcie had made it clear that she wouldn’t be phoning me—just showing up when she said she would, so somewhere along the way, my phone and answering machine got smashed into scraps of plastic and metal. I ground my upper teeth into my bottom ones for like a hundred hours straight, especially when I tried to sleep.
My only relief came from remembering her moons, her mouth’s inner curves, and the sculpture-perfect twinkle of her tiny teeth.
And then she reappeared. The buzz on my intercom jolted me from days of outlandish dreaming. Like a geranium that comes back in the early fall for no reason, there she was, standing radiant in my doorway. The joy, five minutes after midnight, melted me to tears. My apartment, my fingernails, and my baby blue Hawaiian shirt were all as clean as could be. I’d even spent time styling what was left of my hair. I hadn’t done that in years. Instead of a bad comb-over, I had a rather slick one. Looking down, there were even loafers on my feet.
“Mark, it’s so good to see you. What shall we do?”
“Everything,” was my winded answer. We sat down on my beat-up corduroy couch. Being without her had drained me. I felt like I should curl up next to her and sleep, but I couldn’t dare. I was too afraid she’d vanish.
I know that not very many people have been through something like this and I know that it’s hard to talk about being sexually attracted to someone who is extremely beautiful without sounding like a pervert. Then again, I didn’t feel particularly worthy of being chosen either. Marcie was fabulous. It’s just that fabulous is a word with multiple meanings . . .
We did it again. This time on top of her car, sliding around on the hood while we made out like crazycakes, at a scenic stop by the side of Route 32. It was late and moonlit and I called her name loud, even though it was so different than anything I’d ever done. Marcie had plugged me in to a more fragrant, sensuous world.
It kept going that way. The nights without her seemed to get a little better. I took to sleeping in my closet so I wouldn’t pace around. I felt safe, lying there in the dark for the days when she was away. When she pressed my buzzer, I’d be waiting and ready. I stopped eating, only craving the sweetness of her skin. I knew I was going downhill. The inside of my head got shot up with confusion and I didn’t look quite as good as I used to try to look, but it was easy to accept. My hair boinked cockeyed and my face became grizzled . . . but, Marcie, she was Marcie—and that was clarity enough to keep everything else in place. I just wondered when I’d get to lift her skirt or pull down her jeans. I wanted nothing more than to return the mouth favors she’d been bestowing.
She was visiting more often. Concerns that she was seeing other people slipped away. I guess I got caught up in it all. She’d giggle and run her fingernails through my thatches of hair. The midnight movie theater for a showing of Marnie. In the rose garden of a mansion on Kindred Boulevard. The weeks spread out, as we got so close, more and more intimate, over twenty-six days.
Every bit of her was like a fantastic creature. I kept on sleeping in my closet. There wasn’t any special reason for it, just less room for me to roll around waiting to get distracted. You can’t imagine how much I wanted to uncover her sex and actually make love to her, instead of just receiving mouth favors.
Looking back, I didn’t feel like the stallion that you’d think I would’ve felt like. A little part of me knew it was all overmuch. My arms and back would get sore from lifting and pushing my member into her. I started to call the intimacy of her mouth my “peapod” and she didn’t mind. I had never, ever been loved by anyone like her. Not one bit. Her tongue was the most angelic thing in the world, like an eclipse.
Now, here I was a lucky man, but my back molars felt like they were getting shorter from my grinding. And I found strange raw spots of skin from jamming my softness against the friction of her tongue and teeth, too.
Anyway, I ignored any concerns because it felt like Marcie and I were destined to be together. Marcie was meticulous with the scheduling of her arrivals. I never knew if she was employed. Curled up on my couch one day, I asked if she had a job and she said, “The idea strikes me as interesting.”
A few times like that, I felt like I should keep my lips from moving. I should just peck her on the cheek and act however she wanted me to act. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to know. It was that I didn’t want to scare her off.
So, there, I’ve told it as good as I could remember, up to the last night.
Like I said, Marcie came smelling of orchids, with perhaps a hint of gardenia. Barely dressed in a white gossamer robe, she gently wrapped the blindfold around my eyes and drove—leading me to our secret cavern. Stumbling down the smooth-flat steps in the darkness, Marcie whispered about tonight, “finally being special.” All my blood drained down into my genitals. Her temptations made the pressure inside me seem unreal and it was uncanny how wound up I was.
