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THE BARK AND SHRIEK OF A DOMESTIC DISPUTE
slipped in from the street, through a window
at the front of the store opened a crack to let in gusts of cool air. The shop was
frequently sweltering, as the condos upstairs were overrun with the elderly. In particular
there seemed to be a surfeit of septuagenarian divorcees in greasy fur coats succumbing to
mange, always flaunting their grandfathered-in kitty cats (pets were no longer allowed),
and constantly complaining to maintenance of the cold. Because of the onion-thin skin
of this slow parade of battleaxes, Plum and Peach sweltered in the winter months.
"Ooh, it looks like an ugly one," Peach said, walking to the front to watch the couple
pass. She stood at the door on tiptoes to see over the blue-finned, red-nippled mermaid
(reading Colette) painted on the glass.
"An ugly what?" Plum said. She walked to the window seat and raised a slat of the
blinds. "An ugly husband? An ugly wife?"
"An ugly fight. Look how he's getting in her face like that."
"But she can't just walk away, can she?" Plum murmured. "Is he going to slug her?
Should we call the police?"
"No, he won't slug her," Peach said. "At least not until they get home. Then bap,
a knuckle sandwich."
"But maybe not," Plum said. "Maybe things are different when they're at home. In
the dark of their kennel. At home, they just break open a bottle of us-against-the-world
and anesthetize. Maybe it's only when they're out in the city, faced with everything they
don't got, that they turn on each other."
After a silence, Peach said, "What am I doing, Plum?"
"That little lover's tango got you thinking," Plum said, sitting on the cushions of the
window seat, drawing her knees up, putting her arms around them. "It's like a metaphor.
For your affair."
"Oh, stop," Peach said. She sat next to Plum. Peach's skin was all goose-bumpy, and
Plum reached over to rub some warmth into her arms. "Everything can be a metaphor
for an affair," Peach said. "Because, our feelings for other people, that's all anybody's
ever really thinking about, at any given minute, isn't it? Am I happy alone? Am I happy
married? Am I having enough sex? Am I having too much? Is he unhappier than I am?"
Reprinted with permission
from Devils in the Sugar Shop
Copyright © 2007
by Timothy Schaffert
Unbridled Books
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A NIGHTLIGHT NEAR NINA'S BED
lit the room enough for Hud to see Nina sleeping still in a cowgirl costume, still even
in boots and prairie skirt and western shirt printed with yellow roses. A straw hat hung
on the bedpost. Hud tugged on Nina's skirt and she woke peacefully, too peacefully, Hud
thought. "You shouldn't be sleeping next to an open window," he whispered, and Nina sat
up in bed and puckered her lips for a kiss. Hud kissed her, then said, "Any creep could
come along. Aren't you afraid of creeps?"
"Oh, sure," Nina said, shrugging her shoulders.
"Let's go for a drive some place," Hud said. He opened the window and lifted the torn
flap of the screen.
"OK," she said, standing up in the bed, "but first, don't you like my costume? We went to
a party."
"It's nice," Hud said.
"I'm Opal Lowe," she said, and Hud was touched that she dressed up like Opal Lowe, his
favorite country singer. He'd taken Nina to a county fair a few weeks before to see Opal
singing in the open-air auditorium. ... Nina had loved it and had hummed along as Opal Lowe
sang about her man's habits, of how he had liquored her up on Wild Turkey, lit her Old
Golds, made her need him like water.
... Hud jotted a note in crayon: "I'll be back with her before sunlight, before you even
read this," and left it atop the rumpled covers of the bed. Nina crawled onto his back,
and they slipped through the torn window screen. He imagined never returning with her,
imagined his picture next to her picture on fliers sent through the mail.
Reprinted with permission
from The Singing and DancingDaughters of God
Copyright © 2005
by Timothy Schaffert
Unbridled Books
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IN HER SECONDHAND SHOP,
Mabel stretched out on the fainting sofa, feeling
tipsy from the summer's heat, not knowing, for a moment, if it was June,
July, or August. She shook up a leaking snow globe, the white flakes
settling in the laps of lovers on a gondola. Mabel had read in a book on
antiques that the snow in snow globes was once made of sawed-up bone.
