His mother had not died, and at the time, every rise and fall of her living breast reminded him that he wished the case were otherwise. His father had been dead a long time, forever. His sister was mad. At a certain point, he felt he had only to benefit from risk, and so he left. He left his past before he was too old to change; he left his present with the intention of finding a way less painful, with fewer sidelong glances by himself at chunks of roast beef being eaten by strangers.

Flight turns out to be good for him. He contrives an exact trajectory. He settles in a small city near the Loire River where an ancient castle houses the longest tapestry in the world with woven stories of the Apocalypse and men cowering and angels triumphant and the devil small and nasty, holding out his hand.

The man grows quite rich in industry. He marries a beautiful woman who is also kind and gracious. They have a son with curling hair and a quiet personality. They move to a seaside town close to the small city. They have plenty of friends. They go to the cinema and the opera and the theatre. They are happy.

When the son is ten years old, the man, forgetting the pain of the past and the harshness of his mother and the insanity of his sister, takes his family to his former hometown to meet his relatives, who do not know about his good fortune as he has written no letters and made no phone calls and sent no telegrams. The excited little family travels by airplane, the first time for the boy, and then they drive a long distance in a rental car through countryside only vaguely familiar to the man.

After settling his family in a nice local hotel, the man goes alone to the boarding house where he understands his mother and sister to be staying. He will surprise them. He enters the boarding house after knocking twice at the front door. The boarders are seated at the dining table preparing to take a simple lunch of salad, hard cheese, and bread. The man looks directly at his mother and asks if it is possible to join them.

The man's sister and the others at the table stare at him blandly, assessing his soft leather shoes and his fine cashmere jacket. At last, the landlord says, “Well, of course it is possible to eat, but there will be trouble finding more lamb chops and the cost of lunch will be higher than normal.” The man pulls a thick stack of cash money, secured with a gold and platinum clip, from his trousers pocket. He hands the landlord three bills, more than enough for lamb chops for everyone. The man's sister and his mother exchange a glance, easily recognizing the large sum of money the man slips back into his pocket. They do not recognize that the man is their kin, their brother and son.

After eating a fine lunch, the man sits in the breezy garden under a large tree in a brown wicker chair. He pats his stomach, which is neither fat nor slim, and groans with satisfaction. His mother sits across from him on an ancient chaise with faded damask cushions. She pretends to be interested in his comments on the weather and the current political climate but does not perceive her son, and his strange accent gives her no clues. She does not hear the voice of one she knew intimately, a fleshy reminder of a guilty past, and therefore she has no reason to consider him more than the cat that slips under their feet. Except for the money.

The river flows by at the bottom of the garden, just a few feet from where they sit under the rustling tree. It stinks of rotting leaves as the winter is late and new growth is dormant under the decay of last year. Still, the air is soft. Spring approaches.

As the man speaks in his slow and easy manner winding up to his revelation, his sister creeps up behind him, moving in a steady zigzag pattern, across the spongy grass. The mother sees the sister advancing but makes no change in her expression. She offers no sign to this stranger, her son, that time is short.

When the sister is close enough to the man, she lifts a wooden mallet, one she had been hiding in the folds of her dark skirt, hoists it high above her head, and twisting at the waist, swings it around to bring it hard across the man's right temple. She doesn't stop at his head, but continues her swing until the mallet is high over her other shoulder, a perfect long drive.

The man is mid-phrase and bites his tongue hard enough to slice a small part off into his mouth. He briefly notices the bright tin taste of blood. Then he falls over, a slow motion, frame-by-frame topple. The wicker chair falls with him. The sister approaches and kicks the chair clear of the man. It rolls down the inclined yard, into the river.

The mother bends over the man, shielding him with her ancient wool shawl. She quickly picks all the cash from his pockets and then lifts a delicately engraved silver and gold watch from his waistcoat before pushing him firmly with her foot so he rolls into the river after the chair.

The Mother

My husband didn't talk much. I married him before the war, before the relocations, the problems. I was 27 when we got married, old really. I was too tall. I had dark hair and a big chin, bad signs for a nice wife. So when there were no offers, even though my Daddy was rich, I decided to take care of things myself. I picked one of the men working at the main post office, one that sorted mail efficiently.

He was a plain man with clean fingernails. Once I'd decided on him, he didn't have a choice. I'm not being sassy, but I had a beautiful body and even a man with clean fingernails and a stoic heart can't resist the beauty of soft, intentional form.

