Alex S. French was raised in Montana and openly refused to ever leave. Until he did. He now teaches composition to college students and various creative writing workshops to the public while pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Minnesota State, Mankato. His words can be found in X-R-A-Y Magazine and Collective Unrest. He is online at www.alexsfrench.com and tweets at @asfrenchaf.

 

 

The stage was his again. Sprinting, swirling, twirling, his body torqued, the world blurring. Golden pirouettes trailed his every move like fainting devotees. They splashed around him like bubbling shooting stars. Finally one admirer could restrain her fervor no longer. She raced at him full bore, letting loose the sounds of joy that society had always wished to quash, to domesticate. Rick flashed his cool smile and knelt for her arrival. He would not be her oppressor. Not today.

It was beautiful. Pure. They came together. Merged as one on that grassy scene, naked enthusiasm for voyeurs and prudes alike to gawk. Bodies clashed. Tongues slavered. And Rick was left with a fine dusting of hair to keep as trophies in his teeth.

“Yo Rick, stop riling up the dog. Come on, man, you’re getting beer all over her.”

Rick looked down the barrel of his Stella Artois. Graham told no lies; Rick certainly couldn’t have drunk all that. He swilled the last of it before placing the bottle at the dog’s feet, allowing her to gingerly teeth the thin foil wrapping and lick away all traces of yeasty aroma from her new paramour.

“You’re right. Might as well throw me a fresh one. One of my cans this time.”

His friend sighed but acquiesced. Pulled one of the warming Coors from the cardboard ‘teener next to the cooler.

Rick had never seen any need to put his beer on ice. Just made it more work to extract later on. Efficiency was one of those strange byproducts of the lazy. Cold drinks, less so.

The toss landed heavy in Rick’s hand. He cracked the can, blew the resulting fluff into a zephyr, and turned to Graham’s son.

“Alrighty, Eamon—let’s get back to this footballin’ we been up to.”

Eamon grinned, nodded and brought the football back to his ear, his left hand out straight in perfect poster-worthy form. Then the rubber of his body released and he heaved his whole spine into it, from shoulder to hip, looking as though the ball might very well rocket his eight-year-old body to new lands. A puff of dust arose at Rick’s feet as the football completed its short journey solo instead.

Rick scooped it up with well-oiled ease and dropped back over the crunchy, half-yellowed grass. Barren clouds slipped by like greasy smudges on deli paper. It had been a warm summer. Seasonably, you might call it. But the lack of rain was beginning to taint the merriment of amber waves of heat. As though a good storm was needed to wash away not only the smoke particles that now omnipresently clung to the sky, but the various bickerings and injustices that had sparked up over the past few months as well. The forecast called for it soon, though. That’s what they all said. That was the skillet-hot news of sidewalk chats and past schoolmate’s social media twitterings. Exciting stuff! No matter, they would all return to their misery soon enough come winter. Rick had no antipathy for the sun and all its glow.

The football flicked away and fluttered gently into young Eamon’s breadbasket-bowled arms. He delighted to have found such athleticism in his own tiny, sticky hands and charged forward with what he assumed was the prize and pride of coming into his own. Rick stepped to the young attacker and scooped him up by the waist, gently bouncing Eamon as both ball and laughter spilled out alike.

Eamon wriggled farther up and center until his arms clasped tight around Rick’s neck. It caused no pain, no loss of breath, and the childish strength of grip and friction allowed Eamon’s legs to dangle freely down Rick’s back as Rick swayed around the lawn in feigned befuddlement as to where the rascal had run. Eamon giggled and peered over his daft carriage’s shoulder.

“You’re bleeding.”

Indeed, he seemed to be splattered with the still-crimson stuff. Patches of it on his shirt and the right pocket of his jeans. As if the mini-est of murders had just occurred.

“It’s your hand, silly,” Eamon guided, with the same declarative wisdom that allows a child to inform women of their pregnancies.

“So I am.”

He turned just in time to see Eamon’s mother, Trudy, running up to them, her bubble of socialization pricked by the softest mention of danger or bodily fluid. She plucked Eamon away and ushered him off to play with a friend’s daughter, Felicia, another younger boy already at her side. Eamon wrinkled his nose but dutifully hopped to the corner of the yard where Felicia demonstrated how to properly clank upon an oversized set of knock-off Legos, somewhere between instrumentalist and engineer. Rick hadn’t even noticed the kiddo over there. He could barely keep up with all the people producing litters nowadays.

“Oh, Rick. It’s covered the football, too.” Trudy culled the wounded pigskin from the ground and carted it upon a paper towel stretcher away and into the house. There went that bit of fun.

