Pieces Read online

  No one pickpockets anymore, a tourist from Canada thinks as he reads the weathered sign. Honey, let’s go, he says to his wife, who is carrying their beige umbrella. Don’t call me honey, she thinks but doesn’t say anything as usual. They walk toward the esplanade. The wife sees a crowd has formed near an ambulance at the left leg if you’re looking out toward the esplanade. She wants to see what’s going on, but she knows her husband is in a hurry to get to their next destination. He’s always in a hurry, she thinks. Even on this vacation.

  There are fifteen German tourists in the crowd around the ambulance. One of them, a tall man dressed in a Nike jumpsuit, understands someone has had a heart attack while attempting to climb the stairs. The stairwell has now been closed off and the French paramedics are trying to figure out the safest way to get the man down. The German man is thanking god it is not he who has had a heart attack. More and more people gather to investigate.

  A small Scottish woman leaves the crowd. She walks toward the esplanade. Poor man, she thinks. Poor, poor man. What a horrid day, she thinks. Someone holding a lily walks by. Don’t hold lilies if it doesn’t really feel like spring, the Scottish woman thinks. So what if the months say it is spring. It doesn’t feel like it. She sets her eyes on a man holding a dog on a leash. It’s too cold for a dog to be out! the Scottish woman thinks. Take him in!

  Stupid dog, the man holding the leash thinks. The dog runs to a passerby. The passerby stops to pet the black dog. The black dog licks the passerby’s hand. You can have him, the man holding the leash thinks.

  Gross, the American woman petting the dog thinks.

  The dog spots a woman holding an umbrella. It’s a red umbrella, except it appears only black and white to the dog. She looks like everyone else to the dog. It doesn’t occur to the dog that the woman with the umbrella is looking at a man with a snake tattoo and a Polaroid camera.

  The man with the Polaroid camera stops near a tree on the esplanade. He turns around and sees a woman holding a red umbrella and standing at the edge of the pavement. She might be nice in my picture, he thinks. She might be. Her umbrella would be nice, at least, he thinks. With the tower in the background, the heart and the umbrella would complement each other perfectly. He notices that she keeps glancing at him. She thinks he doesn’t know. He knows. He wonders what she is thinking.

  The woman with the red umbrella wonders why this man is taking pictures with a Polaroid. She suddenly remembers a dream she had last night. It was actually a dream within a dream. She was in a rain forest and someone took a picture of her next to a waterfall. A few moments later, she woke up and realized she was dreaming. She turned to look at the clock on her nightstand and saw a picture of her with the waterfall next to the clock. She tried to grab the picture. Then she truly woke up.

  As she watches the man with the Polaroid point his camera in different directions, she thinks, What if we could take pictures of our dreams? What if there were a way to document the visions we have while we sleep? Maybe we could know ourselves better and, in turn, better ourselves if we had pictures of our subconscious. If we knew our deepest thoughts, the thoughts that won’t come out during the day, perhaps we could know all there is to know. Before she can form her next thought, the man calls to her.

  Move in front of the tower! he yells to her in English.

  She points to herself as if to say, Me?

  Yes, he answers. Move in front of the tower!

  She looks at the tower. She moves to where she thinks front would be. Is this right? she yells back.

  He looks though the viewfinder. Perfect, he calls to her. He pushes the button and a picture pops out of the front of the camera.

  Anything else? she calls, hoping somewhat that he’ll say yes.

  What time is it? he says.

  She looks at her red watch. Four twenty-nine, she tells him. She remembers she has to meet her friend.

  Thanks, he says. For the picture and the time.

  Okay, she answers. She sees him flapping the picture upside-down in the air. He is not interested in her anymore. She has many questions to ask him. She wants to know his thoughts. She wants to know what the picture looks like. She hesitates and then turns around and walks toward the tower, where she is scheduled to meet her friend in thirty-nine seconds.

  The man with the Polaroid and the tattoo stops waving the picture. He watches the red umbrella as it moves farther and farther away from him. He looks at the picture he has just taken.

