Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short Stories by Robert Shapard & James Thomas

Author:Robert Shapard & James Thomas [Shapard, Robert & Thomas, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Anthologies (Multiple Authors)
ISBN: 9780393306132
Publisher: Norton
Published: 1989-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

United States

MONICA WOOD

Disappearing

When he starts in, I don’t look anymore, I know what it looks like, what he looks like, tobacco on his teeth. 1 just lie in the deep sheets and shut my eyes. I make noises that make it go faster and when he’s done he’s as far from me as he gets. He could be dead he’s so far away.

Lettie says leave then stupid but who would want me. Three hundred pounds anyway but I never check. Skin like tapioca pudding, I wouldn’t show anyone. A man.

So we go to the pool at the junior high, swimming lessons. First it’s blow bubbles and breathe, blow and breathe. Awful, hot nosefuls of chlorine. My eyes stinging red and patches on my skin. I look worse. We’ll get caps and goggles and earplugs and body cream Lettie says. It’s better.

There are girls there, what bodies. Looking at me and Lettie out the side of their eyes. Gold hair, skin like milk, chlorine or no.

They thought when I first lowered into the pool, that fat one parting the Red Sea. I didn’t care. Something happened when I floated. Good said the little instructor. A little redhead in an emerald suit, no stomach, a depression almost, and white wet

skin. Good she said you float just great. Now we’re getting somewhere. The whistle around her neck blinded my eyes. And the water under the fluorescent lights. I got scared and couldn’t float again. The bottom of the pool was scarred, drops of gray shadow rippling. Without the water I would crack open my head, my dry flesh would sound like a splash on the tiles.

At home I ate a cake and a bottle of milk. No wonder you look like that he said. How can you stand yourself. You’re no Cary Grant I told him and he laughed and laughed until I threw up.

When this happens I want to throw up again and again until my heart flops out wet and writhing on the kitchen floor. Then he would know I have one and it moves.

So I went back. And floated again. My arms came around and the groan of the water made the tight blondes smirk but I heard Good that’s the crawl that’s it in fragments from the redhead when I lifted my face. Through the earplugs I heard her skinny voice. She was happy that I was floating and moving too.

Lettie stopped the lessons and read to me things out of magazines. You have to swim a lot to lose weight. You have to stop eating too: Forget cake and ice cream. Doritos are out. I’m not doing it for that I told her but she wouldn’t believe me. She couldn’t imagine.

Looking down that shaft of water I know I won’t fall. The water shimmers and eases up and down, the heft of me doesn’t matter I float anyway.

He says it makes no difference I look the same. But I’m not the same. 1 can hold myself up in deep water.

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