I walked up in a black and blue dress, my long hair hanging loose to my waist. The dress was sheer enough to see through when the sun was behind me and I made sure I went early, when the sun was low in the sky. I said I was there to collect a package for my Daddy. But of course there was no package, and, of course, this plain, efficient man followed me home.

My Daddy made him marry me. My Daddy was strong-willed and forceful.

My husband never said a word. At first I figured it was out of spite for being forced to marry me. Then I figured he was just a silent man. He worked day and night shifts to make enough money to take care of me and my Daddy because my dowry was withheld. My Daddy said this ignorant, silent man would just mess up anything he was given. When my Daddy died, I found that everything he owned, which was a lot, was tied up with liens and bad choices and we didn't get a single copper coin.

Right after my Daddy's funereal, I found I was pregnant. My son was born in late March, just after a flash flood. He was small and red and silent like his father. He didn't cry but made a tiny noise like a cat or an insect when he wanted something to eat. He seemed afraid to ask for the basics but he gobbled up whatever he was given. I fed him at the breast, the form which had changed to an enormous, veined grotesquerie. There was little familiar about what had been my beautiful body. I didn't like the lushness of my post-pregnancy form and resented the small mewling beast that suckled from me.

I admit to being proud. It's a sin, I know, perhaps one of my heavier ones. Still, I was pleased at having one thing of beauty about me, one trait that was desirable. I feared God would punish me for my vanity, but I was more afraid of being made completely hideous by the greedy boy. I told my husband as much and insisted we get a goat.

I stood over his armchair, my unbendable posture conveying the seriousness of my request. My husband looked at me a moment, as if considering my proposal. I decided that he may not have heard correctly and began to repeat my request, my claim. He just continued to stare at me. I grew shriller, it's true, louder, hysterical. Then when he stood quickly and slapped me as hard as he could, I was calm.

“We won't take no goat in a one room apartment and you can shut it you bitch.” He said the words slow and soft, like a caress to me who had never really heard his voice. I latched on to the sound of the words in spite of the throbbing on the side of my head. I instantly craved the tone of his voice, perhaps especially his viciousness, directed right at me. I decided I would get him to say more even if it meant a beating a week.

Despite my best, sniping efforts, I only got him to do it one more time. After our daughter was born, I told him what a failure he was and his stupid efforts at earning a living were more pathetic than any woman or even child would make. This wasn't true, but since he worked so much I figured it would hurt him maximally and he'd speak up again.

I called the kids nasty burdens and him a useless no-good parasite on myself, a hardworking woman, and a loathsome failure as a man. Well, I repeated it again and again and again, growing ever more disembodied from my own shrieking voice.

Steady for 20 minutes, I kept on him, a low rumble at first then a shrieking mess in the end as I moved myself to glorious, damning hysteria. Finally, his eyes settled on me and stared hard. He propelled himself at me from the armchair, faster than any cat, and pushed me hard in the chest toward the closet. The doors broke with the force of my landing and my breath left my body for a moment. Then he slammed half of the broken door into my head, fixing my skull between the door and the wooden rod in the closet. Some empty wire hangars gouged into my flesh.

I kept screaming at him things like, “oh yeah, big man beats his wife” as if I had no part in it. “Go ahead, hit me again,” I taunted but it was really a sincere request. He finally kicked my side and I felt the ribs go, two in the middle. Then it started, his words, warm and hard around me.

“You stupid bitch. You stupid bitch. You stupid, stupid bitch. Why didn't you shut up? Why'd you make me do it? Why, why? Stupid, fucking bitch.” He kicked me for emphasis.

Twenty-six words. I repeated them again and again in the days that followed with his arrest and parole, the sick feeling in my gut coming back each time. I fed off the meanness of them like they were sweet words of loving kindness from the Savior Himself.

Four months later, my husband had a stroke and slumped over his canvas sorting bin, died in the back room of the postal annex. Apparently the big bin rolled all the way outside and down a ramp before anyone saw my husband hanging over the side of it.

I didn't expect that and the doctor said it was from some recent high level strain to his sanguinity. I knew then that I had killed him.

“Well, there you go, I thought.

2

Later, in the evening, the man's wife goes with her young son to the boarding house. The lights from the dining room stream out to the lawn. Two men are visible through the windows, sitting at the long table playing a complicated card game. Low light stains the lace cloth. Through another window, the young wife sees two women watching television. A dubbed version of Wheel of Fortune quivers on the screen and applause fills the room.

The young wife enters the house and stands in the doorway to the room where the women watch television. She approaches the old woman, assuming she is the mother of her husband, and asks if she has had a surprise visit from her son today. “Did your son see you, madam?”