  The sky is gray, almost purple. It is raining. Drizzling. The usual numbers of people are milling about around and below the Eiffel Tower. Some people line up underneath to buy tickets to go to the top. The people who are not waiting to ascend the great tower are looking up at it. Some people are carrying lilies. The grass in the esplanade in front of the tower is green and the trees there are becoming green. There is a beautiful woman holding a red umbrella in the foreground. There is a crowd of people gathered around an ambulance at the right leg of the tower in the background. The Eiffel Tower looks the same as it always has, except for one thing. On the top of the iron structure, a large red heart has seemingly been impaled there.

  DAY OF THE DEAD

  Aury Wallington

  Listen.

  I don’t want you to think I’m some sort of Birkinstocked pantheist when I tell you this, but it’s true: My kitchen table had amazing powers of prophesy. Now, I don’t “do” metaphysical. My chakras are unaligned, my past lives unregressed, I’ve never consulted a psychic. I don’t even do yoga, okay? But this is different. It’s eerie how the tiles on that table mimicked and mocked us, foretelling the demise of Jack’s and my relationship. It was a gorgeous table, though. Dark grayish-brown wood, rough-hewn, pitted and scarred, and in each corner a crazy-looking Mexican tile showing the four seasons depicted by those Día de los Muertos skeleton people.

  Jack and I had decided to keep my apartment instead of his because not only was he living in the same building that David Koresh grew up in and the karma was just too freaky, but my apartment had the huge balcony, the off-street parking, the funky coffeehouse next door. Besides, Jack was in Colorado for two months and I wanted to suck the last bits of marrow out of my life as a single person.

  All that June I’d sit in the kitchen; blue rag rug from Pier One covering the stains on the floor where the home brew experiment went wrong, kick-ass Lynda Barry cartoon taped to the refrigerator, my beautiful dishes with the fish on them sitting out on the counter because they were so gorgeous they deserved to be looked at all the time. There I’d sit, elbows propped on that table, which would chain me to this town, this house, this man for the rest of my life, and I’d make lists. Thirty-five days until Jack comes home. That’s three paychecks. That’s fifteen pounds. That’s five more times I can watch Melrose Place without his making fun of me. Thirty-five days can be my lifetime. Then the phone rang. Jack.

  “I didn’t know Outward Bound lets you make phone calls.”

  “I’m sick. Really sick. Pick me up at the airport at 9:35, okay? Delta.”

  Here’s where I’d like to say I first realized the psychic powers of the table, but I’d be lying. The winter skeleton didn’t move in his tile, his bony little face laughing as the snows fell. My eye didn’t fall on him as I was grabbing my car keys. I didn’t suddenly Know. I just threw my lists away, fetched Jack from the airport, and took it from there.

  This isn’t a story about Jack’s illness. I don’t want to talk about the trips to the hospital, the weird stains in the bathtub, the sound of Jack gasping in the kitchen as I tried to sleep. Instead I’ll let the pictures on those Mexican tiles tell you about his recovery.

  Now, I’ve always been a Dexatrim-and-cigarettes-for-breakfast kind of girl. Jack was the big health nut in our house; buying salads at Wendy’s, that sort of thing. So it was no surprise when, a few weeks into it, I came home to find him sitting in the kitchen staring into the open refrigerator.

  “Why do you buy this shit?” he asked. “No wo
nder we’re sick.”

  “I’m not sick,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you’re not healthy. Look at yourself. Jesus. We need to eat better.”

  So we went down to Whole Foods and bought our bible: Zen Health, Zen Sex, Zen Longevity, by Jason West. We went home, fished a couple of Rolling Rocks out of the vegetable crisper, and sat down to read. We skipped the Longevity section. I wanted to go right to Sex, but Jack insisted on reading the Health part first.

  Zen Health, Zen Sex, Zen Longevity is a sweet little book, full of chapter headings like “Wanted for Murder: Killer Milk” and “Follow the Meat Eaters to Their Early Graves.” We loved this book. Every day we read, embraced, and implemented a new chapter. Jack would read it aloud to me in bed in the mornings. It was kind of erotic, like reading The Story of O or something. And the kitchen became our playground, our battlefield. Lynda Barry had to share her space with charts of which foods are yin and which are yang. The black and white countertop sprouted juicers and slicers and a bread-baking machine that we only used once. The vegetable colander took up permanent residence in the sink. The summer skeletons danced and sang. This was their perfect hour. Teamwork, consideration, a common goal. Lots and lots of sex. They knew that this was as good as it could get. So what happened? What changed?

