The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore Read online

  Jorge is studying to be a veterinarian. He picks up the cat that rubs against his leg. The tail under his nose.

  Carl says, No animal can pass him without he picks it up.

  Johann: And they could kill him; he is allergic.

  I carry a pill, says Jorge, or I die like this. He holds the cat’s tail in his teeth.

  I say, Will you work with big animals or small?

  He leans forward. We have finished four bottles of rum and two, no three, rounds of beer.

  He says, I want to work in an abattoir. I don’t know how you say in English.

  I say, But they kill animals there. I thought you loved animals?

  These cats will kill him, says Johann, if they break his skin.

  Jorge says, It’s a simple operation, the gun they put to the head like that. He holds the flashlight to my temple and flicks the light so my cheek glows orange.

  And it scrambles the brain, says Jorge, switching off the flashlight. He sits back and his wicker chair screeches unexpectedly. His throat is exposed by a floodlight in a palm tree. It’s covered with bruises like squashed blueberries, hickeys. I realize he is much younger than me.

  Jorge tosses the flashlight to you. It turns over in the air and lands in your hand with a neat smack.

  He says, Why don’t you put this in your wife’s pussy tonight? Is big enough?

  Everybody laughs uneasily, and Carl changes the subject.

  I think: This afternoon I saw one of the transsexuals rest her feet on Jorge’s thigh. He cupped her feet in his hand. Her feet were strong and nicely shaped, like meat-eating flowers. I imagine again Carl’s switchblade opening the bartender. The bartender may finally get a rest. He’s been here since eight in the morning. The transsexuals are both very tall, with high cheekbones and beautiful breasts. The nipples are beautiful. They have changed so much. Full lips. Comic-book eyes. Betty Boop. They go topless at poolside. I’ve seen one of them riding down the beach at sunset on a bay horse. A loop of reins slapping on both sides of the withers. Sand tossed. You, a long way from shore, you stand. There is a sandbar, and the ocean comes to your knees. One of the transsexuals turns a Sea-Doo sharply, so a white curtain of surf falls on your shoulders like an ermine mantle.

  I shaved your neck before we left St. John’s. Shaving cream like a neck brace holding you, a guillotine. The scrudge of the razor against your neck and hair, and cream piling. You were kneeling, and you turned and pressed your face into my skirt. Smearing chiffon like a hand wiping condensation from a window.

  I realize I am at a table with four men and a flashlight. I laugh. The rum is like a time-lapse film playing in my skin. Briefly, I feel a leaden euphoria. I am most myself now.

  We have been given the key to a different hotel room after checkout so we can shower before the long trip home. The room is more luxurious. It is dark, all the curtains drawn, and we turn on a light. We have to shower quickly to catch the bus to the airport. There is a dresser with a giant mirror.

  I say, There isn’t time.

  My breasts flour white where the bikini covered me.

  One foot on the bed frame and the heel of my hand on the desk edge. You stand behind me, gripping my hipbones, the strength in your thighs lifting me off my feet, letting me touch down. I watch in the mirror. Your hair is long and wet, stuck to tanned skin. Mouths open. I love you.

  In the bathroom you open a jar of coconut pomade and put some in your hair. Pomade that someone has left behind. Another traveller. Later, in the Halifax airport, we sleep on benches, waiting for our connecting plane. I sleep and feel the planes taking off through the vibrations in the vinyl couch. I smell through every dream the coconut pomade. You smell like someone else.

  THE WAY THE LIGHT IS

  Mina O’Leary pulls a long silver skirt from her cupboard and holds it to her waist, one hand sweeping the folds. The fabric falls in sharp pleats, the light from the bedside lamp flashing in it.

  How about this?

  You sure have beautiful things.

  It’s stuff. I just like stuff .

  The price tag still dangling from the waistband. Dried roses, petals crusty, in a vase on the vanity. I focus on the roses, but they look inert. The lack of motion in the dead roses buzzes. She picks a pair of nylons off the floor.

  I’ll put these on, I’d be wearing them in real life.

