Oh! by Mary Robison

Author:Mary Robison
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781640090927
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

22

Chris had talked Maureen onto the brick veranda. She stretched in a vinyl and aluminum chaise. He sat backwards on a cast-iron chair, and ran his finger around the tracery of the chair’s leafy pattern. “I’ve done this all wrong,” he said. “I shouldn’t have groveled. It’s unappealing. I’ve had no pride.”

“How eerie,” Maureen said, looking up. The wind had died and, in the calm, the light was beige. “I can’t locate the sun.” Sooty clouds swarmed, billowed, tore apart, but without the sound track of the wind. Brilliant splinters of lightning ignited from cloud to cloud, yet there was no report. “Whew! It’s like the overture’s finished and the curtain’s about to go up.”

“You know what I think?” Chris said, his face caught in a stare. “I think when I won that lottery I used up all the luck I’ll ever have.”

“That’s occurred to me,” Maureen said. “You also used up your twenty minutes.”

“Give me two more minutes,” Chris said.

“I knew it. Got a light?”

He said, “Maureen? Who gave you so much liquor? You know when you get squashed you throw up.”

“I used to be that way. I’m not that way anymore. I’m this way. But here’s Chris, everybody, dragging a tornado with him. We’re all so happy to see you.”

“Could I have my lighter back, please? Guilt? Is that what I inspire in you?”

“You are the past,” she said. “I hate it. I don’t even want one. My past is a joke. Violet—there’s one joke. She gets under everyone’s feet and she reminds them that I, Maureen, am a twenty-four-year-old failure. What are you looking at?” Her legs opened as she twisted in the chair.

Chris’s eyes went back and forth, from the high, sun-tanned insides of her thighs to a white shape in the sky that was revolving and reaching for the ground. The funnel was half a mile up, rumbling enormously. Hailstones flew crossways, like pellets shot from a gun.

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