Then Marcie untied my eyes. We were underground, in the sarcophagus room. That’s where, some blindfolded nights, she’d lead me. I know it sounds unusual, but she said it
was a place where we could be alone and do anything, anything at all, that our hearts desired.
I couldn’t get my eyes to look up at her unblemished face. My gaze kept dropping to her thighs, where her robe parted just a bit. She could tell I was staring and seemed okay with it.
In a fluid gesture, her smile sparkling now, she grabbed her robe’s fluffy white collar. The cloth fluttered as it dropped to the stone floor. The raven strands of her hair seemed to breathe or pulse, subtly, in the darkness.
Her eyes glowed a sudden green. A pale radiance exuded from her skin. A crazy profusion of heat flowed toward me, spraying from her. I smelled some earthy bouquet, crackling underneath her scent. Marcie began to make an animal hum. I was enraptured by her soft murmurs, a rush of saliva in my mouth as I stared at her sex. Its lips parted delicately.
I distinctly recall her mumbling an apology, though that could be my wits playing tricks. A vision of her, soft like smoke, began to unfold before me. Small shoots and vines began to unfold from between her legs. The green tentacles grew thicker, reaching out toward me. As in awe of her unfurling fronds as I was, I wet my pants like you wouldn’t believe.
Vines continued to hiss out of her nether regions, thicker and thicker until they were like wisteria bark. As preposterous as it sounds, I remember marveling at how quickly she sprouted, like kudzu.
It seemed to last that way for hours, for days. I was terrified and hypnotized, transfixed by the wonder of nature that was before me, perhaps naively hoping that I could still make love to this dream-creature.
Her face fell off—well, the sheets of latex, robotics and makeup that had made her into my Marcie. The wig of her hair tumbled off. Leaf flaps, like oversized jonquils, bloomed from where her face had been.
The room erupted with flowers, fecund tendrils seething with her very essence. I crumpled, gasping barely breathing in the rich drowning green of it all. As a visual person, her unblemished face should’ve tipped me off. Our faces are so exposed; up close enough, no one’s skin is as flawless and unblemished as Marcie’s had always appeared to be.
And I figured out how she knew my original name, Marcellinus. When I was eight, way up high in a maple, when I was trying to climb as high as the stars, I carved my name into the bark. It’s got to still be there, in Northfield, Vermont.
They found me lying in the cemetery, they said. Facedown and muddy by the stone door outside the tomb. They said the door was locked but I didn’t believe them.
Marcie had pleasured me too much for it to be any different than I’ve laid it out. They said the door couldn’t budge—but that’s where they gave themselves away. They claimed the name Marcie Levitch was engraved in marble. They insisted the granite door to the sarcophagus was wedged shut by a thick arm of bougainvillea.
My experiences were not the sort that can be imagined. I am not the sort of man to hallucinate.
Bougainvillea could never climb that flight of stairs, thriving in the darkness, unfurling without a miraculously bright light. It can’t grow like that in Wisconsin. The perverse irony of their falsehoods is that I’m under lock and key, and the liars are free.
I told them everything, true like I told you, but they won’t let me out. And I’ve been placed in this small room with barred windows, a tiny bed, a wooden desk and a musty journal lying open to a blank page. I’m using the note she left after our first night together as a bookmark. And I miss her.
INVASIVE SPECIES
Carrie Laben
The starlings were hit hard when the Conrads’ barn burned. A few of them died as the smoke and flames swept the evergreens where they roosted; the survivors lost their shelter and their cattle-feed buffet.
Some resorted to the scraggly locust trees by the well, but bare deciduous branches offered no protection from wind or rain or owls. Some resorted to perching on the chimney. They fell asleep and never woke up. Meanwhile, the number of lost kernels of corn to be found in the tall grass was dwindling.
So, as the sun grew more fearful of getting too far from the horizon, the starlings began to move.
The first people to notice were the Bucks, who’d bought the place a quarter-mile up the road and were running horses on it. They were so new that Daniel Buck hadn’t yet quit bragging about what a deal he’d gotten on the place, but they weren’t completely stupid.
Janice Buck, for instance, knew that something was wrong before her eyes adjusted from the brittle outdoor light to the barn’s dusk. Horse manure and hay had smells that she knew, and even loved a little—but today the barn’s odor was wrong, tinged with more ammonia than usual. And when she could make out Marco’s stall, the pony seemed lumpy. Swollen.
