I’ve arranged myself on the bed, my hair fanned out on the pillowcase, the sheets pulled up to my waist, and a hardcover book propped up on my chest. Felix gets in bed, and I can smell his bathed skin, moist and clean. I continue reading.

“Is the book any good?” He turns on his side to face me. I nod without looking up.

“Does the boy get the girl?” His hand slides across the sheet and the distance between us.

“The girl gets her. He dies.” I keep reading.

Felix isn’t discouraged by the vicissitudes of postmodern romance. He moves closer to me, and the heat from his body makes the skin on my arms prickle. Without saying a word, he takes the book out of my hands, folds a corner of the open page and reaching over me, tosses it on the floor.

I stare straight ahead, my hands still clutching the ghost of a book.

After almost twelve years of marriage, Felix is damn good at proffering a graceful exit for me after I’ve backed myself into a corner of my own making. He knows how to diffuse my unpredictable moods that can make our bed a virtual no man’s land.

“How was school today?” He pulls me across the DMZ.

I shrug.

“Are you going to tell me why you were upset?” He buries his face into the curve of my neck.

I shake my head.

“Dinner was delicious.” He strokes my mouth with his thumb.

I close my eyes and try not to cry.

He kisses my forehead, my nose, my chin, and my lips. “Tell me a story, Anna.”

Felix knows I will do this for him. He understands my need to be heard, to give release to the onslaught of words that run amok in my head, and to be granted permission to voice what I might dare imagine but never do.

In the lair of the Beast, it is often the voice of another, the not-Anna that gives my feelings a life of their own, where animal instincts are expressed with the hands as well as the tongue. Stories stir and arise from the creative loins of a sated belly, crouched by a roaring fire, in the company of kin and freshly gnawed bones. Long gone civilizations erupt into present tense from the strands of a familiar tale which courses through my veins and gushes forth from my lips.

I take a deep breath, and staring up, I’m mesmerized by the oscillating paddles of the ceiling fan.

 Richard for the Third Time

She arrived in Las Vegas six months ago, the vestiges of her incomplete degree in English literature tucked safely away inside a cardboard box. She’d quit school in the midst of a postgraduate debacle and took off to find her honor (never mind Brutus’) as a waitress in the cheap sand and sun of the wild West.

She’d had an epiphany standing before the professor, staring at the red ink which scarred the paper she held like a wound, desperately fighting the urge to cry. What the fuck did he mean it was an “interesting attempt”? She’d died and gone to Hell for this paper; she’d been eviscerated and exposed, and this assassin wasn’t satisfied? Then it hit her: In the end, when the critical analysis hits the fan and all the literary crap settles, will any of this really make a difference? Will the sky fall down because her attempt wasn’t “interesting” enough? Her words had failed her, so she resorted to gesture. She tore her paper in half, let it drop onto the professor’s disbelieving lap, and walked out of the land of the dead and dying. Far better to measure her life in coffee cups (or was it spoons?) than to expose her soul to a tenured philistine only interested in his own need to increase and multiply.

“Did you get a “C” on a paper today?” Felix asks. He’s still fishing for answers to what he considers my vexing behavior.

“If I got a “C,” you’d have found me hanging from the chandelier, and I wouldn’t be recounting a story about it.”

“Good thing we don’t have a chandelier.”

“So…”

So, she set off for Vegas, which took her in, and her intellect became a dormant trait that hardly interfered with her thinking anymore. No more winters of discontent under the blistering sun. She’d managed to get a fairly decent job as a hostess at a 24-hour coffee shop but had no ambitions about it.

Working the graveyard shift was pretty much predictable, filled with the usual assortment of glitter zombies who roamed the Strip in the wee hours. All she had to do was greet them with a plastic menu as they shuffled in and then wish them a pleasant future as they dissolved through the revolving door on their way out. And because the shop was a little off the main strip, the job usually afforded her enough free time between customers to read excerpts from a People or Cosmopolitan magazine she kept stashed under the front counter.

 “A People magazine?” Felix leans over to look me in the eyes.

“Yes, a People magazine. Now be quiet.”

One night, a few hours before sunrise, there was finally a lull at the front, and she bent down to pick up a magazine displaying a sylph with a drop-dead cleavage surrounded by copy on how to catch a man, keep a man, and decorate her apartment for less than $200 bucks.

When she looked up, she came face to face with an impeccably dressed man, unusual at this hour, sporting the measured arrogance of a person used to being instantly disliked. His well-cut suit looked crisp, a white rose tucked into his lapel, and every hair in place. Yet there was an air of incompleteness to him.

