Arvida by Samuel Archibald

Author:Samuel Archibald
Language: ara, eng, eng, fra, jpn
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2015-08-12T21:16:22+00:00

Paris in the Rain

BLOOD SISTERS III

He’d died deep in the woods and they’d taken him to the funeral parlour to try and deal with the damage. He’d worked for Abitibi Consolidated, which everyone around called the Console. None of the guys had seen what happened. He’d been split open from shoulder to hip by a machine that could trim trees tall as cathedrals. No one knew how he’d got in the way of the lopper. They were deep in the woods and the guys said that the day before there was a little snow. In June, mind you. Seems he’d made a stain on the ground as big as a puddle of water, thick as molasses and red as a harlot’s mouth.

She was there just by chance. A friend had found her work in his parents’ bistro in France. She’d be staying ten days in Paris before getting on a train for Brittany, and she’d come to say goodbye to her parents before taking off.

The woman at the funeral parlour had been brought up to date, and she met her in a room that reminded her of the reading room in her grandparents’ house. The woman had very beautiful hands, with small fingers, both plump and delicate, and that’s all she could bring herself to think about.

“I’m sorry that you can’t attend the funeral.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re part of the family?”

“Yes.”

“His daughter?”

“No.”

There was a silence.

“You’re going back to Montreal tomorrow?”

“Yes. I’m taking the plane for Paris on Thursday.”

The woman sighed.

“I’ve never been to Paris.”

“Neither have I.”

Something wasn’t quite right, and the woman wouldn’t understand what it was until two days later. Sitting in front of the television set beside her sleeping husband, she would think again of the young woman and her heady odour and her large breasts offered to view through her dress’s plunging neckline. The colour black was the only thing appropriate in her appearance. The cut of her clothes and her perfume and her hair and her thick red lipstick and the brightness of her eyes spoke of something forbidden in that place. The woman would think of the young woman and then those deadly beauties in crime novels who poison their husbands to get their hands on the insurance money.

“She looked like a black widow.”

This idea, expressed aloud to herself alone, raised a thousand questions, and at that moment the only person capable of answering them was flying thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic.

The embalmer was standing right beside his table when the widow entered the room. He turned to face her, and said:

“My sympathies, Miss.”

She didn’t answer.

He’d prepared a speech to warn her. Either he delivered it badly or she didn’t listen or there was no way to make her change her mind, because she said:

“I want to see him.”

The embalmer sighed. He took the sheet by the hem and folded it back to bare the cadaver to halfway down the chest. The woman didn’t move, not a gesture, not a twitch.

“I want to be with him for a while.

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