The Laboratory of Love by Patrick Roscoe

Author:Patrick Roscoe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Psychological, Short Stories (Single Author), Gay, Fiction
ISBN: 9781551525211
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2013-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Phantasmagoria

They say that you were just a dream, but now the night is over. At chill dawn I waken once more in the cabin on the lake, with pines pressed behind and the meadow farther back. There is the shape of your head indented upon the pillow, the scent of your last cigarette stale in the air. Night turned traitor, inhaled, and held its breath while you stole away, while I slept unaware.

If I believed them, we never scattered yellow leaves on the road to Redfish Creek or rowed the boat to Sunshine Bay to drink wine upon the midnight cliff. I search drawers and corners and beneath the bed for proof of your presence. Where are your shirts that furled within the closet, the razor rusting beside the sink? All evidence has been immaculately removed (by you?), and now with insistent voices empty space demands to be filled. You were here, I know—even as they repeat that imagination plays pranks and desire conjures phantoms that hover like mist above cold water before they fade. I remember that you never said you’d stay.

The long grass stiffens with frost and the kettle steams upon the stove and a boomerang of birds slides above the slate lake. Sometimes the damp morning earth betrays the spoor of prowling through the dark. Claws, hooves, paws.

So at night I turn the pages of my books and hear the ferry cross back and forth nearby, connecting this side to the other. Tomorrow I will see you standing on the farther shore, shrunken by distance into anyone at all, dissolved into blue and green and grey, reflected upon the still water. And I will glimpse you walking through the woods above the old man’s farm. You turn once to glance behind, then continue toward the clearing where we lay in tall weeds through summer afternoons languid with bees. Even now I know the shape and size and texture of the muscles that strode your legs from me. From a distance, well-intentioned neighbours arrive at noon to say that I will soon forget, or will dream a new lover in the night.

Each week darkness arrives earlier, and the snow-line lowers. A descending lake exposes small stones that were concealed by water before. Already it is winter and summer people have retreated into town. Cabins are locked tight; they twitch with ghosts. We listen for the last train to whistle above the water; we split enough wood to warm us from November until March. There is coffee in the morning, a candle for the night. The refrigerator buzzes. Mice rattle between the walls.

Perhaps your voice draws me out this afternoon, and I find myself on the point beyond the wooden bridge. I realize I’ve been here before. I know this landscape that you are coming back to breathe with me. In the meantime, another Kokanee wind sweeps down the valley, and my warm breath puffs above Lovers’ Lane. Bears curl in safe, dark caves, and deer descend the mountains in search of food beneath the snow.

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