Rick looked down at the webbing of his right hand that weakly burbled blood from the surprising jag the can had made in the collision of being caught. He mused at the miracle of organisms that this cut should heal itself within a week. His little platelets and cells and mitochondria and whatever else would build the skyscrapers of skin back up good as new. He wouldn’t even have to think about it. A pin of flesh in payment for not walking all the way back for a beer. A welcome tradeoff, all things considered. The future would probably get more expensive.

He sucked at the electric amuse-bouche of blood and sweat and wondered when he had last eaten. This was a barbeque after all, but he hadn’t grabbed more than a passing nibble off his wife, Jane’s, plate. Lunch was hard to picture, too. Casualty of a late wakening, no doubt. Liquid bread. That was all he needed. He smiled and swished away his banquet beer.

Time to join the parental units. He wondered if he still had the chops to jump into their serious conversations about babysitters, PTA indignations and hashtagged opinions on the current state of the economy. He chuckled to himself. Of course he did. He was the chops. He was the unregulated lawn mower these people needed for the weeds that had overgrown their lives. All he needed was a few pulls from the ol’ starter cord. He placed his hand on Jane’s shoulder, who smiled warmly at his periphery, and let tilt the magic into his soul.

Suzanne held court at the moment. As she often did. “I’m not complaining. It’s just so hard. Basically everyone else got lucky and found their partner already. So now I’m stuck trying to decide why a guy will be all friendly in person and then not text back for a week.”

The effervescent potion had worked and his lips fizzed free, “Well, you know how it goes. Some people dream of being astronauts—others just want a little space.”

Dear god, he loved how the words sometimes managed to tumble from his mouth. He needed to keep it up, though. Quicker. Rapid fire. Collect the little laughs like kindling. Burn, baby, burn.

Rick snorted back another sip. “It’s pretty easy to find a man who will come for you. The trick is finding one who won’t leave! Am I right, Suzanne? Ay-yo!”

Dear god, it felt good to be alive.

#

“Dear god, Rick, you’re going to get blood all over Janie’s blouse! Come here; come here before you ruin it. We have band-aids in the kitchen.”

Rick hemmed and hawed and brayed, but allowed himself to be collared into the home. A moment later, another shout arose from inside. Apparently Graham had moved the med-kit. Rick imitated Trudy’s cry and berated Graham as well.

Jane hadn’t been worried. Not about the blood. The grin of skin had mostly dried and a stain was easily washed. It was the man behind the claret flow that worried her a bit, even if she would never let it show. Those hands, so strong and nimble during most days, were left with another marking of the weekend. Like so many other weekends before. Cuts and cuticles and burns and bruises: mysterious in their causes, persistent in their timely appearance.

Suzanne untwisted her wine cap and plonked some more Rioja onto her misplayed Tetris of fruit. She shook her head as the crevices filled and floated, “I don’t know how you do it, Jane. You’re such a saint.”

It was the type of compliment that knifed and niggled and cut more one day than the next. Jane smiled dreamily in response and looked off to the side where the breezed trees chattered a soft chlorophyllic chorus. Let them whisper away another slight notch to her soul.

Through the sliding glass door Jane could see Graham and Trudy laughing as Rick pranced about the room in some manic self-made game of Charades. They were two of his oldest friends and had no qualms about being stuck with him for the rest of their lives. Though the obsessive in Trudy could leap out at Rick’s impish prodding, the anger never truly lasted. It was hard to stay mad at a man so innocently preposterous.

Panting with campy exhaustion, Rick breathlessly rolled up to the counter and pulled from his can of beer like an inhaler. Chugging at the contents, his left hand twiddled and tapped his steel wedding band onto the Formica.

How many rings had he lost in exactly the same manner? Or when he decided to play quarters with it? Splashed from hand to glass to gullet in so much as a tiddlywink. She personally had seen him over eagerly swallow enough to adorn all his fingers. It was surprising that both his and the home’s plumbing had managed to handle the strange digestif so well.

If they could accept it, she had decided she could as well. There was no real expense to the lost rings. He made cupfuls of them at a time in his metal shop in the backyard shed. It was more the ease at which his hand looked free that bothered her. Monogamy had always been so simple for him. There was no threat in his suntanned fourth digit. Running ringless through the bars of their town or the bookstores for her work was of no concern to anyone who knew him. It was simply par for the course. Another chip shot from the shaggy well-manicured rough he had come to exemplify. Their marriage, their relationship, was not a question for him.