  She takes armloads of clothes off the bed and throws them in the closet. She stretches the white duvet over the crumpled sheets.

  Mina: I’m doing this mainly so you can watch me move.

  Me: Put on that gold coat and give it a flap. Like the wings of the insect.

  Mina: Okay, cool.

  I’m making a five-minute film based on a poem by John Steffler, “The Green Insect.” The poem is about the elusive . I want to shoot a combination of animation and live footage. I need a woman who looks like a grasshopper. A woman who will sit in a white wicker chair with her ankles drawn up near her bum, knees sticking out. A woman who doesn’t get kinks in her neck. The insect doesn’t have to be a woman. It could be almost anything you follow because you can’t help yourself. It could be a chiffon scarf floating down Duckworth Street in the wind. I saw a beautiful Chinese film with a recurring shot of a long, almost transparent scarf tangled in some branches at dusk. But I like faces. French movies always take a long time with a face. The plot turns when a man raises an eyebrow. Bergman spends a long time on a face, but there is no plot.

  What could capture the essence of this poem. No single image by itself, but a storm of images. Some children with sparklers running down the sidewalk at dusk. Bannerman Park with Christmas lights. The insect is anything there’s no holding on to. And greenness. Something you ache to own.

  My eight-year-old daughter in a purple bathing suit, swinging in the hammock Mina brought back from France last summer. We are around the bay, my daughter is reading a book, and I’m watching her from an upstairs window. She’s completely absorbed in the pleasure of reading, the warmth of the sun, the long grass brushing her back with each sway of the low-slung hammock. Finally she gets up and wanders onto the dirt lane in front of the house. Her feet are bare. She’s been wearing that bathing suit all summer, sleeping in it, picking blackberries that stain her teeth, leaping off a boulder into the river. Her long hair in a loose ponytail. She throws a baton. Far up in the blue sky it becomes liquid, a rope of mercury, but it comes down fast, bouncing off the pavement on its white rubber ends. There’s no way to keep this moment in the present.

  INT. RAMSHACKLE SUMMER HOUSE - DAY

  MINA stands at a window on the second floor of a weathered saltbox. The glass is old and warped. She’s watching a child in the long grass throwing a baton. Her HUSBAND enters and stands behind her. He’s wearing swimming trunks, his body is wet. She tilts her head and he kisses her neck. He unbuttons her blouse so it falls off her shoulders. Lowers her bra strap.

  MINA She can see us.

  HUSBAND She can’t. The way the light is.

  Mina closes her eyes for a moment, lets her husband touch her breasts. Then, tentatively, she waves to the child on the lawn. The child waves back.

  I want Mina O’Leary riding the bus in St. John’s in a rainstorm. She’s in the back, a blur of green moving toward the door. She gets off and snaps open a green umbrella. Droplets of rain spring away from the tight silk. The air brakes sigh, steam rises from the pavement. The umbrella tips over her head. Drops hang, jiggling, from the steel points of the umbrella’s skeleton. Her face, thinking . Liv Ullman is always thinking, her face is young, young, young. They just talk, Bergman’s actors, straight into the camera about humiliation, fear of the dark, death. Liv Ullman strikes a match and lights the lantern, a glow floods up from the wooden table to her chin. They are always on an island. There are vampires, sacrificed lambs. A crow with a giant bea
k. Bodies draped in white sheets lying on slabs of stone, desolate fields of snow seeping into the mud. Trudging, a lot of trudging. Then, like a jewel, a flashing ruby dropped in a bucket of tar, Bergman offers a bowl of strawberries, or a child. A greenish cast over Mina O’Leary’s cheeks from the streetlight through the silk umbrella.

  INT. AN ABSTRACT SPACE - DAY

  Mina is twenty-seven, she has dark, shiny hair that she tucks behind her ears, a severe cut that’s growing out with deliberate dishevelment. When she’s listening she becomes very still, captivated.

  MINA My mother was young, she was twenty-one when she had me, and I was the fourth. My father was away.

  YOUNG WOMAN Where was your father?

  MINA Oh, fucking around I guess. (laughs) … no, my father drank and he was a musician, so that was part of it.