The old woman appears confused, but the sister visibly pales and begins working her lips around a short prayer. “Hail Mar…”

“My Son?” asks the old woman.

“Yes,” the young wife replies. “Your son came this morning to be reunited with you and his sister, to take you to the city where we live in a large house with plenty of windows looking across the bay to the ocean. We are quite rich and want to share our fortunes with you.”

At this, the sister of the dead man lets out a painful yelp and falls directly to the floor. Her knitting tumbles across the room, and the fat old cat looks with some interest at the ball of dark red wool spinning past him to a far, dusty corner. The chair the sister had occupied falls as well, hitting her on the lip. Her lip bleeds and swells immediately, a ripe plum. She lies unnoticed by the other two. Small bits of her hair wave in the breeze of static generated by the applauding television.

The young boy stands close to his mother watching the scene. He sees it like he is viewing a film at the cinema, flat and flickering. "Mama," he begins, but doesn't finish when he touches her arm and notices how soft it is. A sound like enormous wings moving once fills his head and the entire room. His eyes grow wide. His mother continues to talk about home, willfully ignoring the danger that the boy sees clearly.

The old woman's eyes do not move even to blink away dryness. The color of her face is like old rice flour. She strokes the surface of something she cups in her hand, circling the pad of her thumb in a steady flow.

Thinking perhaps she has made a mistake and entered a private asylum for the insane, the young wife grabs her son and quickly leaves. She has a heavy sense of dread, but knows that she will feel better when she sees her husband. She returns to the hotel and tucks her son nervously into bed. He does not speak, but lies motionless and awake on the small, stiff hotel mattress.

The wife feels a dread pit in her belly as, at midnight, she has had no word from her husband. Still, she hesitates to call the police as her husband often stays out late and doesn't appreciate if she questions him or expresses worry. She is so bewildered by the behavior of the women at the boarding house, that she cannot even consider it in connection to the fear that mounts around and inside her.

After reading several paragraphs of The Adulterous Woman, a short story that she has labored to read for several days, she falls into a deep but restless sleep.

The Wife

After 5 days searching for the missing businessman, his young wife has an interview with the police psychologist who secretly desires to be a Freudian analyst.

My husband is not perfect, I know, er was not perfect. I suppose I should speak in the past tense. He gave us what we needed. We have the latest and most comfortable of everything. My son, for example, has a G5 Powerbook for his games and schoolwork. My son is very adept at computer games, you see.

She takes a sip of water from the filigree glass on the table in front of her. It is warm and smells thinly of bleach. The psychologist moves in his chair. The leather creaks. His shoes are top quality. He is very handsome.

I think it began when I was pregnant with my son. My husband has always had strong appetites. Before I was pregnant, he was all the time with me. You know what I mean. But when I grew large and heavy with child, he stayed away. He remained at his office later than usual and eventually he would sleep there as he made long reports to his shareholders and he would worry about the profitability of his decisions if he didn't finish the reports during the night. He slept on the couch and then he would come home the next day. I never had reason to doubt him. In any case, I wouldn't really dare to question him.

She sips the water again. She spills a bit from the lip of the glass onto her pale green dress. The silk absorbs the water quickly and the wet area on her lap grows large. She doesn't seem to notice. The psychologist tries to keep his dark eyes from falling there repeatedly.

I don't believe he kept just one mistress, as I never noticed a consistent detail. I would have noticed. I am that way. I once found a bill for expensive lingerie, Chantal Thomas. A bra and panties. I found it just as I was so large from my child that I felt as though I moved through dim water. I itched and was unable to look in a mirror.

I found the receipt quite by accident and since my husband had been gone so much, I assumed he would make some proposals to me when the baby was delivered, proposals that involved the expensive lingerie.

She pauses and adjusts her dress. The sweat at her waistline is noticeable and creeps toward her breasts and the police psychologist misses nothing.

He did give me some lingerie the day I came home from the hospital. It was a cheap brand that young girls wear with rough transparent fibers and flowers in obvious places. The baby was staying on in hospital as he had a herniated testicle. We were alone.

She flushes. The psychologist stares at her, hoping to force an intimacy, an unnatural bond. She doesn't look up.

I imagined the touch of those rough fibers in contact with all my sore, private areas and it made me choke. I felt hot sickness like a rolling sea and I started to breathe hard, then to gag, then to scream.

My husband slapped me. Hard. “You're crazy.” He said it quietly, definitively. He shoved me out the front door and into the car. He took me back to the hospital where I had to stay in the psychiatric ward, as I was no longer an expectant mother.

