Under the Nihil by Andy Nowicki

Author:Andy Nowicki
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781935965282
Publisher: Counter-Currents Publishing
Published: 2011-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Once outside again, I hopped on a bus, not really sure where I was bound, and got off at the mall a few miles from my apartment, a place I’d ridden to many times over the last few weeks to compose disposable poetry and scribble stupid drawings. The parking lot was full of cars, and the interior of the building pulsed with life, but I felt no connection with the human warmth and bustle; I surveyed the passing bodies with open disdain, a smirk fastened to my face.

In the bookstore, I picked up a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, sat, and ordered a coffee.

“A little light reading, huh?”

I glanced up, and found myself looking into the mascara-caked eyes of a woman in her forties, accompanied by a girl who was surely younger than twenty. Both were strikingly pretty, but the discerning eye could tell that the older woman’s beauty was starting to fade; in another five years or so it would be utterly gone. A desperation clung to her overly-rouged skin—her smile seemed pulled just a bit too tight, her teeth obviously polished; her nose had perhaps been retouched a time or two. Something hung about her that faintly disconcerted me; it was the first hint of trepidation I’d felt in several days. What was it? I remembered the ghastly grin of my mother in that dream; even though this woman looked nothing like my mother, I could not avoid the inexplicable association.

The girl was another matter entirely. Her dark hair fell in cascading ringlets down her neck; her lovely face radiated boredom and haughtiness. Both mother and daughter—for such they clearly were—wore identical skintight jeans and sparkly, chest-hugging shirts, but the older woman’s spike-heeled boots contrasted sharply with the girl’s more innocent-looking sandals.

Ignoring my burst of unwelcome apprehension, I fixed the woman, who’d spoken the initial words, in a glance that may have bordered on being a glare, but she didn’t take it askance.

“I read that book a long time ago, when I was in college,” she effused. “Well, maybe not that book, but something . . . I’m Clarissa.”

I noticed no ring on her left hand, which she oddly enough held out for me to shake. The girl by now was clearly mortified by her mother’s forwardness with a stranger; she muttered that she had to go to the bathroom, and flounced away, ostentatiously rolling her eyes. Clarissa, ignoring her daughter, asked in a slightly impatient tone, “So, do you read a lot?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“My ex-husband never read a thing except Sports Illustrated,” she told me. “God, he was such a jerk.”

I shrugged sympathetically, and Clarissa asked if she could join me. I nodded with gracious equanimity, and she immediately sunk into the chair across the table. When she began talking again, I caught a strong whiff of the cigarette smoke carried by her breath, but didn’t recoil. Instead, I moved to the edge of my chair, poised like a coiled serpent, a snake-like smile slowly taking shape on my face.

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