She ran, trying to remember everything she’d ever read about the various manifestations of bloat. In the shadows, Marco’s skin seemed to be rippling or crawling. The thought of overgrown worms or bot flies made her hesitate; but he was her horse, her responsibility, and she had to help him.
She was a few steps away when the starlings took off, and even then her mind couldn’t quite shape what her eyes were seeing into something sensible. The sound and the rush of air gave her the sensation of being sucked into a giant fan. Then the birds streamed out the open door, blotting out the sun, and were gone.
Marco raised his head and snorted softly. She was having visions of him bleeding, pecked, eyes gouged out—but he was fine, only his oats had been pillaged. He nuzzled at her, a little indignant, mostly just hungry. But the barn still didn’t smell right.
When she went back up to the house to tell her parents what had happened, she didn’t notice the starling that slipped through the door behind her.
There was a line in front of the feed store when Dan Buck got there—not a Wal-Mart at Christmas line, but a knot of men and women using their trucks as windbreaks, smoking and talking in low voices. A handful of starlings were perched on the telephone line overhead, and their continual whistling chatter kept everyone on edge. One of them had learned to imitate the woman who read the weather on Channel 7 somehow and seemed eager to show the ability off. People laughed nervously, called the bird a floozy who didn’t know wintry mix from her own ass.
“Yeah, they’re enough to drive you crazy,” Rick Morris said. “I was trying to eat my breakfast and one of the little fuckers took a crap right in my cereal.”
Another band of starlings circled in to join the first. Kim Lyman picked up a rock from the parking lot and chucked it at them. The starlings roused and settled again, noisier than before.
When the clerk finally showed up and unlocked the place, half a dozen of the starlings swooped low over their heads in the doorway. Rick threw his hands up to protect his head and knocked one down, and stood on its wing with one foot while he crushed its skull with the other. Dan would have looked away, but after the night he’d spent he was no longer bothered by the sight of a broken bird. The rest of the starlings got through and perched on the tops of the shelves.
By the time Joe arrived for the afternoon shift, Gladys had sold out of naphthalene, air-gun ammo, bird netting, glue traps and poisoned bait. Meanwhile, more starlings were getting into the building every time someone opened the door. The customers seemingly couldn’t resist trying to knock them down; this was having more effect on the merchandise than on the birds.
On her way home she looked over at the Conrads’ and saw that Angela’s car was in the driveway. Without thinking, she pulled in behind it, and then she had to get out and knock on the door, because it would look pretty weird if she just pulled out again.
She’d grown up just over the hill, driven by here almost every day of her adult life. Seeing the charcoal crater where the barn had been, with the skeletons of the pines on one side and the silo listing on the other, was like a punch in the sternum.
Angela was in the kitchen, washing dishes. To her surprise Erik was there too.
“Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?” she asked him. He was pretty bandaged up, especially around the hands, and his face lo
oked brutal. No eyebrows anymore; skin pink and peeling.
“The hospital gets a lot less eager to keep your company when they find out you don’t have insurance,” he said with a chuckle. His voice was changed, too. “Besides, fire can’t kill me.”
“You sound awful sure of yourself.”
“I’d have to be, to go running into the flames like a damned fool for a bunch of old books, wouldn’t I?”
Angela, scrubbing hard at a pot, rolled her eyes.
“A guy who was born to be drowned can’t be hanged. And he can’t be burned, either.”
The starlings perched on the top of the corner cupboard shifted with a dry sound of feathers on feathers. Gladys, always uneasy when Erik went on one of his prophetic rambles, turned to Angela and tried to change the subject. “So you’ve got the starlings, too.”
“Of course. What can you do?”
“Going by what we sold today, people are trying everything short of tactical nukes to get rid of them.”
“And it ain’t working, is it?” Erik said from behind her.
“It’s early to tell yet.”
“It won’t work.”
He had that quaver in his voice that he got when he spoke shit that was going to come true; she had to shut him up.
“What are you doing to deal with them?”
“Putting up with them.” As though to underscore Angela’s point, a starling swooped across the room and landed a dropping in the dishwater. “We’ve been putting up with this sort of crap all our lives. I don’t think Erik even remembers when the barn was built.”
“Of course I do!” He coughed.
“No, you don’t. I was four when the windstorm took out the grove, right? So you were one. And it took a year to get the lumber milled, with everyone in town being so prissy about touching it, and a year to get the barn up. So I was six, and you were three.”