Boulevard by Jim Grimsley

Author:Jim Grimsley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Published: 2002-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

Louisiana Purchase

Leigh had asked Mark for the merest cut. A trifle. She had draped herself on the settee and opened her robe. The skin at the top of her breasts beginning to crease in that powdery way, white as milk. Such a fine skin. “Just do touch it to the skin.” Her breath moving her so the blue veins lifted and subsided, she added, “You have a delicate touch, it’s in the fingertips.” She pulled the robe below her shoulders. She and Mark looked into each other’s eyes now, breathing together.

Through the open door, in the dim bedroom beyond, Jack coughed, one deep sound, his shadow moving on the wall. Mark lay the blade onto Leigh’s skin, hardly touching her, drawing the tipmost edge of the razor over the fine white creases, Leigh’s breathing changing and the insides of her thighs shivering. He could see the motion where her robe had come open. Her breath caught and a flush rose through her and she smiled in a glimmering that became for an instant some other expression. She was rolling her eyes back in her head. Red blood trickled in a line down her breast. “That’s good,” she said, pulling the robe onto her shoulders again, “I knew you could do it,” but when she stood her eyes slid past him to the open door where Jack’s shadow had stopped on the wall, waiting. “This is so nice of you.” Standing, with a nod of the head, one only, she stepped past him. Currents of air, everything, including the light she shed, smelled of her.

She paused at the open door, the robe gliding off her shoulders. She went into the bedroom and closed the door. Mark listened for a while. He laid the razor in the marble bowl, a drop of red pooling at the blade tip.

He was supposed to go away now. Not supposed to open the door and go inside himself. Leigh had told him so.

When he headed for the streets, he was looking for nothing. Out the courtyard and down the long, dark passageway to Governor Nicholls, opening the wooden door and closing it, he headed into a night with a smell of rain. He could feel the edge of the trip, now. He liked these first moments of chemical sensation, the taste of metal in the back of his throat. The feeling that his stomach was rising onto his ribs. Mark Cascade, he thought. No. Mark Chase. Or Chace. Mark Stone. Mark Rampart. Like the street, like the sign, the word he liked in his head, and every sound rushing at him in full doppler, a feeling of something in motion passing and receding, gone, so precise, every sound passing, the world.

He felt as if he could not get his breath, there was something constricting his ribs, but he did manage to take a breath, easily; the feeling stayed that he would strangle but he kept breathing, and walking, and his head felt as if it were becoming detached from his body.

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