James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt

It’s a great pleasure when I discover a writer who makes me smile knowingly, nod my head vigorously, and exult out loud, “that’s wonderful, that’s just right, that’s brilliant.” I have just finished reading, for the second time, James Lasdun’s latest short story collection, It’s Beginning to Hurt (2009). ” I first read him in the 2010 O. Henry Award collection, which included his story “O Death.” This is his third collection. Based on this reading, I have just ordered his first two, The Silver Age (1985) and Three Evenings (1992). I’m embarrassed that I have somehow missed his work up till now. I think he is an excellent short story writer. I recommend him to you very highly.

I would like to tell you why I think he is so good, but it is of course easier to explain why you think a writer is weak than it is to explain why he is so strong. I like most all the stories in this collection. I would like to sit down beside you and point to each one in turn, saying “read this, read this.” I would like to watch your face as you read and say, “See, see, what did I tell you?” Isn’t he great?” But hell, that’s no good. It’s like when I was a teenager and really liked a new song I heard on the radio and wanted so badly to share it with someone, preferably a pretty girl, and watch her face while she listened, knowing that she felt exactly the same way that I did. But that never happened. So I will lamely try to convey why I think Lasdun is so damned good. I will just comment on two of the stories. But you gotta promise you will read them all.

The title story is only about 500 words or so. If you Google Lasdun’s name under the video category, you can find a short film of his reading it. Here’s what happens in the story: A guy’s wife calls him at work to tell him to pick up a salmon for dinner. He has been at a funeral of a woman who had been his mistress seven years earlier. The salmon is too long for the office fridge, so he goes to the stock room, where it is cooler than in his office, and puts it in a filing cabinet. But he forgets it, and when he gets home and tells his wife, the last line of the story has her say: “You’re a fool. You’re a complete bloody fool.”

That’s it. That’s the whole plot line. But the story has many complex implications that it is not easy to explain. The one paragraph remembrance of the dead woman on the train ride home is sufficient to convey what the man has lost. He is in real estate, and since he and his mistress cannot afford hotels they pretended she is a client and made love in a number of the houses he represented. They could pretend they were bohemian students, or rich socialites. He felt he was the happiest man alive, for she did not ask him to leave his family. Then she ended it abruptly by saying: “I’m in love with you, and it’s beginning to hurt.”

I like the choices Lasdun has made in this story. It’s just right that the central metaphor is that oversized salmon turning rank in a filing cabinet drawer, where things are filed away to be forgotten. It’s just right that he and his lover have made love in many different transitory houses, for that not only communicates the temporary nature of the relationship but also the fantasy nature of it. All is well, until that fateful day when matter-of-factly, she tells him that because she loves him, “it’s beginning to hurt.” A perfectly apt and irresistible one line! When he goes home, it is just right that his wife calls him a bloody fool. For that not only justifies the happy affair he has had and reminds us that he was a bloody fool for giving up a woman who loved him, it also reminds him. The poor son of a bitch! You can judge him, but you have to sympathize with him. This final reader situation of being torn between sympathy and judgment is what the short story does so well.

“The Anxious Man” won the first UK National Short Story Prize in 2006, beating out one of my top three favorite short-story writers, William Trevor. Here’s what happens in the story: Joseph Nagel is on vacation with his wife, Elise, and daughter on Cape Cod, but he is not having a relaxing time. He is a dealer in antique prints and furniture, and his wife does web design, making them modestly comfortable. However, his wife has inherited some money—a little under a quarter million after estate taxes—and for the first time they have some capital. He now feels a sense of responsibility he has never felt before; desirable things now seem necessities to him. He and his wife go to a Wall Street money manager. Joseph is enthusiastic; but Elise thinks the man is a creep. Joseph comes to agree and urges Elise to invest the money herself. At first, things go well and the stock goes up, but then it goes down just as rapidly. Watching the market exhausts Joseph, and he feels that by investing the money his wife has “unwittingly attached him by invisible filaments to some vast, seeing, collective psyche that never rested.”

The stock market comes to represent some uncontrollable reality that torments him. It is a “nightmarish discovery” that when you get in you cannot get out—can’t sell when you are ahead because you might miss getting further ahead, can’t sell when you are down because the market might come back. “Whatever you did, it seemed you were bound to regret doing it, or not having done it sooner…It was as though some malicious higher power, having inspected the workings of the human mind, had calibrated a torment for it based on precisely the instincts of desire and caution that were supposed to enable it to survive.”