  We were following the book to the letter. I lost weight. Jack got better. Life was golden. Then Jack bought another book. Fasting, by a Professor Eichmann. I didn’t trust a man who wouldn’t tell me his first name. Besides, I’ve read Mademoiselle. I’ve read Cosmopolitan. I know what happens to girls who fast. For the first time in my life I was getting in shape, and now Jack was trying to tempt me into an eating disorder. No way.

  In bed. Thursday morning. It’s raining outside. I wake Jack up. Since he’s stopped eating animal products he won’t go down on me anymore, but I figure it can’t hurt a girl to try. As he kisses me, Jack murmurs, “Professor Eichmann once went forty-nine days without eating anything.” Jack is getting hard. “When he’s not fasting, Professor Eichmann only eats once a day.” He pushes into me. “He won’t eat any foods that digest into mucus.” Jack times his thrusts with each word. “He only eats fruits—” BAM! “—and—” OOH! “—nuts,” WHAM! “He’s called a . . .a . . .a . . .frugavore!” As he says this final word, Jack comes. Hard. He rolls off me and lies back, eyes glazed, mouth slack. “Frugavore,” he repeats, reaching down to touch himself lightly.

  That day I go to the Crossroads Market and buy a book of feminist erotica, which I read in the kitchen as Jack reads the fasting book in the bedroom. The skeletons are on Jack’s side now. For them and for him it is springtime and life is full of rich possibility. The trees are budding. Jack rips the scary-looking portrait of Professor Eichmann out of the middle of the book and tapes it up on my refrigerator. I rip it down. He in turn rips down Lynda Barry. I cry. He goes into the bathroom and locks the door. Many days pass like this.

  I sit at the table and make a list of all the positive things in my life. Um. My mind is blank. Start small. I can drive a stick shift. I can recite “The Wasteland” from memory. I bet I’ll get into the master’s program at Rice. I’m in charge of my life. I can choose my destiny. I can do anything I want. To hell with Jack, I’m moving out.

  Then I look at the table.

  The skeletons look back, make some eye contact, grin. I don’t move out.

  I buy a two-liter bottle of Coke. Jack won’t let me keep it in the refrigerator because he thinks toxins will escape from the plastic and circulate, contaminating his organic plums and pears.

  I start to eat meat again. Ice cream, pretzels, frozen waffles.

  After a while Jack’s good health starts to catch up with him. He was fasting four, five, six days at a stretch. His skin turned a funny shade of yellow, he started walking into walls, and he developed a constant tic under his right eye. Then one day he fainted while driving down Montrose Avenue and plowed his Jeep into the side of a taqueria. He called me to come pick him up at the police station.

  I bring along a bucket of chicken, which I set on the chair between us while we wait for his paperwork to be processed. Jack can’t take his eyes off it.

  “I drove by your old apartment,” I tell him. “It doesn’t look like it’s been rented yet.”

  Jack’s still looking at the chicken. “That’s disgusting. I can’t believe you’re eating that. Don’t you care about yourself at all?”

  I pat his skinny yellow arm. “Why don’t we give your old landlord a call? I bet he’d take you back.”

  Jack very gingerly picks up the bucket by one edge and peers inside. “Unbelievable,” he says. “Chicken. It’s just too much.”

  Later that night. Jack’s throwing his stuff into boxes, loading them into the back of my car. I go into the kitchen to wait. We haven’t discussed who gets custody of the table. The autumn skeletons are the only ones left. Everything is dying, falling, growing cold. I turn my back on them and look around.

  These are my beautiful plates, I think. This is my black and white countertop. The skeletons scream, brutal, desperate. I open the drawers and cabinets. These are my forks and knives. Green glass candlesticks. Coffee mug. Corkscrew.

  THE WHITE CAROUSEL HORSE

  Dennis G. Dillingham, Jr.

  She preferred the white one. A princess, she knew, rode a white horse, not a pink one, a purple one, or a blue one. There was no reality in any of those. She had a sense of reality when it came to horses, the color of them and the associations made between color and things such as woman and man, girl and boy, good and evil. That sense is what kept her from the darker colors too: a child’s sense of associative realities. Or maybe she simply preferred the white one.