I didn't sleep despite the tranquilizers as I fully expected they would give my child to another woman, one who had no need to become hysterical.

She stops again. The psychologist pours her some more water. She takes a small sip, then tips the glass and drains it. The water runs down her chin in two lines and spreads rapidly across the front of her dress.

She pats her hair behind her ear. It curves around and piece touches the edge of her jaw, like an arrow.

I believe my husband beat the woman he was sleeping with. She embarrassed him in front of his workers. He fired her from her job. She started walking by our house daily, then hourly. At first she had a black eye and a large plaster on her left arm. Then she was dressed in a silk chemise that might have been a nightgown and her left arm hung, swollen and disfigured at her side. She was looking for a glimpse of him, I know but also to see me, to see how I might be different from her. I just pretended not to notice.

This woman arrived once when I was in the garden with a friend. Our children were playing and we were having a drink. My friend had recently returned from a time in Italy and told stories of her husband's increased amorousness with a beautiful, clear voice that rang like bells of thin steel.

My husband's former mistress stood at the gate to our garden, very still and heavy. Her thick blond hair was turning yellow and curled around her face like overgrown ivy. She stared directly at me, abstract and dazed. She swayed from one foot to another. She didn't breathe.

When my friend began to sing a bit of some old love song she'd learned in Italy, the mouth of the woman at the gate opened wide in preparation for a scream. She wailed but my friend sang on, oblivious to the agony just on the border of our garden. Then my husband's former mistress broke and ran down the street, her chemise riding up her thighs showing her dimpled flesh. I thought I might vomit, but I kept my expression neutral. My friend finished her song and left shortly after with her little girl.

The psychologist clears his throat and brushes some imagined dust from his fine wool trousers. He doesn't pause too long before quickly asking the woman how all of this makes her feel. She stares at him uncertainly.

3

The next morning, over breakfast in the sunny hotel café, the young wife avoids thinking about her husband's continued absence. She ignores the pieces of him drifting through her mind like dust motes or static. She scoops some marmalade onto a croissant for her son. As she is finishing her second coffee, some police officers approach her table and ask if she is Madame H__________.

“What's wrong?” she asks, panic making her voice thick.

“Please come with us,” they say.

She and the boy rise in silence, the boy with his napkin still tucked tidily into his shirt. They follow the police down the sidewalk to the station where she is told that her husband was found in the river, his head beaten and a chair holding his legs down, resulting in his death by drowning. He was robbed as well.

The woman sits silent and still, only swaying a bit with the electricity in the air. She would like to scream but feels it would be impolite. The child begins to choke and asks for the toilet. One of the policemen takes him. When they return, the woman thanks them all quietly and takes her son's hand. As they leave, the chief says he has some papers for her to sign. When she does not stop, he says he will contact her later, at the hotel. She does not respond but continues walking outside, her son's small hand in hers.

The Boy

The boy sits at the hotel desk, his golden curls lapping at his earlobes. It seems he and his mother will finally go home. He draws shapes on the pages in front of him and doesn't look at what he draws. He traces tiny red circles all around a flat bird he has constructed by drawing triangles. Bird Shape, he writes in the corner. L'Oiseau

I'm not talking to you, the boy says in his mind. You are not my mother. My father is dead. I, I may be nothing.

If you are dead, you help flowers grow. That's what Grandfather said. Grandfather is tall and he smells bad. Like he's dead. He's not dead though. He walks and buys potatoes and commands the gardener to cut the shrubs.

The boy stops drawing and stares out the window over the tops of newly constructed buildings. There are sharp-edged mountains in the distance.

My mother is not my mother. She took me from my real mother, the lady with beautiful teeth. Grandfather laughed as he drove the car away with me in the back seat. I was a baby but I never cried and I remember. I just looked out of the window and thought about nothing. Rien.

I think that's what it's like to be dead.

4

Even on the path, the young woman is uncertain about walking to the boarding house, but she wants to see her husband's mother once again. This must be an old woman who knows things, who can tell the future with tea.

The police and an ambulance are at the boarding house. Many people are standing around trying to see what is happening, what will come next from this ill-fated place. One man is rolling a cigarette between the stained fingers of his right hand. In his left hand some playing cards are fanned out. He doesn't seem to notice the emergency workers who bump against him as he stares directly into the sky, his head tipped as far back on his neck as it will go, as if a hinge were broken.

The young widow looks at this man. His body is angled like a sundial. He is wearing four shirts under his wool jacket. The neatly arranged collars are frayed and edged with stains in various shades of sepia and ochre. She looks at the sky, following his gaze, but sees nothing.