Joseph goes into a market to buy scallops and witnesses an incident in which a woman first in line to buy the last two lobsters is distracted for a moment, allowing another smartly dressed woman confidently to claim them. He feels ashamed that he did nothing to correct the matter. When he gets back to the house where they are staying, his wife and daughter are not there and he begins to worry. He swims across a quarter-mile lake worrying all the while, falling into a superstitious mode in which he thinks on the swim back, “If I close my eyes and hold my breath for seventeen strokes, Elise and Darcy will be there on the jetty.” When he gets back, they are standing there and he cannot resist the joyful relief he feels. “A surge of love came into him, and with it a feeling of shame. How crazily out of perspective he had let things get, to have allowed money to loom larger in his mind than his own daughter!”

The daughter has found a young friend who she is visiting next door, and when Joseph and Elise got to get her, he discovers that the wife is the imperious woman who claimed the lobsters. They agree to have a cook-out with them, and Joseph goes home to get the scallops to go along with the lobster. The husband has made successful investments on Wall Street and Joseph experiences a new feeling of well being at the possibilities the market will rebound. He even thinks the wife has eyes for him. He feels too good and drinks too much.

Elise becomes very angry with Joseph when he agrees to let their daughter spend the night. The situation worsens next morning when Elise goes to get the girl and there is no one at the house. They become panicked and Joseph wonders if this catastrophe is what he has felt preparing itself inside him. ‘His obscure, abiding sense of himself as a flawed and fallen human being seemed suddenly clarified: he was guilty and he was being punished.” He thinks of ways he can propitiate, thinking if his daughter will return, he will sacrifice something valuable. He will devote himself to the poor and needy, and this makes him feel a joyous calm. He feels full of faith and hope. When the daughter does return and all is well, he feels that his panic was absurd and shameful. The story ends with him listening to the Marketplace morning report. “Lifting a watermelon from the fridge, he set it on the counter and cut himself a thick slice. He ate it nervously while he listened.”

As is usual with a great short story, a plot summary is totally inadequate to explain what makes it a great short story. What Lasdun does so brilliantly here is put a man in a situation in which he knows he has no control—either over the world around him or within himself. He bounces back and forth between anxiety and relief, between being in his wife’s good graces and being out of favor with her, between feeling confident and feeling inadequate. I like how Lasdun captures that familiar feeling we all have when we make promises to some invisible and impossible power outside ourselves, saying, “please, if you will only give me this, I promise I will do that.” There is always that sense that there is something out there or in me that I cannot control, no matter how hard I try. I want to be strong, but I am often weak. I want to be honest with myself, but sometimes I do not see myself clearly. I don’t believe in mysterious ominous forces in the world, but sometimes there seems no other explanation.

“An Anxious Man,” like all of Lasdun’s stories, reaffirms my long-held conviction that short stories are not about specific events, social movements, concepts, ideas, themes, etc., but rather about some ineffable, complex, universal, human experience. What is this story about? It’s about anxiety, an anxious man. At the end when he is sitting there eating that thick slice of watermelon, it is just right that he is eating it “nervously.” He has a right to be nervous. Who knows what’s going to happen next? Damn. Who knows if I can handle it or if it will have its way with me. What do I do now?

Well, what I’m going to do now is to read more James Lasdun’s short stories. I hope you will too. If you do, let me know what you think. You’ll see what I mean. I’m telling you, the guy is great.

In the Late Morning

I said there'd be at least one more short story this month, and I was right.  Though this isn't the one I planned on.  This one just sort of came out over coffee this morning.

Be sure to check out all of the stories on the site by clicking on the complete list.  I'm still waiting on final approval to post my Chain Story as well. 



Be sure to check out my recent collections available on the Kindle. 

            She smiled and added a deep love and care to her voice, "I love you."

            I smiled back and laughed.  "I love you, too."

            "What's so funny?"

            "I'm not laughing because of anything funny."

            "What then?"

            "It's just been a while, is all."

            I ran my hand across her cheek and down her neck, pulling the sheet down to her waist and pressing her bare chest up against mine.  Then, I kissed her quickly, trying to catch her before she clenched her lips together in an effort to keep her morning breath in.

            She shooed me away.  "I haven't brushed my teeth yet."

            "I don't care.  Love isn't just blind, it doesn't have a sense of smell or taste, either.  Doubly so before it's gotten out of bed."

            She giggled and covered her face over with the sheet.  "Don't look at me.  I'm not cute in the mornings."

            "Says who?"

            "Says me.  I'm not showered, I'm exhausted, I've got bags under my eyes, I'm just...ugh."

            "You are a beautiful, shimmering angel."

            "You're really laying it on thick today, aren't you?"

            "Isn't it my right as a doting boyfriend?"

            She smiled again, this time unconsciously flashing her teeth and brightening her almond colored eyes with love.

            "I love how smiley you are this morning."

            "Aren't I always this full of sunshine?"

            "Only when we sleep in."

            "Ha."  She laughed. "Maybe."

