Elena

She collected him. His moods, his tics. Hoping that by this accrual of fragments, she would have all of him, would come to know him as her favorite protagonist. In this way he became real to her, and then, slowly, became distasteful. She had gone through myriads of him, always the same patterns, the same path walked down to dirt & scuff. She tested him with poetry, would savagely grind against him over a choppy sea of sheets, whispering Verlaine into his ear:

Pour toi, j’ai fait, pour toi, cette chanson,
Cruelle et caline -

&: he would draw away from her, like a ferry tugging out of its slip, harbour & islandward. She would stand on the pier, stone-eyed & silent

or: she would subtly inflame him with embarrassment, until he became a wizened cinder, one ember of pure hate winking furiously & impotently in her direction.

the latter, occurring with more frequency than the former.

there were, of course, variables to her algorithms: there had been the liar, the pervert, the honey-tongued rake, et alis.

after some time, their names gracefully faded from her recollection, and so, in conversation, replaced them with colors - most often, the color of the shirt she last remembered him in. (took an inordinate amount of pleasure in assigning the hue “Buff” to one ex-flame who commonly went sans shirt)

(now), she was largely alone. read books. he had gone weeks before, and though his name was Theo, she already knew him as Red. a pile leaned like a familiar lover to her right. from bottom to top: Lautreamont, Barthes, Nin, Rousseau, de Sade, Bachelard, Flaubert, Proust (Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff), Pound, Nabokov, Pynchon, Auster, Albee, Woolf - &, placed deliberately at the top like a capstone, Justine, Durrell.

she dreamed of violence. of monsters with no faces & yet, possessing maws agape with wicked fangs. they existed around her with no interest in attacking or devouring. she was ineffectual, had no import or bearing. a distant lighthouse faltered & extinguished, plunging her (in the ocean, treading water) into utter black.

the second drink went down faster than the first. she saw him across the bar in a t-shirt whose color she was unable to discern - some shade of Gray - (she had, already, Gray-with-an-A & a Grey-with-an-E.) his eyes were fastened to a paperback. in front of him, a sweating pint of beer and an empty shotglass with a thimble of amber pooling in the bottom. she decided he was Shale. craned her neck (over her Tequila Sunrise) to see the title of the book. the letters swam in her vision like guppies in a bowl. there were multifold creases, cracks, in the spine of the book - she rises inside of herself, throat arid with expectation, but cannot make it out. he coughs, lightly, and turns a page as if the book is porcelain. she slams herself back down into her seat, spraying her desire with the pesticide of negative thought and horrible outcome. “Another crayon in the box,” she sighs, and chortles morbidly behind a hand at the image it conjures.

“What’s that?” the bartender is someone she knows - it’s good-old-Randy, of the churl’s smile & the fool’s mad grin. she supposes he’s an attractive guy. ruddy. rangy. going to seed a bit in the middle as a result of a fondness for malty, thick beers.

“Another crayon,” she repeats, absently, twining a strand of hair around her finger.

Randy’s put something on the bar in front of her that rattles like candy. At first, she thinks it is candy. “I think we lost Black awhile ago, and Green’s just a stub. Keep ‘em here for Deb’s kid.” He scratches his beard. “Don’t know what you’d need ‘em for.”

She blinks, and stares him full in the face. Laughter trickles out of the corners of her mouth and she sucks on the straw until the Sunrise fades noticeably in the pint glass. “Randy, you’re a peach. Got any paper?”

They spend the next half-hour scribbling contentedly, with no real images or goals in mind, her with Cobalt Blue, he with Burnt Sienna. She drinks another Sunrise away.

o

ELENA HARRIS
152 CHURCH ST
5C
CITY, STATE
ZIPCODE

No return address. She turns the envelope over & over in her hands as if trying to ascertain its contents by touch alone. She is unsuccessful - for the most part. It is a letter, and it has been written by one Elaine Harris, now deceased. The letter contains a great deal of hand-wringing & apology, as well as funeral instructions. It is the last missive from a mother who feels the Kublerian-Ross finality of regret & is straining for some sort of redemption from her daughter. Despite the commonality of their surname, Elena has never heard of Elaine. Her mother’s first name is Linda.

