Read Online The Mercy Journals by Claudia Casper - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Claudia Casper
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another one.
She stared straight ahead at my shirt button. I put my arm around her and we left.
March 26 |
She knocked on my apartment door around nine the next night, complaining about the dark stairwell. She was still wearing the blue silk dress. We went straight to the bedroom. We undressed and she pulled me down on the bed. The sight of one another was like rocket fuel. Neither of us were the sort to delay satisfaction.
Afterward she lay in my arms, where I’d gathered her, my chin on her head. She raised her head off the pillow and sniffed.
It stinks in here. Like fish, and not fresh fish either.
Instant shame. You can’t smell your own smell. Should I have taken the sheets to the laundry? With Leo here, and the suddenness of this love affair, I hadn’t had time to plan out domestic details. My nose was in her hair, and all I could smell was the cedar perfume of her shampoo. I raised my head and sniffed. The odour was like tide pools after a day in the baking sun or two-day dead crab. It was clinging to the paint on the walls, circulating through the air pockets in the mattress, permeating the curtains. I got up and investigated. It wasn’t coming from the kitchen, outside, or from the apartments above or below.
Then I remembered. I crouched down beside the bed and fished out the bowl. The goldfish’s belly was very swollen now and its eyes filmy and sunken. I strapped on my leg, pulled on my pants, my shoe, a shirt, winked at her—Let me handle this, little lady—and exited with the bowl.
I carried it downstairs and outside. Every year, when the new buds are about to unfurl into leaves, the city drapesthe trees with fine netting to protect them from burning in the sun. In the moonlight the street looked like a ghostly sculpture garden. I walked over to the base of one of the trees. The square of earth in the sidewalk was covered with dead leaves and bits of twig. The goldfish’s body, lacerated at the gills and whitened around the mouth and tail, flashed out of the bowl, like a thought that slipped someone’s mind, and nose-dived into the leaves. It should have slipped from sight and rotted under the leaves except that it seemed to meet some sort of obstacle, so the tail stuck out, creating the surreal impression that the dead fish was burrowing into a hole or trying to reach a morsel of food under the leaves.
Even outside the smell was strong. I worried a raccoon or stray cat that had survived the crises against all odds would eat it and become sick. Surely evolution had taught everything but true scavengers to stay away from rotten fish, but instincts can be massively imperfect in their ability to protect a species. As we know.
Allen, I said to myself, the universe must take responsibility for itself. In the narrow light of my Callebaut I saw a black beetle tentatively approach the fish’s diving cadaver. It reached out and caressed the bright scales with its antennae and thread-like feet. And it was the caressing which was the problem, which sucked me down a funnel. That dead goldfish seemed to have become a focal point for a reawakening tenderness in me. Ruby had softened me up. A suppressed memory, thin like the beetle’s leg, tested my edges to see if I was defended or inert, to see if I was vulnerable or ready to turn with savage jaw and bite back. It was the quality ofthe goldfish flesh, its not-too-springy plumpness, like the turkeys my mother pressed with her forefinger to see if they were fresh, that dulled golden flesh being caressed by the ever-so-thin tip of a beetle’s leg. An image streaked across my mind of flesh, cold and blue in death, streaked by a thin line of blood dissolving in rain.
My diaphragm plummeted, creating a vacuum that forced me to suck in air with such intensity that I barked. Several violent involuntary inhalations followed.
I turned and made my way slowly, stiff and brittle now, no more the thirty-year-old lover, back to my apartment. Ruby was in the armchair
She stared straight ahead at my shirt button. I put my arm around her and we left.
March 26 |
She knocked on my apartment door around nine the next night, complaining about the dark stairwell. She was still wearing the blue silk dress. We went straight to the bedroom. We undressed and she pulled me down on the bed. The sight of one another was like rocket fuel. Neither of us were the sort to delay satisfaction.
Afterward she lay in my arms, where I’d gathered her, my chin on her head. She raised her head off the pillow and sniffed.
It stinks in here. Like fish, and not fresh fish either.
Instant shame. You can’t smell your own smell. Should I have taken the sheets to the laundry? With Leo here, and the suddenness of this love affair, I hadn’t had time to plan out domestic details. My nose was in her hair, and all I could smell was the cedar perfume of her shampoo. I raised my head and sniffed. The odour was like tide pools after a day in the baking sun or two-day dead crab. It was clinging to the paint on the walls, circulating through the air pockets in the mattress, permeating the curtains. I got up and investigated. It wasn’t coming from the kitchen, outside, or from the apartments above or below.
Then I remembered. I crouched down beside the bed and fished out the bowl. The goldfish’s belly was very swollen now and its eyes filmy and sunken. I strapped on my leg, pulled on my pants, my shoe, a shirt, winked at her—Let me handle this, little lady—and exited with the bowl.
I carried it downstairs and outside. Every year, when the new buds are about to unfurl into leaves, the city drapesthe trees with fine netting to protect them from burning in the sun. In the moonlight the street looked like a ghostly sculpture garden. I walked over to the base of one of the trees. The square of earth in the sidewalk was covered with dead leaves and bits of twig. The goldfish’s body, lacerated at the gills and whitened around the mouth and tail, flashed out of the bowl, like a thought that slipped someone’s mind, and nose-dived into the leaves. It should have slipped from sight and rotted under the leaves except that it seemed to meet some sort of obstacle, so the tail stuck out, creating the surreal impression that the dead fish was burrowing into a hole or trying to reach a morsel of food under the leaves.
Even outside the smell was strong. I worried a raccoon or stray cat that had survived the crises against all odds would eat it and become sick. Surely evolution had taught everything but true scavengers to stay away from rotten fish, but instincts can be massively imperfect in their ability to protect a species. As we know.
Allen, I said to myself, the universe must take responsibility for itself. In the narrow light of my Callebaut I saw a black beetle tentatively approach the fish’s diving cadaver. It reached out and caressed the bright scales with its antennae and thread-like feet. And it was the caressing which was the problem, which sucked me down a funnel. That dead goldfish seemed to have become a focal point for a reawakening tenderness in me. Ruby had softened me up. A suppressed memory, thin like the beetle’s leg, tested my edges to see if I was defended or inert, to see if I was vulnerable or ready to turn with savage jaw and bite back. It was the quality ofthe goldfish flesh, its not-too-springy plumpness, like the turkeys my mother pressed with her forefinger to see if they were fresh, that dulled golden flesh being caressed by the ever-so-thin tip of a beetle’s leg. An image streaked across my mind of flesh, cold and blue in death, streaked by a thin line of blood dissolving in rain.
My diaphragm plummeted, creating a vacuum that forced me to suck in air with such intensity that I barked. Several violent involuntary inhalations followed.
I turned and made my way slowly, stiff and brittle now, no more the thirty-year-old lover, back to my apartment. Ruby was in the armchair
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