            The cool gray of a clouded morning slowly gave way to the orange and yellow of the sun peeking out from the clouds, bright and fresh as though the clouds had let the sun sleep in, too.

            We both laid there, considering each other deeply.  I wondered what this morning would have been like without her at my side and decided I didn't like any of the options my imagination came up with.

            "What did you mean before?"

            "What did I mean before about what?"

            "About it being a while. What was that supposed to mean?"

            "Oh, I don't know.  Nothing?"

            "Don't do that."

            "I don't know..."  I knew.  I just didn't have the right words.  As people often do, I knew exactly what I meant and how I felt, but felt too embarrassed and foolish to say it out loud.  Somehow, the feeling had crystallized in my brain and it was beyond words, and now that I tried forming words to describe it, I was failing miserable.  It's virtually impossible to describe a feeling that complex.  Maybe things would be easier if we could just touch each other and share the exact sentiment we're trying to get across.  Maybe one day humans will find it necessary for survival, but I didn't have that luxury. 

            "Well, you know.  Things haven't been rainbows and lollypops all the time.  And we've both been working ourselves stupid.  And...  you know...  I can be an insensitive, insufferable son of a bitch..."

            "I know.  You've been better lately, though."

            "It's because for a while it didn't feel like you meant it when you said, 'I love you.'"

            "I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it."

            "Deep down I suppose I knew you meant it, but it was like the scattered embers of a once raging fire."

            "Were you writing bad poetry in your dreams?"

            "Always."

            I forced a smile and carried on.  "I felt like I was losing you.  And I've been trying.  I've been trying to be sweeter, to make less of a big deal of things, trying to recapture that newness of our love.  I'm trying to fix, at least in small ways, the things I know bug you the most."

            She grew serious, laying there, watching me talk with a measure of solemnity carefully added to her features.

            "When you said it this morning, you had that warmth, that fire back in your voice.  I could feel it, in my heart, as a thrill up my spine, and it all shook out as a smile on my face.  It felt like the first time in a long time that you meant it like you used to, and it was the best thing I could ask for."

            She took a moment to think over what she was going to say, then she leaned in close, whispering into my ear, adding to those excited chills of love, "Of course I love you.  And sure, things were rough, but I love and care deeply about you.  And I'm not going anywhere."

            My excitement turned elsewhere.  She noticed and bit her lip coyly.

            "You are so effing adorable."

            She cocked an eyebrow and grinned crookedly, "You better believe it."

GUEST STORY: The Man in the Box

We have another Guest Story from my brother, Jason Young.   These are excerpts from his second novel that read as short stories.  Be sure to check out all of the stories on the site, including Jason's by clicking on the complete list.  I'm still waiting on final approval to post my Chain Story as well.  I'll have another story this month also, to make up for last month.



Be sure to check out my recent collections available on the Kindle.  You can check out Jason's Kindle offerings here.





     I had a dream of a stone prison…

     I didn’t know where I was, because I could see the world outside myself. There was a transport that traveled an endless desert. It rolled across the golden sand with its deep iron tread. It lifted the sand and dropped it back onto itself like a water wheel. It would move as long as there was sand in the desert. I tried to point my focus to the burning sky, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t comprehend its dimensions. There was a pilot steering the craft in a straight line. I couldn’t be sure if the pilot was also the architect of the craft. All I know is that the pilot appeared the same as the distorted sky, and I couldn’t tell if it was a he or a she. I couldn’t even see if it was a human being, but my imagination told me that that was the only thing that it could be.

     The transport carried two heavy stone slabs, moored to the back with gilded chains. The stones were the shape of a box and they were held tightly together so that not even a single ray of light could pass through their divide.

     The transport moved on and on, and everything was the same so that there was no reason to differentiate one moment from the next. Every aspect of the world was a constant and because of its consistency it felt like death. After a long time, what felt like an eternity, the transport came to a stop.    

     The golden chains that were bored through the stone began to fall into the sand. As the chains fell, the stones were pulled apart, slowly grating across the transports metal surface. The sound was so loud, that the whole world began to shake and I couldn’t see anything clearly until the chains sat in piles in the sand and the stones came to a halt. I looked into the gap between the stones where there were shapes etched out of both sides in the exact dimensions of a man. In the recess of the stone was a man, finally liberated from the box. Though he was free from his prison, he was still held to the stone with a leather strap around his throat. He remained still and silent, but I could see his chest moving in and out and I wondered how he had survived inside the box for so long.

     I imagined what it would feel like to be trapped inside the box myself, the darkness, the isolation, the fear. the stones pressed so tight that I couldn’t fill my lungs with air. I imagined the torture of being buried alive, but this was somehow worse. I lost the will to live. I imagined an eternity of suffering, and wishing I could die. Praying for the release that is an iron maiden. No sight, no sound, the darkness. I wanted to call out to the man and tell him to break free. I could think of no better pleasure than to see the man stretch out his ancient arms, and hear the crack of his idle bones.