The telephone rings and, at the same time, a small bird flies directly into the window directly to Elena’s right. This is the first time this has ever happened, and she is startled, dropping the letter from Elaine Harris to the floor. A small smear of blood on the glass pane is hesitantly extending a downward pseudopod like a recalcitrant explorer. The window is nailed shut, she cannot open it to clean it. The bird is nowhere to be seen. She picks up the letter anew and sits heavily on the couch; opting for the stifling silence rather than turning on music, as is her usual habit upon entering the apartment. It is sweltering on the fifth floor, though she would never live on the ground floor - prefers vastly to have a sense of omniscience by looking down on things, to be able to look out and over and up. The evening is a great nothing stretching out ahead of her. She has no plans. A sigh leaves her body involuntarily, sneaks out & away before she can catch the errant breath. She unzips her bag and pulls out the day’s acquisition: it is Derrida, and a battered, bruised copy of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, in a translation she does not already have. (She has two, and they sit next to one another on her bookshelf)

At that very moment, S. calls.

They lay in bed - S. & E. - letting their fingers traipse over one another. It is the bliss of post-coitus, and the world is white-gold all over. everything around them seems basted with the night, soaking it all in. The dark is liquid, pliable. She sighs, gathering air into herself and allowing it exit with a carefully moderated exhalation. He lights a cigarette and muses through the smoke. She isn’t paying attention, lolling like a primate in the glow, tongue hanging loose, body unhinged, splayed and akimbo on the queen-sized bed - that is, until he asks

“If I die, will you make sure they bury me with headphones on?”

She almost snorts her derision at the ridiculous nature of the question. His name is already Royal (after Royal Blue) even though the shirt he was wearing is crumpled on the floor. “I thought you said you wanted to be cremated.”
 He chewed the thought for a second, like a tough piece of gristle. “Well then make sure the photo they put in the funeral has me wearing headphones, okay? Music is important to me. I think I should be remembered with a symbol of listening to music. Or something. I don’t know.” He paused, as if immediately recriminate. “Am I making any sense at all?”

“You’re ruminating. It’s all right.”


“I’m not being too … self-involved?”


“No.”

“All right.” He sank contentedly back down into himself, resting his head more comfortably in the crooks of the arms folded behind his head. He seemed inordinately pleased with himself, like a cat in the birdcage, feathers sticking out of his mouth. She curled away from him, dissatisfaction staining her in the same way as wine stains teeth & tongue. He didn’t seem to notice.

o

She is discouraged. The world is this gigantic place she can only see one frame at a time, from the window of her screened-in porch. In grandiose moments, she refers to it as her solarium, replete with a moue of hand and mouth. she comes to smoke here in the early mornings, dredging herself out of sleep with a cup of english breakfast tea & a hand-rolled cigarette; curling on a settee found on the curb a block or so away. this morning, it is beginning to rain and it sounds dour to her. any other morning she would have elated in it, the insistent and tinny rhythm of the water on the roof and asphalt below, but this morning she is irritable and snappish, even at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her stomach is a weird sea of unease and her fingers are sticking to the cigarette. This is going to be a day where everything goes wrong, she decides, and stares down at the street below.

A man & a woman (call them Hannah and Brian … Livingston.) are hand-in-hand in leisurely promenade. Hannah is carrying a small purse, the color of which is offensively green, which offsets her offensively blonde hair. Brian is one of those perfectly cut-out specimens of masculinity, down to the tucked-in polo shirt and bermuda shorts. They go jogging together. They have separate lives but somehow always careen back into one another by evening. Hannah has dinner plans floating in her skull. She’ll cook that chicken breast in the freezer, season it with lemon & paprika, pan-fry it over some rotini and chop up some light vegetables. Some sort of vinaigrette. She knows Brian won’t be very hungry, but she knows she will be. A white wine for her - something of the chardonnay variety, and a Michelob Ultra for him.

Brian is thinking about his golf game, and the girl caddy with the brunette ponytail & white visor. Her name is Lola, and sometimes Brian finds himself humming the Kinks song of the same name as he’s teeing off. Watching and admiring her pert, round ass in her cream-colored miniskirt as she bends over to retrieve a ball. She has some Mexican blood in her.

Hannah is asking him a question. He hasn’t been paying attention, drifted, from her. He makes up a noncommittal answer and they pass out of sight, turning the corner.