  She reaches for a lobster claw from a platter in front of her, cracks it open with a hammer. She’s eating the meat with her fingers; such intent pleasure, both aloof and sensuous, unwittingly intimate.

  MINA He’d get these houses for us on the outskirts of town, isolated, and she’d have to wait for him, just wait …

  YOUNG WOMAN To bring her food and stuff?

  MINA To get her out of there. She’d wait and wait, and he just wouldn’t come. I think she went kind of crazy. She saw things …

  YOUNG WOMAN What kind of things?

  MINA Scary things.

  YOUNG WOMAN Like what though?

  MINA Well, like once –

  YOUNG WOMAN No wait, don’t tell me if it’s too scary.

  MINA No, it’s nothing, she saw a dog, that’s all, a dog on the lawn pacing back and forth, waiting to get in.

  The John Steffler poem says that after the insect was trapped it tore up history. “It ripped up reality, it flung away time and space I couldn’t believe the strength it had, it unwound its history, ran out its spring in kicks and / rage, denied itself, denied me and my ownership.”

  There’s a dried squirt of breast milk on my computer screen. I wipe it away with the tip of my finger and saliva, the pixels magnified in the wet streak. The way my husband, Jason, talks to our new son: Oh, the saucy thing, the saucy thing. Jason can’t get enough of him.

  Mina will be here soon, I say.

  She’ll eat him up, Jason says.

  Mina, in Paris, about to miss her flight home for Christmas. She has to find an elevator, a moving sidewalk underground, swinging doors on the left. Forget that . She drags the luggage cart outside and crosses the four-lane highway between the two wings of the airport.

  EXT. AIRPORT RUNWAY - DAY

  A plane is taxiing away from Mina, who is running through a blizzard. She stops and waves her red wallet over her head. The plane

  stops like a sluggish animal, a crocodile, the staircase falling open like a jaw. The attendant steps out into the snow in a short-sleeved white blouse and navy skirt.

  Bergman has said about writing a script, “All in all, split-second impressions that disappear as quickly as they come, forming a brightly colored thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious. If I wind up this thread carefully a complete film will emerge, brought out with pulse-beats and rhythms characteristic of just this film.” I think about how so much of a good story seems to happen elsewhere, off the canvas or screen or page, in Europe or a backwater New Brunswick town, in what is left unsaid. A word on the tip of the tongue, ungraspable. The teasing smush of a feather boa over naked breasts in a striptease. Mina is ten years younger than me, and is rarely jealous of her husband, Yvonique. It’s New Year’s Eve, a dinner party at Mina’s. Her necklace has broken and she’s trying to fix it.

  Mina: I can’t believe this. Can you believe this? I loved this necklace.

  Yvonique asks the baby, Do you know what Coco Chanel says? When you walk into a room, think champagne, feel champagne, be champagne. But of course, you will be carried into the room. The same rules apply.

  He talks to the infant with an ease that suggests an affinity between them I can’t imitate. Anything I say to the baby sounds studied or, when I’m overwhelmed by the fact of him, maudlin. Yvonique rips a bottle of champagne from an ice bucket and tells us one judges the quality by the size of the bubbles (the tinier the better) and their plenitude. They must taste crisp and clean.

  I think plenitude is one of those words that only gets spoken by someone whose native tongue isn’t English. I want to say this, but I’m afraid of offending him. Yvonique becomes shy at unpredictable moments, blushing dark red, his earlobes the darkest, his gold earring seeming to brighten.

  Jason says, Can you taste a bubble?

  Yvonique: Oui. But of course.

  He reaches over the fireplace for a machete, which he unsheathes from a tooled leather case hanging by a gold braid and tassel. He places the bottle on its side with the neck sticking over the edge of the dining table and runs the blade of the machete around the glass so it whistles eerily.

  Mina: He’s bluffing, he doesn’t know how to do that!

  Yvonique lifts the bottle and cleanly slices the glass with the machete so champagne gushes over his upturned face and open mouth for a moment before he fills the crystal flutes on the sideboard. We have finished the second course and there is a pause.