     But he didn’t move, and the chains pulled themselves back into the stone. And the stones came together. And the man was entombed in the stone again. And the transport went on until the desert ran out of sand. And I was the man. And I would do anything to die, anything to not exist, but I couldn’t, and the desert was endless.



Aegis’ Dream



     I dreamt of eternal night. I was trapped but I didn’t know where. I couldn’t hear a sound, and though I understood that I had a body, I had no control over it. The only part of me that was at liberty was my mind, which I used to put the fathoms of darkness behind me.

     The day came that I heard a sound, chains cutting into stone. And then there was light. Only then could I see that I was entombed between two great stones that were sitting upon a mechanized transport. I could feel my body for the first time, and the heat of the sun. I suddenly felt the fear of the stone prison. A fear that wasn’t possible until I understood the horror that I was forced to endure. I got off the transport and saw only scorched ground in every direction. A wind blew over the barren landscape and lifted the last of the deserts sand from the cracks in the surface. I went to the driver’s compartment, but there was no one to be found, and no sign that there ever was a driver. The unit was completely robotic. It had no steering wheel or pedals, just a vial lying on its side filled with a murky liquid. I took the vial in my hand, and I can’t explain how, but it told me that I would have to go on a journey. It told me that I would have to walk the desert until I grew old, the direction didn’t matter. I stepped away from the vehicle that had no driver, and I looked to the sky that had no clouds. I could see so far that the sky was ripped in half. On one side there were the nights dark stars. And on the other side, the night's adversary, the burning sun. When I started walking I was a young man and once I started I couldn’t stop, but I kept walking until I was old and approaching dark death. My feet were worn and calloused. My back was spindly and bent. I had a grey beard that reached the Earth, and my eyes were buried beneath my wrinkled skin. I held the vial still; my hand was swollen around it. I arrived at my destination. It was nowhere in particular, just the place my feet wouldn’t carry me beyond. I bend my weary back to the ground, and I poured the contents of the vial into a scar in the surface. The scar was bottomless, as if the entire universe lied directly beneath. By the time I lifted myself back up, I could see that all around me the land was covered with green life. The ground was soft, and it took the pain from my crooked toes, giving me the life to walk a little further. I walked into the forest until I came to a throne, and I knew that it was mine because I was the father of the forest. I sat down for the first time since my journey began, and the years melted from my face. I thought my youth was being returned to me. Through the trees I could see the sun reverse direction, and like a curtain it pulled the sky behind it. I was already a young man, but the stars kept passing over my head going the wrong direction. The sun dropped until it was dawn, and the stars dwindled until there was none left. I lied in my throne an infant, but the sky kept pulling itself back until it was a white nothing, and the throne was empty because the infant was never born, but the throne remained. And though I was a nothing, I could see the white light. And I would do anything to be born again.

     I would do anything to live.

Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

I am trying to catch up with all the collections suggested and recommended to me after posting my “favorite 100 short story collection of the 21st century” list. So, here’s my response to my favorite question—“I would really like to know what you think about…--”vis-a-vis Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006).

This is a youthful book in many ways. Russell was only 25 when the book came out. Lord, one of the stories, “Haunting Olivia,” came out in the New Yorker when she was only 22! A graduate of Columbia’s MFA program (No. 25 in Poets and Writers' Top Fifty MFA programs in the Sept/Oct issue), Russell raises the suspicion that many of these stories were written as class assignments. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except writing to an assignment is sort of like teaching to the test, isn’t it? Could lead to a narrow sort of focus aimed to please.

I read the first two stories—“Ava Wrestles the Alligator” and “Haunting Olivia” with pleasure. They made me smile. The basic concept that seems to guide the book-- a concept that Russell probably discovered as she wrote the first couple of stories—might be expressed this way: Since from their own perspective, children sometimes feel they live in a quite different universe than their parents (which is why fairy tales appeal to children), why not explore some of the basic conflicts that young people experience—peer pressure, sibling rivalry, conflict with parents, burgeoning sexuality—from the perspective of a world that, while it seems somehow familiarly real, is really most definitely strange and surreal? Not a bad idea, right? But for me, a little of this goes a long way. After reading subsequent stories in the book about alternate worlds—such as a sleep-away camp for disordered dreamers, a palace of artificial snows, and a city of shells—by the time I got to the last story about a home for girls raised by wolves, I was not smiling quite so much.