She wrinkles her nose at them, unseen from her lofty perch, and turns away from the window. Dust catches in her throat and she gags involuntarily, swilling the last of the tea-gone-cold from the red & gold mug. This is going to be one of those days.

o

Around noon, the telephone rings. It’s an older-version cell phone, flip-phone, with no bells or whistles - the ring is seven long, impatient-sounding tones, in the style of an old receiver & cradle phone. She has to endure endless jokes & jibes at her expense when in mixed company, surrounded by a forest of people whose eyes are glued to their iPhones, or BlackBerries, or what-have-you. They make an alarming array of hoots and bleeps and she feels that the phones are having their own private conversation - moreso, even, than their owners. She has walked into a bar and seen the entirety of the clientele - all the way down the long bar to the bathrooms - with their faces turned down, illuminated by the eldritch blue of their devices. The tableau so chilled her that she immediately powered her own churlishly anachronistic telephone off and left it off until the next morning.

She doesn't answer it.

o

She waits with drink in hand for someone to leave, hovering near the first stool. There is a burly man occupying said seat, hands cupped around his pint of lager as if protecting it from possible spill. His hands are big enough to overlap around the backside of the glass. He wears a camouflaged trucker’s hat, sunglasses perched on the brim, a white t-shirt that’s seen better days, duck pants, and black workboots. Randy is tending the bar again, and it’s a busy night. She isn’t even entirely sure why she’s sojourned to the bar, with a half-full bottle of gin on the kitchen counter and a bottle of tonic in the fridge, but she’s here now and is determined to follow through.

(The day, as she had expected, was one disappointment after the next. She started to read, but found herself constantly distracted by minor irritants:

a strand of hair that wouldn’t lay quiescent (and so, deranged with a pair of dull scissors, chopped it right off), followed by

a persistent tickle in the rear of her throat, one that couldn’t even be dislodged by repeated coughing, followed by

the inability to find a comfortable position, even after re-arranging her body five major times and six minor times, while at the same time

scratching in vain the itch on the sinistral side of her lower scalp & consumed with the heat radiating from a tiny, cruel cut on the webbing between her dextral thumb & forefinger -

she had given up on comfort and threw herself out of the house without bothering to tuck her book under her arm)

The man in the camouflage hat shifted in his seat and emitted a rumbling belch, a low sound that he self-consciously muffled with the back of one hand before surreptitiously glancing around to see if anyone had taken offense. Elena was pleased despite herself at his furtiveness, declaring it an act of conscious chivalry, and when their gazes met, she smiled at him to communicate her approval. He nodded, somewhat awkwardly, and briefly touched the brim of his hat. She was again touched, and inclined her head in the same fashion.

Thunder, then, from somewhere in the stomach of the sky, and her neck twisted to give her vantage of the sidewalk and beyond. It had begun to rain, and unabashedly so, in heavy, full drops that splattered as they struck the concrete. When she turned back around, the man (she couldn’t call him White, she had one, and Whitey was out of the question … Camouflage wasn’t really a color so much as a color of colors - he had a dark beard, she could call him Blackbeard, but that’s breaking the rule - )

“Why don’t you have a seat,” he was saying gruffly, one hand attached to the underside of his chin, scratching.

She blinked at him. “Me?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“Very kind of you,” she said, but did not sit down.

“I have to be goin’, in any case.” He clipped the end consonants from his words like someone clipping a cigar, and she found it delightful for the first time since Maroon had left her, well, marooned, for some Kentucky-fried up-and-coming country singer.

“Thank you.”

“I’m Jeff.” He extended his hand. She could see the topography of his palm was heavily callused, a square shape radiating evenly measured and distributed fingers. From her minute-long dalliance with chiromancy, she recalled that his Mount of Saturn seemed unusually prominent, but couldn’t remember what that entailed.

“Elena.” (She was going to have to come up with a color for him.)

“Really?”

She blinked again, and fell into her habit of re-assessing the physical situation. The empty chair sat between the two of them. His hand was still outstretched. She bit her lower lip & took it in her own. He had a firm grip, but not overly firm - but not so restrained as to display a concern for her fingers. In fact, it seemed he hadn’t really thought about it at all - he simply extended his hand and did what came naturally. They squeezed, shook, and disengaged. Elena was becoming more thrilled by the minute. “Oh - yes. Really,” she said, bewildered by her brain.

