Stunt by Claudia Dey

Author:Claudia Dey [Dey, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9781770562202
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 2008-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

Leopold cannot cry. That is why he has so many onions. When he needed to cry to his mother, he would crawl under his bed with a butter knife and slice the onions open and gaze into them until his eyes went watery. When you left, and he had to beg and bleed for days to attend your funeral, she caught him under his bed with the onions. That is why he had the surplus. You left just when he thought of asking you to teach him how to cry. He wanted his hurt to fit him the way it fit you.

Immaculata straightens the cuffs of my suit and runs her fingers down my face, a Braille she can read. We untwine her hair from my wrist. It leaves a red tangle. We hug, buoyant as ocean water, a love surging between us, indelible, my sister’s indelible imprint. Feeling the impermanence of all things, the spin of the earth, the pull of a gravity all my own, I move away. She leans into my ear, sugar breath, ‘Just don’t let it make you love differently.’ I look at her bones. Archaeologists will mull over them one day. Even as dust in their hands, they will be able to tell that she was beautiful, oppressively beautiful. This is how we lived, this is how we lived.

Her step a lope, she returns to Leopold and the dogs, the pine needles not breaking beneath her feet. Beside them, her face is a burning white candle.

And then, the one word we never heard, ‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

We sew up the moment.

I open the letter.

Ms. Ledoux,

Did your doom-fucked policemen not sing, E minor, ‘The

gentleman Finbar is dead, dear, the gentleman Finbar is dead’?

The letters are tall and shaken, the last word, dead, and its attendant question mark, only partly on the page. His eyes could not see where the page ended and the dresser began. He writes on a dresser. All other surfaces occupied: bottles, nail clippers, rinds of cheese, the stale ends of bread, newspapers, photographs, costume jewellery from the days before her fall. I lift it to my nose. The weather lingers in the paper, the wet weather, the extravagant heavy green. All of his windows must be either open or broken.

I do not see the letter as a caution. He took the time to pull himself from the deep, and he wrote. Oh. And he’s not dead. Huzzah. Huzzah.

Return address: a PO box.

Postage: Canada.

June 10, 1981

Dear I. I. Finbar Me the Three,

I am eighteen now. As I understand it, this has some currency

in your world. Please send directions.

Eugenia

Past the prostitutes, heeled and shimmering, calling me pussycat and honeydoughnut and angelface, past the church, past the mission, I mail the letter to Finbar and step off our street. Goodbye, Dunn Avenue. I salute the air. Pow pow.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.