I will comment only on the two stories that I liked the best. In “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” Ava (whose name she tells us is a palindrome—where she got that little byte of info is not known) is jealous of her overweight sister named Ossie, who, like Karen Russell herself (who is not overweight, but is cheerleader cute) “has entire kingdoms inside of her.” Mainly, Ossie is “possessed” by horny boyfriends, currently one named Luscious, invoked by her for masturbatory fantasies. Ava and Ossie’s family own a Gator Theme Park in the Everglades named Swamplandia (Russell is currently working on a novel named Swamplandia, from which the New Yorker recently published an excerpt in its “20 under 40” series—see my earlier blog on this).

Russell has one little literary tic that trips me up occasionally. I mentioned it in my earlier blog on her New Yorker story. She likes to throw in little “educated” references uttered by her uneducated narrators. But then she has to justify the allusion by citing its origin. For example, she wants to use the metaphor of having Ava “graph the coordinates” of her love and courage, but has to tell us she is learning latitude and longitude in school. She wants to use the concept of language as being what separates us from animals, but Ava must attribute it to her science teacher, Ms. Huerta. Lord knows where Ava got the idea of “affect” when she says she feels a numb surprise at her “own lack of affect” or where she got the word “turbid” when she says she peers into a “turbid pit.”

There’s no doubt that Russell has a facile way with imagery and language. At the end of the story, Ossie, whose fleshy sexuality contrasts with Ava’s pancake-flat breasts, walks naked into the swamp with all her mysterious animality in evidence: “As she walks toward the water, flying sparks come shivering out of her hair, off of her shoulders, a miniature hailstorm. It’s the lizards! I realize. She is shaking them off in a scaly shower, flakes of living armor.” When Ava drags her out of the swamp, her finger nails make little half moon marks on Ossie’s arm which swell into puffy welts, “As if something were still clawing at her from within, pushing outwards, a pressure that is trying to break the skin.” Nice metaphor, don’t you think, for the id-like forces that threaten to break out, like the creature in the first Alien movie that scared the crap out of us.

In “Haunting Olivia,” two brothers are co-conspirators in the accidental disappearance/death of their sister Olivia. The story begins at Gannon’s Boat Graveyard, a “watery junkyard” where people abandon old boats, when they find a pair of magical goggles that allow them to see things in the water that others cannot see (the old magical glasses fairy tale gimmick). Russell has the narrator, Timothy Sparrow, say that his brother, Waldo Swallow, has a thick pelt of black hair because his father jokes that his mother must have had “dalliances with a Minotaur”— (For a little intertextual in joke, the reader should fast forward to the story in the book “from Children’s’ Reminiscences of the Westward Migration” for a tale about a boy who does have a Minotaur for a father).

Olivia, 8 years old, disappears in a whimsical way (everything is whimsy in Karen Russell’s stories). Her brothers simply push her too hard down a slide at in a crab shell (a sort of sled made out of giant crab shells), and a wave takes her away. This does not seem to be a great tragedy in the story overall, for Olivia, like Ossie in “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” is another Russell avatar. Described by her brother as a “cartographer of imaginary places,” she creates an underwater hideaway called Glowworm Grotto.” In an echo of what Russell’s parents may have felt about her as a child, Timothy the narrator says, “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Olivia was an adoptee from some other planet.” The grotto’s walls are coated with the feces of glowworms, which, as everyone knows, glows in the dark, giving it a yucky beauty. At the end of the story, when the brothers try to find Olivia there, Timothy goes into the Grotto with the magical goggles. “Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can’t tell the living from the dead. It’s all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere.”

Another nice concluding metaphor to reflect that basic human desire for transcendence, metamorphosis, spiritual dissolution, and the ultimate return of the self to that which it was before it was.

I enjoyed these two stories. They seem to get at the heart of Russell’s narrative ploy. Although “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” makes for an intriguing book title, I felt that the concept of using fantastical wolfish transformations to reflect childhood and early adolescent feelings of bestial urges and alienation—they are little animals, after all, aren’t they? —was just too predictable. And too much "keeping with the concept."

My old guy reaction to these stories is that they are fun to read as childlike fantasies and illuminate some of childhood’s strangeness, they lack the depth that real exploration of these experiences require. When it comes to magical realism or philosophically significant fantasies, Karen Russell just needs more intellectual background. She is still so young. For profound explorations of the issues she explores superficially here, I prefer the mature vision of Borges, Garcia Marquez, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, and Steven Millhauser. But then, that’s just the way we old guys are. We prefer fiction that makes us think, not just makes us smile.

My Cross To Bear

Things have been busy lately what with San Diego Comic-Con and Star Wars Celebration.  I'm still waiting on final approval to post my Chain Story as well.  I'll have another story this month also, to make up for last month.





Be sure to check out my recent collections available on the Kindle.