Jeff nodded. “Never met an Elena before.”

“First time for everything,” she came back, gamely. He smiled, an easy smile displaying two rows of teeth whiter than his shirt. He leaned in, one foot up on the bottom rung of the chair, folding his arms over his chest. That worried her - she’d read somewhere it was a defensive posture, but seconds after the thought traversed her mind, he unfolded them and stuck a hand in a pocket, letting the other rest on the back of the chair.

“Yep.”

The silence fell like doors being finally breached by a battering ram. They both reached for their drinks at the same time. On the jukebox, someone was playing “Baby, I’m Gonna Leave You.”

Thunder, once more. Over her shoulder, Elena heard someone telling a story

“Jacky told me they’ve been finding wolves around.”

“No way. Where? How many?”

“No one knows where they’re coming from. Jacky’s friend Victor’s brother works at the police station and he told Victor that they’ve had twenty-five calls in the past two nights about wolves in people’s front yards.”

“No shit.”

“I shit you not.”

“Have you seen any?”

“Not yet.”
 and she felt a chill.

Jeff was fishing his wallet from his back pocket, settling up with Randy. Elena pinkened in the cheeks, averted her eyes. “Be careful,” she heard herself saying.

“What’s that?” Jeff turned around.

“There’s wolves.”

He blinked. “Sorry?”

“I just … “ she was motioning over her shoulder when she realized confessing to eavesdropping wasn’t the most attractive trait - did she even want to seem attractive to him? - “I heard. Someone.”

“Wolves.”


“Yeah. In … in the streets.”

He laughed, quietly, and she knew instinctively he wasn’t laughing at her but at the absurdity of the statement. “I’ll be careful.”

“Okay. Good … then. Please do.”

Jeff tipped his hat to her again and exited. She watched him go, admiring his gait, which was slow without being ponderous, deliberate but without pretense. “Thanks for the seat,” she called out, as if to trip him up, but he just waved over a shoulder & the door closed behind him.

and finally, the electric herald of lightning, God’s Holy Camera making a Kodak moment out of the rain-slick streets.

(around the corner, in a garbage-strewn alley, a brindled gray wolf slavers over the corpse of a small cat)

o

she wakes up alone, on the couch in the living room, dazed. feels the hangover brooding like a hurricane just off the coast of her frontal lobe, tracking a slow & painstaking path down behind her face. her mouth is dry and her palms are clammy. she isn’t quite sure how she made it home - can’t remember much after the fifth drink. she remembers the rain ceasing. something about a pregnant mother.

her dreams were vivid and made little sense: she had somehow made friends with a ball bearing, which had sentience, moved of its own accord, and rolled tenderly up and down her body at night. it lived in a small cup on a porch just outside her home, and one day, the cup was thrown senselessly away. her heart tightened as she recalled the dream-moment she discovered, heavy inside of herself with knowing, the absence of the cup, the ball-bearing’s home. some vicious personage had thrown it into the yard, which turned into a salvage lot, which was also somehow a beach. she became obsessed with finding her friend, and years passed with her crawling on her belly through the short grass, the tall grass, picking through the twisted, rusted metal of the junkyard, eventually beaching herself by the indifferent waves. a grain of sand, blown by the wind, tickling up her bare arm - a startle of joy, ecstasy, seizing her by the insides, recalling the sensation of her friend - but an arrogant gust of sea-wind tosses it callously away -

She is wiping the tears from her eyes with the back of her right hand. The rain has stopped, but she can still hear fat, loner drops plunging from the trees’ broad leaves to the unforgiving asphalt below. Fog brushes its belly over the streets of the city. She hauls herself from the couch and prepares some tea. Goes through her morning ablutions, lost in a swirl of imagery. Stares at herself blankly in the bathroom mirror and doesn’t quite recognize the face looking back. She is expressionless but her eyes are red and the skin around them swollen as though needing the pinprick of a lancet.

Later, she sits down to breakfast, and a magazine from months ago.

Later still, she sits, smoking a damp cigarette made clumsily the night before, on her porch.

The possibilities of the day stretch out in front of her, coalescing in the same manner as the fog.

She is waiting for the sun to burn it away.

She is in the habit of making lists.