Though Mabel was very young, she often pictured her demise, often hovered
above her own Valentino-like funeral with women collapsing and
broad-chested men singing impromptu bass tremolo. She'd like to donate her
skeleton to a snow globe maker, liked thinking of her remains forever
drifting among the plastic landscapes of a souvenir. Mabel watched her
sister Lily put on lipstick in front of the mirror of the decades-old
nickel gum machine. Sometimes Mabel wondered if she'd been separated at
birth from her real sister, for Lily and Mabel shared no resemblance. In a
fairy tale, Lily would have been the fair sister of goodness, goldilocked
and rosy-faced, and Mabel the nasty one, made up of pointy bones and thin
skin and a hank of black hair.
Lily wore only a thrift-shop bra, a pair of jeans, and thick glasses,
without which she was only a few blurs from complete lack of sight. After
one last drag from her Virginia Slim, she ground the cigarette out in the
palm of a mannequin's severed hand.
"I don't know how you can smoke in this heat, Lily," Mabel said.
"Everyone's quitting." It had been a terrible summer, and the heat had
killed a fifteen-year-old boy in the fields; he dropped dead from a heart
attack at eight in the morning cutting tassels from the corn for five
bucks an hour. The black-eyed susan by the railroad tracks had blazed
yellow for only a week before burning up from the sun. There had never
been a better summer for running away to someplace temperate, Mabel
thought, fanning herself with an old Omaha World-Herald-twister kills
five-the whirling dust of yellow paper making her sneeze. Mabel and Lily
Rollow lived alone in this junk shop in the country. Tiny hand-painted
signs along I-80 directed motorists (antiques 4 mi., antiques 3 mi.) onto
Highway 34, then off onto gravel roads past a stretch of corn and bean
fields and pastures overgrown with tall musk thistle. The gray house stood
next to a large, outdated satellite dish in the middle of eighty acres of
farm land long left fallow, a few miles from the little nothing town of
Bonnevilla (pop. 2,900).
Lily held a tissue to her lips to blot her lipstick. The tissue, marked
with the red shape of her kiss, floated softly from the tips of her
fingers to the floor. Her boyfriend Jordan had called to say he bought a
car and wanted to take her for a ride. At nineteen, he was two years
younger than Mabel and a year older than Lily. He was sexy in his tight
concert T-shirts and with a clip-on silver hoop over his left eyebrow.
Nights, Jordan came to Lily with gin in the hot months and bourbon in the
cold. Even before she noticed his one scarred wrist, Mabel had seen in
Jordan an inadequacy for the rough-and-tumble of the world. His breath
always smelled of the cheapest wine; Mabel could taste it when she smelled
it, a remembered sip stolen as a child at a funeral, and she yearned for
its vinegar sting at her throat. Should he ever reopen the wound of his
right wrist and this time die, she thought she might fabricate a romance
between him and herself and confess it to Lily at the peak of her
mourning. Mabel could almost feel that lie waiting in her mouth, hidden
beneath her tongue like an unswallowed poison.
"It's not just any car," Lily said. "It's Starkweather's. Sort of. It's
not the '49 Ford Charlie owned, but the one he stole from the Lincoln
couple he murdered-the '56 Packard." Jordan and Lily were fascinated with
the stories of Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend
Caril Ann Fugate. Mabel's grandmother had once told of how frightened
she'd been those nights on the farm before they caught the killer.
Everybody across the state was terrified, she'd said. All the teenagers
were afraid to go to drive-ins or out in the country to park and neck.
Mabel's grandmother stood those nights at the window hearing thousands of
noises coming down along the still and empty country road.
Reprinted with permission
from The Phantom Limbsof the Rollow Sisters
Copyright © 2002
by Timothy Schaffert
Blue Hen/Penguin Putnam
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Bibliography