He mumbles repeatedly, “suicide by drowning,” a whispered count. His fingers tremble. He drops the three of clubs from the fan of cards in his hand. It lands beside her shoe. The numbers are erased. The edges are rolled and frayed so the card is more oval than rectangular. As she stares at the card, the man turns away and walks up the sidewalk, still at his isosceles tilt, still gazing skyward, his frontal regions exposed to the sun.

The Sister

Paramedics find the pages of a journal. They were torn from a notebook, the remainder of which has not been located. It is obviously old as the paper is the cheap pulp that was available before the changes allowed for importing better quality from the West. The investigating police officer is reading the pages for the ninth time, mainly thinking of his daughter who is 12 on the 5^th of May.

24 August

Mother didn't notice the black eye I got at school today. She didn't look at me when I came in. She was washing someone else's linens, her arms buried deep in high soap. Her face was red and aggravated. I didn't make too much noise. I put the knuckle of my middle finger on the hot iron until sweat broke out on my forehead and then I went to my room and watched the blister rise.

30 August

There was a Sorcier at school today. He let out balloons and pulled scarves out of his hat. Everyone thought he was funny. He stared at me like he knew me and then he tried to give me a ring, a magic ring that would make me invisible. I said no.

8 September

I am to bed without dinner tonight. Mother noticed the last bit of the black eye and spanked me hard with the razor strop. I had some biscuits in my red box under the bed. I hear brother slurping his lentil soup and telling Mother how good it tastes. My back hurts where she hit me but I will not feel sorry or sad. I will enjoy my hidden biscuits. I will grow strong from pain.

13 September

I skipped dinner three nights because I wasn't hungry. She has made my favorite dinner of peas with cream and lamb pie with spinach. I will try a little although I know it is a bribe. She tries to gain control of my tongue and my stomach, but I will not allow it.

24 September

It is a full moon tonight, and Delphina will give me my first enema. We turn 13 together, on the 30 of October, just before the souls return, although we are not supposed to believe in that any more. I look forward to the cleansing that Delphina says her grandmother guarantees. Also, it feels so nice when Delphina touches my bottom. If mother knew, she might kill us.

25 September

Delphina is in my dreams. Cold waves move over me as if something is flying from the window to the bed and back. Delphina could place her hand …

Here the page is torn and a thin line of charcoal edges the right corner.

9 April

Delphina and I walked to school together. We don't hold hands anymore as she says it's not right for big girls like us to do so. She is taller than I and very slim, but I am much prettier. Still men enjoy watching the way her sweet bottom moves under her denim skirt.

17 May

Nothing new has happened here lately. I have not eaten for ten days. The light feeling behind my eyes is too pleasurable to give in to the meals Mother makes to tempt me.

5 February

There is snow outside and my shoes are damp from walking. Maybe I can get brother to swap with me for one day. I am tired of having cold feet.

Today I won an award at school for best penmanship. I stayed awake all night practicing and when I wrote the sentence I had selected on the chalkboard, everyone was quiet. It was not a really acceptable statement to print at school, but I like to take those kinds of risks.

Another tear and then the paper is whiter and smoother than the previous pages. Some edges have stains.

29 October

Delphina and I turn 16 tomorrow. She decided to fuck with one of the teachers from our school to celebrate. Her mother will make her a cake and I know she has a beautiful pale pink dress to wear to the special dinner at her father's club.

All this got me thinking about the astronomy teacher. He offered to cook me a steak if I would be his lover. He doesn't mind that I am only 16 and I like the prospect of beef. I have never eaten it.

24 December

I am watching for brother to return from the market where he went to buy the duck mother says she would like to roast in celebration of a holiday we are not supposed to celebrate. He has been gone too long. I saw that both his outdoor and indoor shoes are missing. I don't think he will return. Mother is occupied with her own thoughts. She may not notice if he is gone, just as with me.

5

The young widow passes the emergency workers, who are covering the rigidly hunkered corpse of her sister-in-law, and enters the house, her child pressed close against her leg. The landlord is at the door and recognizes her from the night before. He gestures to where the old woman sits in a chair, rocking back and forth at the waist, first slow then faster then slow again. Her pale-dry lips are pressed together. The old wood chair creaks. Her fingers work randomly over and around something in her hand.

“Mother,” the young woman whispers. At this the old one stops moving and begins muttering again and again, “my son, my son, my son.”

Then the young wife sees what the old woman holds. The yellow nails, oval and thick, run over the grooves in the engraved pocket watch that she had stolen from her son the day before.

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