MAY WE SHED THESE HUMAN BODIES by Amber Spark

Author:Amber Spark [Spark, Amber]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Curbside Splendor Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2012-09-13T22:00:00+00:00

She decides to spend the day at the bookstore. She heads for the section marked ‘Travel’ and finds a hardbound road atlas. She sits on the floor and balances it in her lap, her hair brushing over a corn-colored Iowa. She watches the smallish balding man leafing restlessly through a copy of The Really Unofficial Guide to Disney World, and she drops down, lightly, into the land of Other People. She tilts her head, regards him with curiosity.

What’s your favorite state? she asks.

He turns to her and frowns a little, and she begins to feel disappointed. She is just starting to think that he is too much like her, too dependent on layers, too much in love with his Personal Space, when he smiles a little and says, Maine, I think.

Really, Maine? Why? She knows nothing about Maine.

We used to go to my grandparents’ cottage up there when I was a kid, he says. It’s really beautiful. He shakes his head, and with embarrassment she sees that his shirt is unbuttoned too much, reveals too large a patch of flabby white chest, maggoty-looking and hairless. She looks down at her book, flips the pages until she finds the map of Maine. The man leans down and stabs his stubby finger down on a dot near the coast. Great Pond, he says. That’s where the cottage was. He smiles again and she begins to worry a little. She thinks he can probably see down her shirt. She shifts a little and her long hair falls into her eyes, and when she brushes it back she is sure he takes this for flirting. Then she notices a ring on his left ring finger and relaxes a little.

So what happened to it?

Maine? It’s still there, I hope, he says.

No, your grandparents’ cottage. She tries to smile encouragingly, finds it a foreign sensation. It’s like her muscles have forgotten the trick of it. Do you still go there? she asks.

His face changes. She’s asked the wrong question. She is always asking the wrong questions. He straightens and picks up his book, starts to walk out of the aisle. It’s gone now, he says, mostly to himself. And she wishes she could feel bad, but all she really feels is relief because she doesn’t have to look at his maggoty chest anymore. She thrusts her face into the atlas and pretends to be absolutely engrossed in Maine’s highway system.

And then she is engrossed. Not by the highway system, but by the idea of Maine as somewhere she could go. She would like to drive to Maine, maybe live in a cottage on the ocean and catch lobster and never see any people at all unless she goes down to talk with the local fishermen or something. She could get a dog and walk it. Yes. Ruby can picture herself in deepest July, wearing floral print dresses and walking everywhere, everywhere barefoot and sea-salted and hardened as hardtack. Yes. It sounds right. It sounds like a place to be.

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