I hope you enjoy this one:

            Things had been bad for a long time for everyone, not just me.  Everybody's got their own problems but I've got my own unique crosses to bear.  I don't like talking about them, though, because that's always liable to cause more trouble than it's worth and it pretty much always ends up with me and my girl getting run out of town.  Mostly though, we keep to ourselves.  We've got a room in the hotel right about the town saloon.  That's where we spend our time and take our meals.

            We don't talk much to strangers and other folk.  I work hard enough for the both of us to keep us out of trouble.  It's a rough life and plenty of hard work, but it's worth it because I love her so damned much, no matter what anybody says about people like her.

            Problems always start when folks get nosy, and nosy is how things got that warm night that started with a dusty twilight.

            "Welcome back, Mr. Remington," the saloonkeeper greeted me the same way every night.  It didn't vary to the point where I felt like it was part of the routine.

            "Howdy," I'd respond like a pre-programmed robot, and I'd just head up the stairs to my room to be with my Sylvia.

            But it was then, on this blistering hot, fateful night, that the saloonkeeper stopped me, offering me a drink he'd already poured.  "On the house, just hang about and chat with me for a few."

            "Hang about and chat?"

            "Well, you're always runnin' up to your room, barely sayin' hello-goodbye.  You're a guest here and I feel like the better I know you, the more I can make you feel at home while you're stayin' here."

            "That's awful nice of you," I accepted the drink, a dry rye whiskey, "but we're just quiet folk who like to keep to themselves.  Being able to do that makes it home enough."

            "Well, you know it's a small place and people get to talking."

            "I'm not one for much talking, Mr. Witwer."

            "I can see that.  Two months here and we've spoken more tonight than in that whole stretch of time."

            "I work hard and in the sun.  Most days I don't rightly feel like talkin' afterwards."

            "I hear that.  Most times I get home after a long night here and I just button up tight and don't want to say word one to nobody."

            "Mm-hmm."  I swigged my drink and was just about to head upstairs to my beloved Sylvia when he said the one thing that could turn my head back to him and his damn fool conversation.

            "Well, people been talking about your girl.  They been wondering if she's all right in the head.  It's mighty peculiar, not seein' her out of her room at all."

            I stopped and stared, unsure of what to say.  Invariably, it was this line of questioning that was the beginning of the end of my and Sylvia's time in a town, and as many times as I'd lived through it, I'd never come up with a right response.  "Is that what they say?"

            "People like to talk."

            "I suppose they do, don't they?  But nothing's wrong with her, thank you very much."

            "Well, I'm right sure there isn't anything wrong with her.  If'n you say so, I'm on your side."

            "Thank you for that, Mr. Witwer."

            "But if you want the talk to stop, you might want to bring her down to the social tonight."

            "The social?"  Everything in my gut was telling me that this would be an extraordinarily bad idea.

            "Every once in a while, maybe every three or four months or so, the town council declares an evenin' holiday and we throw a social here in the saloon.  Anybody who's anybody'll be here and I'd be right honored if you and your lady attended.  When they see how fine and pretty she is, all that talk'll dry up like the creek in August."

            "That's a mighty generous invitation, but I'll have to talk to her about it."  It would be suicide and I knew it, at least as far as our time in this place was concerned.  Aside from that, I really just didn't have the energy to move on from this place just yet.  It was always really hard to pack up and escape in the middle of the night, then find a new place, try to settle in and find a new job.  It was hard to pick up any work that wasn't manual labor in a situation like that, and I'm not sure how much more of it my body could take.  I was constantly aching with a dull pain in all of my joints.

            "If she's agreeable, we'll be down here dancin', hootin' and hollerin' all night."

            "Much obliged for your invitation."

            And with that, I tipped my hat politely and walked slowly up the staircase, wondering if I'd even tell Sylvia of the gracious but impossible invitation.

            Sylvia had been staring out the window, teasing out her hair with her favorite boar bristle brush.  She was completely hypnotized by the haunting view from our second story picture window.  It was the shambles of the old city.  Most of the towns left these days were established in the desolate perimeter of the old places.  The old places were garbage-strewn wastelands.  The skyscrapers we could see had no windows, giving the city all the appearance of a broad smile full of rotted and missing teeth.  No matter how many times I laid eyes on it in the light of the setting sun behind it, it made me sick to think that all of that destruction could happen all over again. 

            How it all happened is a very long story.  The short version is that Sylvia's kind was responsible for it, though there aren't many of her kind left to blame for it.  My heart grew heavy watching her there, standing against that horizon, looking out over the destruction her kind had caused. 

            Softly, I called her name, bringing her back from the cold past and into the danger of the here and now.

            "Sylvia."

            She turned, adding a smile to her face, almost as an afterthought in deference to me.

            "Darling."

