The Closet Devil: Short Stories by Anthony Pour

Author:Anthony Pour [Pour, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature
Published: 2014-06-09T22:00:00+00:00

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Brazilian Rain Forest

Jane’s Rear End

The road to hell is paved

with good intentions.

The drumbeat of a tropical downpour on the thatch roof of Jane’s hut ceased shortly before daybreak, and in the abrupt silence, the bloodthirsty whine of mosquitoes began to sound like a buzz inside the brain.

It only let up at first light, when the rising sun woke the lizards in the roof, and one scourge was replaced by another. The instant heat of a new day got the cold-blooded reptiles in the thatch going in no time flat, and when the commotion dropped a few reptile-like grass blades on the mosquito netting over Jane’s bed, she scuttled out just to be on the safe side. Not that she would not believe the Station Chief’s repeated reassurances that there were no poisonous lizards in this neck of the woods —it was not that. It was the place itself that was beginning to get to her. She just could not shake off the feeling that one day a snake might drop down on the mosquito net, slither through, and slip in between her bed sheets.

She slept naked. Her three-hundred-thread-count bed linen was the only fabric that would stick to the skin in style in this kind of humidity, and she was glad for the supply she had brought with her. Back home in Boston no one she knew slept in anything else. It was only out here that fine linen had made her the butt of the Station Chief’s jokes—which, together with his exasperating tongue-in-cheek enthusiasm about the work she had come here to do, made her feelings for him very hard to sort out.

She and Harry Gibbs, the Station Chief, were the only Americans within thousands of square miles of what he called damned jungle—rain forest by her definition—stretching between the Colombian border further West and the nearest Brazilian shanty town to the East. A sluggish, muddy river with no clearly defined banks and an ambiguous current was their only earthly link to the world, which made his patronizing attitude particularly uncalled for, and she had to think of him every time she went to bed at night.

The caressing touch of her high-thread-count bed linen on bare skin would invariably bring up images of him sweating it out under the coarse covers of his messy cot, chuckling about rich kids’ sleeping habits. His hut was just a few paces away from hers, and she could all but hear his mind clicking as it honed the next morning rendition of his tired joke about her daytime attire. She was not unaware that under normal circumstances the thin elastic tights she wore day in, day out could be considered provocative. Out here, though, they were a necessity: the only piece of civilized clothing that offered some degree of comfort. The pliable fabric clung to the skin instead of sticking to sweat like everything else, and he had a standing joke about that—a joke that would start a day on the same wrong note and stonewall any feelings she might have had for him at night.

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