Such certitude was admirable. And infuriating. Jane knew it was more complicated than that. That this thing they managed to call love was more work than merely believing it to be. Not that she was worried she’d be blown aloft with lust and wander from the home they had created or anything—though those impulses flared every once in a while. She was human. And no stranger to imbibing in them herself, even if such urges always brought about their own particular guilty hangovers. However, rather than binging and seeing some mistake come to fruition, she chose to thin her fantasies with a tonic of hope—keep them merely fantasy—and gulp it all down until the feelings eventually metabolized and passed. Successful monogamy, for Jane, required such honesty and strength. She attacked would-be obstacles with earnestness. Overcame them with shameless, conscientious, all-encompassing trust. Love was about handing over the glass sculpture that holds your fragile self, and having faith that your partner would never drop it. And that was tough.

Really tough.

She hadn’t made it this far in life by walking around with a cuckoo clock heart. And sometimes Rick’s apparent peace—apparent absence of such issues—made it feel all the more trying. The more lonely.

But maybe that was just a veneer. Those rings weren’t the only jewelry he forged. A wooden cabinet, nondescript in every way but the attached lock, was filled with his creations. Silver-cabled spectral arrangements of gems and stones he had hand-collected from the Earth. Giger-esque organwork compressed into pendants no bigger than a coin. Latticed orbs arranged from fractal math she doubted she would ever even attempt to understand. The rings were just the pieces he allowed others to see. Utilitarian, cold and replaceable.

How could a man so seemingly open have such deep reserves of concealment in his life? She had repeatedly asked him to reveal his exceptional skills. Praised his work and offered to help him find ways to sell it. Display it. In the light of day he always demurred. It was only when she was able to stay up during those deep, dark nights of drunken melancholy that she thought she saw the cracks of ambition begin to shine through. Or maybe she was projecting. He seemed content. And yet, she couldn’t help but wonder. Who really knew how far glacial lakes extended if you were forever kept at water’s edge? He had at least allowed her to wade in, but she wanted others to truly see him, too, and couldn’t decide if that was selfish of her or not.

The communal pot began to boil. It happened quickly. The fabric fold-up chairs roiled from under and yawns heaved out their former occupants. Everyone felt the shifting waves and knew it was their time to vaporize into the night. Almost everyone, at least.

Rick swung his arms wide and gazed incredulously about, “What are you guys doing? It’s barely dark out. You haven’t even finished your bottle of wine yet, Trudy. And since we’re in your home, you can’t use your favorite ‘I have to drive’ excuse.”

Trudy shrugged, “I’ll throw the vacuum stopper on it and put it in the fridge. It’ll still be good tomorrow.”

Rick sidled up to Graham, waving the case of Coors below Graham’s nose like smelling salts, nudging his elbow into ribs. “Hmm? Hmmmmmm? We could have a couple more pre-gamers and then head downtown. I mean, the Saturday night’s so young it’s practically jailbait!”

Graham winced and clapped Rick on the trap with one hand, took Eamon by the other, who had been bouncing nearby like a funhouse version of Rick and looked just as ready to not head to that dreaded bedtime beyond the sun. “Sorry, my man. I think the game’s already been played. No overtime tonight.”

Rick opened another beer in a woeful attempt to tempt another, but managed to at least say his farewells between pleas. Jane corralled him into the passenger’s seat of their car and let him play with the dials until he found a song that appropriately matched the rapid BPM of his dilated heart. An inebriated tongue like quicksilver, he gleamed at her side, jabbering all the way home.

She wondered how much of this he would even remember in the morning. The week after that. The event would still be there, but the details, the words, the stories, might be lost. She had seen it before. She would surely see it again. He lived so much in the moment on days like these. Cracking open great oysters of experience and slurping them down with unmatched zeal. But he shucked the pearls of memory back into the ocean, along with the shells. He didn’t care about the wealth that he threw. He didn’t care how many she saved from the sands. That was her choice, her burden. Designated driver. Designated recaller.

Their routine at home replayed the same record of any other night. Jane put a few forsaken dishes away and then washed her face before slipping into bed next to Rick. They hugged. They cuddled. He begged for her to stay awake with him. To watch a show with him. Any show. She just needed to stay holding him in the consciousness of this ever-waning time. He raged against the dying of the night with mewling howls.

Jane went to work pulling up a random episode of You’re the Worst. Rick was asleep before the theme song even played its first defiantly plaintive chord at the two-minute mark. The next day would be a waste. It might take until evening before he could eat. Monday until he could properly communicate.

She kissed his acerbic-scented forehead. “Goodnight, sweet prince. My beautiful fool. I’ll see you in a day or two.”

On Sunday she would be left with a shell for a husband. She would hold onto their pearls until he returned.