Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Then she leans over, and kisses me, full and hard upon the lips.

Somewhere a car backfired. I turned, startled, and when I looked back I was alone on the street. I sat there for several moments, on my own.

Charlene opened the door to the Salt Shaker Cafe. “Hey. Pete. Have you finished out there?”

“Finished?”

“Yeah. C’mon. Harve says your ciggie break is over. And you’ll freeze. Back into the kitchen.”

I stared at her. She tossed her pretty ringlets and, momentarily, smiled at me. I got to my feet, adjusted my white clothes, the uniform of the kitchen help, and followed her inside.

It’s Valentine’s Day, I thought. Tell her how you feel. Tell her what you think.

But I said nothing. I dared not. I simply followed her inside, a creature of mute longing.

Back in the kitchen a pile of plates was waiting for me: I began to scrape the leftovers into the pig bin. There was a scrap of dark meat on one of the plates, beside some half-finished ketchup-covered hash browns. It looked almost raw, but I dipped it into the congealing ketchup and, when Harve’s back was turned, I picked it off the plate and chewed it. It tasted metallic and gristly, but I swallowed it anyhow, and could not have told you why.

A blob of red ketchup dripped from the plate onto the sleeve of my white uniform, forming one perfect diamond.

“Hey, Charlene,” I called, across the kitchen. “Happy Valentine’s Day.” And then I started to whistle.

LOCKS

We owe it to each other to tell stories,

as people simply, not as father and daughter.

I tell it to you for the hundredth time:

“There was a little girl, called Goldilocks,

for her hair was long and golden,

and she was walking in the Wood and she saw-”

“-cows.” You say it with certainty,

remembering the strayed heifers we saw in the woods

behind the house, last month.

“Well, yes, perhaps she saw cows,

but also she saw a house.”

“-a great big house,” you tell me.

“No, a little house, all painted, neat and tidy.”

“A great big house.”

You have the conviction of all two-year-olds.

I wish I had such certitude.

“Ah. Yes. A great big house.

And she went in…”

I remember, as I tell it, that the locks

of Southey’s heroine had silvered with age.

The Old Woman and the Three Bears…

Perhaps they had been golden once, when she was a child.

And now, we are already up to the porridge,

“And it was too-”

“-hot!”

“And it was too-”

“-cold!”

And then it was, we chorus, “just right.”

The porridge is eaten, the baby’s chair is shattered,

Goldilocks goes upstairs, examines beds, and sleeps,

unwisely.

But then the bears return.

Remembering Southey still, I do the voices:

Father Bear’s gruff boom scares you, and you delight in it.

When I was a small child and heard the tale,

if I was anyone I was Baby Bear,

my porridge eaten, and my chair destroyed,

my bed inhabited by some strange girl.

You giggle when I do the baby’s wail,

“Someone’s been eating my porridge, and they’ve eaten it-”

“All up,” you say. A response it is,

Or an amen.

The bears go upstairs hesitantly,

their house now feels desecrated. They realize

what locks are for. They reach the bedroom.

“Someone’s been sleeping in my bed.”

And here I hesitate, echoes of old jokes,

soft-core cartoons, crude headlines, in my head.

One day your mouth will curl at that line.

A loss of interest, later, innocence.

Innocence, as if it were a commodity.

“And if I could,” my father wrote to me,

huge as a bear himself, when I was younger,

“I would dower you with experience, without experience,”

and I, in my turn, would pass that on to you.

But we make our own mistakes. We sleep

unwisely.

The repetition echoes down the years.

When your children grow, when your dark locks begin to silver,

when you are an old woman, alone with your three bears,

what will you see? What stories will you tell?

“And then Goldilocks jumped out of the window

and she ran-”

Together, now: “All the way home.”

And then you say, “Again. Again. Again.”

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

These days my sympathy’s with Father Bear.

Before I leave my house I lock the door,

and check each bed and chair on my return.

Again.

Again.

Again.

THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN

She has the dream again that night.

In the dream, she is standing, with her brothers and her sister, on the edge of the battlefield. It is summer, and the grass is a peculiarly vivid shade of green: a wholesome green, like a cricket pitch or the welcoming slope of the South Downs as you make your way north from the coast. There are bodies on the grass. None of the bodies are human; she can see a centaur, its throat slit, on the grass near her. The horse half of it is a vivid chestnut. Its human skin is nut-brown from the sun. She finds herself staring at the horse’s penis, wondering about centaurs mating, imagines being kissed by that bearded face. Her eyes flick to the cut throat, and the sticky red-black pool that surrounds it, and she shivers.

Flies buzz about the corpses.