            Her face brightened, she dropped her brush, and we met in the center of the room in a tight embrace.  Our love was forbidden and our daily embrace after my return home from work was something out of a cheap book.  It rang so true though, that no matter how clichéd it was, it made sense for us.  I was her only contact with the outside world.  I alone understood her, and I alone loved her.  After what her kind did to ours, some could wonder how possible it could be that I loved her so deeply, but you'd just have to see her and know her like I do.

            She's soft and delicate with a thick head of brunette hair and alabaster skin.  He curves lead you along gently like a scenic, winding road, and she smelled constantly of lilac.

            What happened wasn't her fault, but folks in this world have a hard time seeing past that.

            I spent time kissing every pale freckle on her tender shoulders before we sat to talk, nose to nose as lovers do.

            "It's started, my love.  Folks are talkin'."

            "Let them.  Talk never hurts us."

            "Talkin' leads to hurtin', and I'd die if they hurt you."

            She smiled sadly and ran her fingers through my hair and then down ever so lightly across my neck.

            It gave me a shiver.

            "The fella downstairs, Mr. Witwer, wants us to come down to the town social tonight.  He says it'll stop all the talking."

            "Will it?"

            "No.  It'll make it worse.  He's bein' friendly enough, he just doesn't know you're..."

            I hung my head, unable to say it out loud.

            "You can say it, go ahead."

            "I don't even want to think it.  It doesn't matter.  You're all I want, what you are is beside the point."

            "It makes me smile, seeing you so in love with me."  Her eyes locked with mine.  She smiled again and kissed my lips.

            "I love you," I whispered.

            "I know you think it's a bad idea, but can we?"

            "Can we what?"

            "Can we go?  I love you, and you're my everything, but you don't understand how hard it is being locked up here all by myself all the time.  I feel like a prisoner."

            "Oh, sweetheart.  You're not a prisoner.  It's just dangerous.  If folks found out about us, we'd have to start over all over again."

            "I know.  But I can't live like this all the time."

            My hand crept up her blouse, slowly against the delicate skin of her stomach.  "You'll die any other way."

            Her other hand pulled up the back of my shirt.  The feeling of her palm against the flesh of my back sent a comforting jolt coursing through my body.

            We kissed and kissed again.  My hand reached up further, cupping her chest.

            "Maybe me being dead would be better for you."

            "Shhh.  Don't even think that."

            Our voices had grown more and more hushed as our advances on each other had grown more aggressive.  Our worries grew small and disappeared as quickly as our conversation did with the onset of our lovemaking.

            Sylvia was always a gentle and passionate love for the most part, but she always seemed to grow claws that would leave deep, red tracks on my body at the height of her climaxing.  The sting made me feel alive.

            Afterwards, I flopped down onto my back, fanning the sweat on my face, struggling to breath at a normal rate.

            Sylvia stood up, putting herself back together, sweat glistening on her naked body.  As she pinned her hair up into a high bun, she looked down at me and smiled coyly.  "Let's do it anyway."

            "We just did."

            "No.  Let's go downstairs."

            "You know that's crazy."

            "What's wrong with being crazy once in a while?  I'm going crazy cooped up in here all the time anyway.  I need to see people."

            "Aren't I enough for you?"

            "You are.  You're everything I need in a man.  But I need people, too.  And fun and adventure.  More than anything I need to dance.  Will there be dancing?

            "I expect."

            "Then we have to go.  It's not like they can tell anything just by looking at me.  It always takes a little more than that to catch on and we won't be down there long enough for that.  One dance and that's all."

            "You never know, love.  There's folk who can tell one of your kind a mile away just by looking at you."

            "How?"

            "I don't know.  Instinct or something.  Same reason folks like you spook animals sometimes."

            "I want to risk it.  For one dance.  What's the worst that could happen?  We'd have to leave again?"

            "A lot worse could happen than that."

            "We'll see, won't we?"

            This was not a good idea.

           

            In the back corner of the saloon was an acoustic three-piece band accompanied by an old ragtime piano that gave the place the feeling of the sort of place you'd imagine if they still played those old western movies.  The whole town was there, most of them were congregating in the center of the room, dancing and carrying on.  There were some card games in the corner opposite the music men, and the bar was packed from one end to the other.  I don't think I'd ever seen Mr. Witwer's place so jumping with life.

            I was hoping to be inconspicuous, but Sylvia held everyone's attention with each and every step down the grand staircase.  She was every bit as radiant as the first time I saw her and I could feel the eyes of every other man in the room beaming right at her.  If there's one thing they did right, it was that they made them as beautiful as her.

            It wasn't long before we found ourselves in the middle of the dance floor, Sylvia had whispered into my ear her deep insistence that I dance with her and who was I to refuse?  I was no dancer, and to be honest, the thought of moving slow in time with Sylvia in front of all these people made my stomach turn just a little bit.  I was never a dancer and never fancied it.  The only kind of dancing I liked was when I was alone with Sylvia and we could press ourselves up close to each other, close our eyes, and sway to the music in our hearts.  It didn't feel as pure in front of people, like it was for show, and that part of it always turned my stomach just a little bit.  But this is what she wanted, and making her happy is always what made me most happy. 