  In the kitchen Mina has thrown out Yvonique’s roux. We hear a spat of bitter words.

  She says, But I thought you were done with it.

  Jason and I sit at the table waiting for the main course. The other guests have left the table to smoke. The baby is nursing. We sit for a long time in the empty room.

  Jason says, What colour are these walls?

  Wedgwood blue, I say.

  Someone in another part of the house turns on some music. Apocalyptica — Plays Metallica by Four Cellos — so loud that the ornaments on the Christmas tree vibrate. Then it’s turned down, and then off. The whole house is silent. Outside, the city is covered in a quick, brief snowfall.

  Jason says, Maybe we should order out.

  Yvonique kicks the swinging door open, holding a platter of lamb studded with wizened apricots. We eat and exclaim how good it is, but afterward Yvonique seems disappointed. He says, Has nobody noticed the flavour of green tea?

  The dessert arrives with a young Australian woman: a President’s Choice tiramisu with a tartan ribbon around the rim.

  I want to catch the dessert on fire, says Mina, all season I’ve been lighting desserts on fire.

  I ask the Australian what she does.

  I can’t tell you, it sounds too pretentious.

  Oh, go ahead.

  I’m a digital artist.

  INT. DOWNTOWN CAFE - DAY

  Mina is sitting in a fat armchair near the window looking out onto Water Street. She is speaking to her girlfriend. The waitress brings them lattes in tall glasses with long spoons. It’s lunchtime, and at first Mina is distracted by the passing lawyers and teenagers.

  MINA Do you know what Yvonique said, that he developed my palate. Can you believe that?

  YOUNG WOMAN He roasts a mean duck.

  MINA Like I’m trailer trash. (giggles) It’s true.

  YOUNG WOMAN Me too. I’m trailer trash too.

  MINA Lay it here, sister. (they slap hands in the air)

  YOUNG WOMAN But don’t you love him?

  MINA We were both coming out of heavy relationships and we agreed not to get emotionally involved. But the sex was so good. So good. We just kept going like that, a month, two months. This was Paris. Then I told him I cared if he slept with someone else.

  We hear Mina’s voice while watching her run through a sparse birch forest. She’s wearing a white cotton dress and white sneakers, she is runn
ing very fast. Her feet hardly touching the ground, sunlight crashing through the overhead branches, she is just a blur.

  MINA (V.O.) That’s what we agreed we’d say if we found ourselves getting emotionally involved. I care if you sleep with someone else. And he said, run. Just that one word, run. I wrote it on a piece of paper in big block letters with a highlighter at work. RUN. I just stared at the word. I kept it on my desk for a long time. It would turn up under a pile of books. It was my father all over again.

  After midnight on New Year’s Eve the digital artist and Yvonique got lost in the crowd on the waterfront. They fell into a snowbank together, kissing.

  Everyone did ecstasy, Mina says, it happens.

  And that doesn’t bother you, I ask.

  She’s sucking the last bit of meat from a lobster claw.

  Not really . She thinks for a minute, wipes her lips with the back of her hand. I mean, if it meant something I guess it would bother me. I guess it would bother me if it meant something. I’m not sure.

  Jason and I sit with the car warming up in the parking lot of the Avalon Mall, Cuban music on the radio. I think of a tropical ravine we passed once, in a tourist bus, and a band that came out and played at a dusty bus stop at ten o’clock in the morning, an hour outside Havana. There was a corrugated roof of green plastic and the musicians wore white straw hats and white pants that looked green under the shelter. Jason bought an orange. How charged the musicians were. I had licked a drop of orange juice before it dripped off Jason’s chin. I think of the possibility of him kissing someone else in a snowbank, just kissing. It would bother me.

  Mina tells us while we’re eating that she smuggled the cheese through Customs.

  She says, It’s illegal outside of France, unpasteurized cheese, it’s a problem with the EU. The other countries want to ban it. But the French, you can imagine how they feel. They’re so passionate.

  Jason lays his fork on his plate, wipes his mouth with a serviette. I put down my fork.