Read Online Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie Jr. - Free Book Online

presumably on her flesh under the water. Fine enough. I flipped over and floated on the swells with only my nose above the surface. The claustrophobic hush beneath sounded like the womb to me.
    The next thing I knew, Rick was pulling me through sea foam up onto the beach while the specimenz fussed and worried above, their three faces framing the moon.
    If you asked me now whether I’d simply passed out and gone under, or if I’d intended to drown myself, I wouldn’t be able to answer you with anything resembling certainty. But I do remember thinking, as they all four stood gazing down while I lay on my back in the wet sand, that I wished Rick had been too preoccupied with Charlotte to notice that I’d disappeared under the swells. I do remember that, if I’m being honest.
    And apparently my near-drowning renewed Charlotte’s interest—or perhaps she’d never lost interest and had only been using Rick to try and stir me from my indifference—because when we left she insisted on driving, and she dropped Rick and the specimenz off at the Crow’s Nest, and then, and only then, drove me back to the pink stucco casita.
    The butterfly flapped its wings. Charlotte helped me up the back steps, unlocked the door, and pushed me onto the bed. When she started taking my clothes off I responded with all the vigor of a quadriplegic. She did what she wanted, and while I didn’t exactly participate, I didn’t stop her, either.
    And for the first time in nearly twenty years I genuinely, if temporarily, did not care about Emma. I didn’t care about anything, in fact. Charlotte and I could have burst into flames, for all the difference it would have made to me. We could have fallen instantly and irrevocably in love. The Earth’s poles could have reversed. My father could have stumbled in, trailing dirt from the grave.
    Of course, none of those things happened. Charlotte made do with my limp indifference, moaning and crying out in ways I remember thinking seemed like a put-on, and the next morning, while she lay sleeping it off in my bed, I smoked on the porch with my head down, and the sun didn’t shine on the island so much as beat on it, it seemed.

T here was a moment that next day, somewhere between my sixth and tenth beers, when I realized it was possible, likely even, that the reason I didn’t trust Emma had nothing to do with her and everything to do with me.
    Like the song says, it’s no secret that a liar won’t believe anyone else.
    Because even before Charlotte happened on the scene, I knew the treacherousness that resided in me, and in a deep place beyond words and reason I believed that this same duplicity existed in everyone—Mother Teresa, Gandhi, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and, yes, even Emma, especially Emma.
    These are all my imaginings, understand. Me being the template for the universe, as we all are in our little skull-size fiefdoms, it made a certain kind of sense.

T hat previous Christmas eve, before attending a cocktail party, Emma brought over champagne and two flutes, and we sat on the love seat and chatted, and she talked about how she hosted parties sometimes with a guy she’d had a brief thing with down in Washington where she worked, and that in turn led to her telling me about yet another guy who was always trying to date every woman in their social circle there, and how this guy had tried to kiss her at one of these parties.
    Again, this is the way it was with Emma—men swirling about her even while she was married, men steering ships into the rocks over and over. There was a strange comfort in the knowledge that I was anything but alone in my obsession with her. Still, it was dizzying, and troubling, to know that others danced and preened in the hopes of winning her affection, and especially troubling to hear about it in her calm, matter-of-fact tone, as if she were discussing nothing of more significance than what she’d eaten