Lake of Urine: A Love Story by Guillermo Stitch

Author:Guillermo Stitch [Stitch, Guillermo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Humour
ISBN: 9781944697945
Google: oVOuygEACAAJ
Amazon: B0872J1VC6
Barnesnoble: B0872J1VC6
Goodreads: 53972281
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Published: 2020-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Bedroom

THERE’S NO ONE in the room at the end of the landing, a distance from the pastor’s and next to the one that Phinoola Quigg took for herself. Emma was moved here once she’d outgrown the swaddling accoutrements of the nursery. The bedroom hangs beneath a gable of the house so the window is low to the floor; the bed, made new for the girl, appears big and tall on the opposite wall, on the other side of which Phinoola Quigg would sit and press her ear to a tumbler, listening.

The bed was built for Emma to grow into; at first, its roughly turned bobbins and balusters of light and dark wood dwarfed her—asleep, she might have been mistaken for a doll tucked up in a real child’s bed, a miniature in a life-sized world. Awake, the discrepancy was every bit as marked—the little girl found herself in a grown woman’s room, furnished with just one stocky wooden wardrobe, two stick chairs, a writing desk by the window, and the one concession to her youth—a gray rocking horse which took up the rest of the space and which she was soon enough forbidden to use, on account of the noise it made on the floorboards.

“How many sides on an enneadecagon?”

“Nineteen.”

“A tetrakaidecagon?”

“Fourteen.”

“What is the capital of Bolivia?”

“La Paz.”

“And what could they possibly have in La Paz that would be of any interest to us?”

“Tin.”

“And what would we be doing with tin?”

“It is malleable, ductile and has a highly crystalline structure. We coat things in it. We cover them up. It slows down the inevitable corrosion of everything. It staves off the rot.”

“Do we rot?”

“We do.”

“When we die?”

“Before we die. We are rotting now.”

“Even you? A child?”

“Especially me.”

“Can we not stop the rot?”

“No.”

“Can we not slow it down?”

“Perhaps.”

“With tin?”

“No.”

“Then how?”

“One: submission. Two: work. Three: prayer. Four: unseasoned vegetables. Five: in the winter, dress for winter. In the summer, dress for winter. Six . . . six . . .”

“Ah, isn’t it well for you that you only need to take five steps, and the rest of us laboring away over here with our seven?”

“Seven. For every confession, a denunciation. For every denunciation, a light snack or similar reward.”

“Well isn’t this a fine state of affairs? We can count to seven, can we, without passing six? It’s a new way of counting, is it?”

“Six . . .”

There still hangs, above the bed, a framed painting that Phinoola Quigg put there to edify the child—a bar scene depicting the brawl that has broken out over a card game and all of the protagonists, despite their clothing and their recognizably human bearing, are canine. The card table is upturned and behind it a Cuban Dogge, for example, with a cigar hanging from its jaw, stands in the half shadow. Next to it, a Cordobese Fighter in a bowler hat with its paw on the haunch of a pipe-smoking Bullenbeisser. The three friends spectate gleefully as a big old Molossus pins a Blue Poll Terrier to the floor—the latter in a three piece suit—and slits its belly with a switch blade.

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