  It had been much whiter, now nearing an off-white, an age-stained version of something that was once as white as the clouds or a sunbleached cement walk. And its hooves must’ve been much blacker once, and its mane much blacker. They revealed now a weakness in the animal in those places where the paint had chipped away, leaving grayish, clay-colored spots, the discoloration a parent associates with illness. That beautiful, once-white horse was suffering from a pox and no child ought go too close. Stay away from that horse, ride one of the others. The pink one is clean and healthy. Why don’t you ride the pink horse instead.

  She knew it wasn’t sick. She knew it was pretending so the other children would stay away. The white horse was faking illness so that only she would dare climb up onto its saddle. That was the way she liked it.

  Somewhere along the way, the carousel operator, the strange old man with the gray poet’s beard and a pocket full of lollipops, had been replaced by a button, a small, red dot, an eye, that a different and grimlipped man would, when a satisfactory number of saddles had been filled and a sip had been taken from the flat, silver flask he kept hidden inside the lapel of his green workman’s jacket, press on his way to apathetically cleaning out one of the over-pouring garbage pails, leaving the keys that controlled it inserted and unattended. That, too, was the way she liked it.

  Privacy, she liked her privacy, and though an occasional lollipop would have been appreciated, this was better. Nothing to scare the horses or the clouds or to eat the music before it reached her and her stallion’s ears. They both relied on the carousel music, and the two would ride all day as long as the music played, but when it stopped . . .

  She didn’t like it when the music stopped. That was when her horse rested, sometimes resting all through the night, forcing her to go home and dream about him instead. But her dreams never seemed to get it right. The music was always a little too slow or the whiteness of the horse a little too bright, sometimes a little too dark, and then there were the other noises; and the other noises were loud, sometimes drowning out the music entirely. Even in her dreams, she couldn’t stop her horse from resting.

  The other noises scared it, the raised voices on the other side of the wall, where her parents slept, the shouting and the pleading and, sometimes, the shattering of things ceram
ic or glass or porcelain—it all sounded the same when broken. And some nights, there was the slamming of doors and the sudden rattle of the car starting in the driveway, and then, eventually, the car returning, the creak of doors being opened slowly and with deliberate care, the whispering her thin bedroom walls could never stop and then nothing but the ringing silence. The other noises scared it and, though she knew very little about horses, she knew they wouldn’t run when they were frightened, or maybe they would run too fast.

  She would lie awake at night, many nights, eye-tracing the shape of her horse on the dark ceiling above, wishing the crease of moonlight that squeezed through her tightly drawn blinds would dance the way her carousel lights danced: over her head and under and around, laughing and singing, and not simply fall lazily on the foot of her too-long bed. She would lie awake many nights, determined to get the speed of the music right in her dreams but struggled to hear even the simplest note over the other noises the night awoke. Fighting to hear the too-slow carousel music, she would drift off to sleep, her horse resting, the lights extinguished, and the music consumed by the noises the walls could never stop.

  Some days her mother took her to see her horse and would sit on a bench nearby watching her go around and around and around. Her mother would sit all day, for as long as she wanted to ride. Her mother would sit and watch and smile. Or maybe, it only seemed like a smile, maybe it was an illusion. She was spinning fast, her horse carrying her so swiftly around the park that anything could have been stretched into a smile. From her eyes, though, it was a smile.

  When she was done, or when it was time for her horse to rest, she would walk over to her mother and, every time, or at least every time she was now able to remember, her mother’s eyes were wet and the skin underneath red and soft like the nose of her heavily breathing stallion. She would think to ask her mother if she had been crying, because she knew crying too. In the way she knew the realities of color, she knew crying. She remembered when she first experienced it, the tingle turning to stinging, the movement down her cheek like a summer-fly slowly exploring the surface of her face. It was when the noises started, the other noises, the wall-noises that scared her horse at night. The noises that kept him from running, that kept her from playing the carousel song in her dreams, that kept her room as loud as it was dark. She didn’t know if she could play it before the wall-noises, before her parents stopped bringing her to see her horse together, before they stopped bringing peanut butter sandwiches and fruit. She didn’t remember very much before then, before the first of the slowly pacing summer-flies came to her cheek. She imagined that she could play it, though, and sometimes that thought made the summer-flies swarm until her pillow was damp with them, and sometimes it kept them away.