He seemed to look through her as he asked in a clipped British accent for a booth. Then something near her right shoulder caught his eye, and he looked lost for an instant. She peered down at her name tag then met his regained icy stare.

“Cicely,” he whispered, then louder “a name to be blessed and cursed. . .it was my mother’s name.”

“And you are?” Caught off guard, she’d broken her rule of catatonic service with a smile.

He took her hand and bowing, brushed his lips over it. “Your own tragedian, Richard, who’d share your company, if only over a cup of coffee.”

“Why not?” A second breech of her usual truncated social interactions, but the place was empty, and she’d had no one to talk to in so long. She was behaving like an amputee who thoughtlessly scratches a phantom itch. She led Richard to a nearby booth, grabbing a fresh pot of coffee and some cups along the way. While they settled down, opposite one another, he began as if on cue:

“Well. So here we are.” He gestured expansively to encompass not just the coffee shop but the entire universe.

“It seems, dear Cicely (I may call you that?) I currently find myself, roaming the earth, out-plotted and outcast from history’s winner’s circle.”

Her first response might have been “Excuse me, sir, but what the fuck are you talking about?” But she sensed that beneath his carapace of cool, he was dead serious and said instead:

“Didn’t someone say that history is a nightmare from which we must awake?”

Richard looked out the window at the empty street and a crumpled paper blew by on the night wind. She’d struck a nerve, and as the gates to his stony depths cracked open, the sound of chains and turning wheels underscored his words:

“History is what I live for, the only thing worth dying for. To be forgotten is to die for all eternity.” He looked stalwart and weary, as if surveying a lost battlefield from a scorched hill.

His expression unnerved her, and she laughed before she could stop herself. His eyes hardened. She turned away and put some cream in her coffee as she attempted to salvage the situation.

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t laughing…at you.” She kept stirring the spoon in her coffee cup.

He stared at her hand, waiting, unsure, like a man who keeps counting his change in a foreign land.

Then Richard of the golden pipes shifted in his seat like a songbird getting ready to wail:

“My dear, Cicely, I’m afraid that you are far more perceptive than you realize. My nightmare is not so much that I’ve been forgotten, but worse, misunderstood and misquoted.  

“I once ruled, not by birth nor deed, but by corrupt circumstance. I created myself out of a tradition rich in audacities and extreme subtleties. I was defined, not so much by what I possessed, but by what I would and would not do to get and keep it.” He twisted a gold ring with a pointed black gem on his pinky.  

“I suppose I most resembled a junior partner in a financial conglomerate plagued by corporate raiders, who pinch and tear at its lucrative underbelly when no one is looking. And I bided my time, grinning at all the cocktail parties, nodding at all the board meetings, while all the while, I dropped curious rumors here and little lies there.” He rapped his knuckles on the table three times, each the drop of an axe.

“Then I waited as my scattered seeds gave fruit to my ultimate design, their vines choking off my victims as I remained poised for the final kill.” He leaned back in his seat and rubbed his eyes.

“And yet, the sad truth is that when I seized the object of my desire, felt it pulsing in these fists, held it to my ears and lips, it no longer spoke to me, nor could it hear my lovelorn cries.” He opened his hands and stared at the half moon crescents on his palms made by manicured nails.

“Well, my dear, the rest as they say is, or rather was, history. I really did come tumbling down and broke my crown to boot. The last shrill notes from my throat were doomed to be repeated for all eternity; it is the fool’s line that everyone remembers and no one forgives.”

 “She’s falling for him, isn’t she?” Felix asks.

“I’m going to complain to the management about the noisy audience in this theater. Shhh…” I place my finger on his lips and he kisses the tip.

Yes, here was Richard of the silver tongue wandering the desert in search of meaning to shape his pain. And he had found her, an empty vessel awaiting the end of time. He was a man in need, but she had no horse, no kingdom, not even dreams to give him.

Instead it was he who gave; he gave her his words, which reminded her of the fairy tale about the precious jewels that fell out of the beautiful girl’s mouth whenever she spoke. His voice poured into her, warming her belly, filling her with the heat of human compassion. He surrounded her with enchantment. He was a frog prince, and she wondered if like in the bedtime stories, a kiss could free him of his mortal coil which was not so much broken as hopelessly twisted.