            We pressed up against each other like we were alone, upstairs, and hidden from prying eyes.  I lost myself in the swaying, pretending as hard as I could that we weren't surrounded by all these townsfolk.

            It was hard to shut them all out knowing full well that if they knew what I knew about the woman in my arms, they'd at the very least do their best to try to kill us.  I tried even harder to put the heat and sting of all the proverbial torches and pitchforks I'd almost been ended by in the last three years out of my mind as well.

            I took in a deep breath of her perfume from the back of her neck, relocating the thoughts in my head to her and the here and now.  It was then that I noticed that the music the band was playing was much too fast for our slow dance.  Always to the beat of our own drum, I thought. My God, how I love her.

            Either she read my mind or I must have accidentally said that last part out loud because she lifted herself up and brought her lips up to my ear, brushing them against it as she whispered gently, "I love you, too."

            We danced right through another pair of up-tempo pieces before I grew tired.  "I need a drink."

            She kissed my cheek, "I'll be right here.  There's still a dance or two left in me."

            The bar was friendly and inviting. I ordered a tall, cool draught of beer and turned, sipping into the foamy head before peering at my Sylvia, alone in the center of the dance floor.

            Alone, she kept better time with the music, moving back and forth with the beat.  It wasn't long before she caught the eye of one of the young men in the crowd. He bowed his head politely and I could tell he'd asked her for a dance.  Her eyes met mine from across the room; she could feel my worry.  Letting people close to her was not something I did lightly, but in this case it might seem more suspicious to not let them dance.  It was a bad idea, but causing a fuss would be worse.  Sure, maybe I'd be mistaken for a jealous lover, but it wouldn't take much to add two and two together with me hiding her up in her room all the time.

            Hesitantly, I nodded to her, giving her the okay, and she bowed and graciously accepted his invitation.  The music began again, a slow number this time.  They danced as close as he felt like he could get away with, their stance was quite formal and the dancing rigid.  I tried my hardest to swallow all of the bad feelings that go along with watching another man dance with your lady.  It was just a dance, but it still worried me and set off all the base instincts of the beasts us civilized folk work so hard to repress. 

            You can imagine my infuriated confusion when the music ended and she leaned in, right close to his ear and seemed to kiss him on the cheek and whisper something in his ear.  I about boiled over before I realized it all the girls seemed to be doing it and she must have just been thanking him.  I quickly knew she must have told him much more than that when he shoved her hands off of him, disgusted with something.  It didn't even register.  I took another draught of my beer.

            I thought nothing of it, she smiled at me, just standing there, waiting for something. 

            It wasn't until I noticed that the beau she'd danced with had whispered into the ears of a pair of his mates, and they turned to whisper to their mates, that I realized that a commotion was being made.  The moment they laid a hand on her, I slammed my beer down, and made a move to intervene, but I was across the room and word of what she was had clearly spread like wild fire.

            I shouted my entreaties, but they fell on deaf ears.  No one cared.  She was responsible and the law was clear.  They lifted her up into the crowd but she was completely calm.  In fact, I was confident she was smiling right at me. 

            Six of them it took to keep me from rescuing her.  Six of them to pull me back and hold me down through all of my trashing.  I'm sure I damaged more than a couple of them pretty bad, I wasn't above biting, and scratching, and tearing, and pulling.  It was always my philosophy that anything worth fighting for was worth fighting dirty for.  And Sylvia was the most precious thing in my life.  If I had the means and the strength I'd've fought a hundred men.  But those six foiled me.

            "Leave her alone..." 

            "Shut it, you damned collaborator."

            "I'm not--"

            --a meaty fist shut my mouth for me and everything went black.

            I awoke some hours later. 

            Alone.

            On the outskirts of town.

            From there I could see beyond the saloon we'd lived in and into the town square where they'd hung her from the neck until dead.  That was the sentence for anyone of her kind found after the purge. 

            My heart broke.  Replicant or not, I loved her and all I could feel were hot tears on my face and sadness in my stomach.

            After a while, I rose from my prostrate position, the tears still came, but I didn't notice them as much.  I spent             a time swaying in the breeze like a dead tree, wondering if I could get to her and cut her down before they cut me down.  It wasn't likely, but I wasn't going anywhere without her.

            One foot in front of the other. 

That's the way things always started, that's the way they end.

            Each step that brought me closer to her beautiful, lifeless body made me wonder why she did this. 

            Was it too much for her?

            Was she doing it for me?

            I'll never know her mind on this Earth.

            May as well find out in the next one.