Hum: Stories by Richmond Michelle

Author:Richmond, Michelle [Richmond, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781573668453
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 2014-02-28T20:00:00+00:00

***

That first time, I was covered with lacerations. Tiny red marks all over the front of my body, like thousands of paper cuts, and also on my back where his arms had embraced me. All through the night I kept waking in pain, the fresh wounds damp with blood, my body sticking to the soft flannel sheets. Beside me, he slept soundly, his scales wet-seeming in the moonlight, his face the picture of peace. I couldn’t help but feel, somehow, that I had saved him, although it would occur to me later that it was the other way around. In any event, that first morning-after, when I woke to the sound of his scaled feet clicking softly against the tile floor, I knew that I would stay with him. That I would make a home there in that house by the bay. Maybe it was the disfiguring effect of our first attempt at love—after all, I had never been loved so dramatically. More likely, it was the fact of his having accomplished something no other man had ever been able to do: with him, I had fallen easily, happily, willingly into silence.

I can say without reservation that the weeks that followed were the best weeks of my life. Days, I went out looking for a new job while he concealed himself in the house, making notes for a memoir he planned to write. He was very secretive about the book, would not let me see so much as a single page, kept the steadily growing manuscript locked away in a file cabinet. It was a house of secrets to which I was not privy, but I had my secrets too. I did not mention to him the flaw that had brought all my previous relationships, romantic and otherwise, to an abrupt and tearful end. I did not tell him that I had laid cruel waste to a long cadre of therapists, professionals who, though trained to listen, could not bear to listen to me. Or that my second-to-last boyfriend had been so put off by my incessant talking that, following our break-up, he’d taken up with a woman who rarely spoke, who made her living as a mime on the streets of New York City. I did not tell him that my own mother would not take my calls.

He had fallen in love with a certain girl, the one he met that night at the end of the pier, the one who sat silently and listened to his stories. In order to keep him, I would remain that girl. It was easier than I could have imagined: he held my rapt attention, and I, miracle of miracles, held my fevered tongue.

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