“Come home with me.” She took his hand across the table and led him out of this neon-spangled cave of shadows they’d both somehow wandered into. Once outside, the last traces of night hung over them, and they embraced it, holding hands and speaking in low voices like conspirators before the fateful dawn.

As they walked to her apartment, he spoke of his childhood, of his beautiful and restless brothers, his ambitious father, and emotionally absent mother. He’d watched from the outside as others did and spoke of the things he could only ache for. He’d hardened, his heart had crystallized into a dagger-shaped wound with only one desire: to cut and to cut and to cut.

She felt like a fugitive who is tired of running and only wishes to immerse herself in the coolness of his diamond kisses. In the space of an hour, Richard had enveloped her in the purest, most painful melody of expression she’d ever heard. She swayed to its rhythm, dipping and spinning on his every word.

This night she sang the sweetest harmony with the heavens. The stars were her bridesmaids, and the moon her blessed mother. The sky opened up, and it rained pure liquid light as it never had before in this barren, unnatural land. His voice washed off the lonely dust from her lips and eyes, the cerements of her life slipped off her shoulders and fell into a heap on the floor by his feet. For the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to be alive, and, like Lazarus, she never wanted to be dead again.

When she awoke, her body washed up on the bed, the room was bathed in the brilliant glow of the midday sun. Richard sat on the corner of the bed, the white sheets draped about his legs as he stared at himself in the dresser mirror.

“Richard, please stay with me.” She had never spoken with such honesty.

He did not turn as he replied. “I have heard it said that church bells sound their sweetest from a distance. The same, dear lady, cannot be said of you, for in your arms I heard the very angels sing.”

“Richard, don’t go.” She felt the approaching fall.

He seemed transfixed by his image, as if truly seeing himself for the first time, and without moving, he spoke a grave man.

“Your flesh and your soul have quelled a pain which had become in my loneliness my only companion. In your eyes, I saw the man I once was. That will have to last me an eternity.”

“Richard, please.”

“I shall long for you in the darkness.” He was gone.

“You will come back to me.” She defied backtalk from the shadows as she fell onto the pillows, burying her face into them and smelling his fading scent. She curled her body into a ball and covered her head with the sheet not wanting to forget what he’d tasted like, knowing she would.

I feel as if I’ve unburdened myself of a devastating secret. I turn and press my face into Felix’s chest and cry.

“Felix, you won’t ever leave me, will you?”

“Never. What’s this all about?” He holds me closer.

“Just love me.” I am on fire for him.

§§§

Lying beside Felix, once more I am comforted by his rhythmic, familiar breathing. The restorative power of our lovemaking spreads through my limbs. All is forgiven, the anger quelled, the fear allayed, the calibration of the universe restored in the coupling of our bodies.

Felix always falls asleep instantly afterwards, lulled by our carnal cease-fire. He is not plagued by any sense of guilt or remorse about our quarrel. Actually, it was my quarrel, not his. I do all the fighting for the two of us.

The resurgence of the veils is troubling. But it doesn’t necessarily mean the Beast will follow. Right?

I stroke the rounded flesh of my belly, the skin laced with delicate silvery etchings like lunar maps that illustrate the scars of bringing my children into the world. Between my legs is the beginning of every mortal story, its wetness translates the utterances of the flesh into animate clay, its inner walls house the first moment of creation, the sanctity of which still glows within every being.

Desire is the handmaiden of mortality. We only truly want what we are afraid to lose.

The birth of my children revealed to me a light shining at the distant end of a tunnel that leads to eternity. The once reckless glow of my happiness is eclipsed by the fear of ever losing them, its penumbra crackling with such potential for pain. I no longer live for the moment but am instead obsessed with an unknowable and precarious future. Death parades before me, stretching, preening, and teasing me as its shadow vanishes around every corner and coils under every bed.

What if someone breaks into the house? What if the house catches fire? What if a hurricane strikes? What if someone launches a nuclear bomb towards the Atlantic coast? What if all the glaciers suddenly melt? What if a mega-meteor lurking in the asteroid belt crashes through the atmosphere and lands on my front lawn, creating a thousand-mile crater and ending life as I know it?

I’m tired, but all is well. The veils, it seems, have retreated to a safe distance. For now.

Tomorrow is Saturday and chances are the world will still be here—with or without me.

We can sleep in. Felix will help take care of the kids.

Life is good.

The lingering glow of Felix’s touch envelopes me as I roll over and renounce the final vestiges of consciousness, and the last and happiest spurts of humanity trickle down my thighs.