Creature (8 page)

“Be careful, be careful,” I yell.

On my walks I whisper to myself, “This couple, this couple, this couple.”

“You’re different than the others,” the woman tells me.

“I’m different from myself,” I say cheerfully, patting her hands with mine. The man is lying in my bed, waiting for me.

“Can I give you something?” she asks.

“I don’t deserve anything.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She takes out a black velvet jewelry box. Inside the box is a delicate gold bracelet made for someone with much finer wrists than mine, someone with noble blood.

“It’s pretty.”

“Will you wear it?”

She puts the bracelet around my wrist and it shines in the lamplight. The gold is both yellow and white.

“But what does it mean? Are you asking me to be in a relationship with you?”

The man comes out of the bedroom and stands in the hallway.

“Yes, we would like to stay with you forever.”

I’m very warm now, especially around my wrist. I don’t think I’ve ever been this warm before.

I wear the bracelet every day. I sleep with it, and I leave it on my wrist when I am taking a bath. I have told the couple that forever is a long time, and they don’t seem to mind my lack of commitment.

“I am so much in the present,” the woman says, “that it doesn’t bother me to let go of the future.”

“The future,” I repeat dreamily. “I guess I wouldn’t mind if it were an extension of this. It’s just that I never imagined I would be in a long-term relationship with a married couple.”

“We never thought of it either,” the man says. He’s wearing a wintery sweater. Everything is wintery now.

When I go to the grocery store I see the bracelet when I reach for things on the shelves. I see my whole arm. Even the children are drawn to its delicate nature, and one of them stares at it when he is supposed to be taking a spelling test. After the test is over the students go home and I stay behind to catch up on my grading. It is dark outside by the time I finish. The turkeys are stapled to a long bulletin board. When the heater kicks on I can hear the air come through the vents.

The school is over 100 years old. Time moves and the building stays still. The first students who went to this school are dead. I look at the turkeys and feel tender toward the children. The children like making things. They like the holidays.

At home, late, the woman calls.

“I just wanted to say good night.”

“Are you going to sleep now?”

“Yes, I’m lying in bed. I’m thinking about you.”

“I’m in my robe,” I say. “I’m thinking about you too. Both of you.”

“It’s never just the two of us anymore,” she says. “Whenever we’re together you’re here also.”

I feel it, that I am there in that house; but I am here in this house too.

It’s as if the couple has softened into one creature—what I am drawn to is singular. I move toward a relationship, not two. It’s not the woman I crave, or the man. But, still, it’s three bodies in a bed.

“Is this your life, Josephine?” I ask myself. “Are you here or are you there?”

But here or there is a tapestry of happiness and pain and joy and terror, so it doesn’t really matter, a tapestry so large and colorful you can’t see it all at once. It’s hard to take in the number of lives imprinted upon it. If you get close you see one life and something of another, touching it.

The next time I go to the couple’s house only the man is home, but as the woman has already proclaimed to me, she is present too, everywhere, even on the very tip of the man’s shirtsleeve.

“Yes, yes,” he agrees, “Gabby is with us.”

In their dark bed I’m not even sure it’s the man’s body I’m touching or that is touching me, and when she comes home, hours later, her body doesn’t feel so very different from his.

I wish to express my appreciation to the editors of the following publications, where some of these stories previously appeared:
Dear Navigator
,
Dewclaw
,
Joyland
,
Little Red Leaves
,
Moonlit
, and
Sidebrow
. “I Will Force This” was published as a Belladonna
^*
chaplet under the title “Hunger,” and “Tramps Everywhere” exists as a
PARROT
Series chapbook.

Passages in “Words Come to Me,” “Queen,” and “They’ve Been Bringing Them Here for Decades” are excerpted from Hannah Weiner’s
Open House
, Clarice Lispector’s
The Hour of the Star
, and Marguerite Duras’
Blue Eyes, Black Hair.

With infinite thanks to Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker, and to Richard Yoo, Rachel Tredon, Alicia Scherson, Amarnath Ravva, Adam Novy, Nathanaël, Ravish Momin, Matthew Mazzotta, Todd Mattei, Laida Lertxundi, Angela Leonino, Taigen Dan Leighton, Jennifer Karmin, Matthew Goulish, Olivia Casanueva, Teresa Carmody, Alex Branch, Daniel Borzutzky, Brent Armendinger, and Amanda Ackerman, whose work, thinking, and friendship has inspired so much of this book.

Amina Cain is the author of
I Go to Some Hollow
(Les Figues Press, 2009). She lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Event Factory

2. Barbara Comyns
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

3. Renee Gladman
The Ravickians

4. Manuela Draeger
In the Time of the Blue Ball

5. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Fra Keeler

6. Suzanne Scanlon
Promising Young Women

7. Renee Gladman
Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge

8. Amina Cain
Creature