Short fiction by Karen Hertzberg

“I thought I told you to leave,” he says. Slow. Steady.

He sits on the wide sill of his apartment window, watching the afternoon parade of cars, taxis, bikes and pedestrians three stories below. He hears her make a soft noise behind him–that same jagged sigh, almost like crying, almost like the sobbing sound she makes at orgasm. But she doesn’t answer him, of course, and he doesn’t bother to turn around.

Finally, he hears her slow footfalls tick on the hardwood, receding, marking time to the rise and fall of his chest. He inhales the faint contrail of her aroma—not perfume, but some amalgamation of cherry vanilla body lotion, baby shampoo and the kitten scent of her breath. He wants to turn and pull her to the floor, penetrate, fuck to absolution. But he can’t be absolved, and he always hears the cadence of her heels as she goes. She is never gone for long.

~~~~

At breakfast the next morning, he fixes pancakes and eggs. He is reminded of the feelings of disgust and longing that always mingled inside him as he watched her fork food between her dainty lips. She would eat with tiny rabbit bites, miniscule chewing motions that drove him nuts. Today, however, he will toss the morning’s feast down the garbage disposal. Though he doesn’t eat much lately, he always overdoes it.

He washes the dishes. She is suddenly sitting at the table, illuminated by a ribbon of golden light that spills in from the window over the sink. “I want you out,” he says. She looks at him once, an apparition with dove gray eyes, and drops her chin to her chest. A forelock of wheaten hair drapes her face. He resists the urge to brush it away, to try and read her expression, to make her real. She rises with slow precision, like a cobra from a snake charmer’s basket, and glides toward the door again. With a muted (imagined?) click of the latch she’s gone.

~~~~

He can’t sleep. Once more, she’s breathing beside him, the tattered sound of sleeping sighs. Before she showed up, he could have rolled over to the cool side of the bed to calm the fevers that rose during the night. Now she is there–still there–and he has to suffer these hot sweats. He kicks the covers off, moans, hopes, out of spite, that he’ll wake her. She shouldn’t be there, anyhow. She’s been asked. She’s been warned. She lied to him. A woman only gets the opportunity to lie to him once.

But even in the sweated, hot night, he finds himself edging closer to the volcanic heat of her body. If he reaches out his hand to touch her skin just once, she’ll take it as a sign that it’s okay for her to linger, to share his bed. The apparition will continue, along with his insomnia. He resists, for now, but traces her outline with one large hand hovering over the landscape of her body. He follows the curves—the gentle slope of her hips, the valley of her slender waist. If he could only mold his groin into the little crevice of her backside all would be right with the world.

~~~~

He sits at a window table at Sacred Grounds, sipping espresso from a tiny ceramic cup, the newspaper sprawled before him. He grazes the personal ads: “Insatiable SWF, 27, seeks bed partner. No complications, just fun and companionship. Respond to mailbox ZX48623.” He almost laughs aloud. It seems his apartment is invaded by an insatiable SWF who won’t leave him alone, and he wonders if he could take out an ad to find her a new home–no reasonable offer refused.

Behind him, he hears her cough–a little attention-getting thing she does. He wheels around. She is not supposed to haunt him here. Hovering around his apartment is bad enough, but the coffee shop is his haven, and he intends to cry sanctuary.

But it is her, solid this time, real. She crosses her arms over her chest and bows her head in that familiar posture, a wave of hair hiding one eye. At last she speaks to him.

“I miss you,” she whispers.

Is this real, or just another eidolon? “I’ve asked you to leave,” he says, this time out loud. “But you’re everywhere; in my house, in my bed. Stay away from me.” He folds the newspaper calmly and turns to go, but she is blocking his path, as solid as stone, real.

“Please,” is all she says.

Short fiction by Karen Hertzberg

You have an amazingly high pain tolerance threshold—that’s what the nurse told us the day after your Caesarian. “She’s a trooper. Hardly touches her pain meds.” Even then, you were unwilling to medicate yourself.

The day I bring you home from the hospital, you smile thinly from the wheelchair as the nurse whisks you down the sterile corridors–they won’t let you walk. We climb into our new minivan, and I know when we emerge from it back home a sort of metamorphosis will have taken place. We will become a family. As we wind through the city, Jonathan wails from the back seat. You sit back there beside him, cooing and fidgeting, while I chauffer alone, you no longer riding shotgun.

****

A week later, you’re still weak from the surgery and sleep-interrupted nights, but you won’t touch the Darvocet on the nightstand. The bottle stands like a sentinel, staring you down each time you crawl into bed, gathering your body into a fist against the pain. You’re like the fuzzy caterpillars we poked with twigs as children, curled in that defensive posture: “Leave me alone—I’m already dead.”

I wonder if, like me, this experience has awakened you to the primal need to break and run. Maybe you haven’t the stamina to run yet, but soon you will. You might feel the same fear and detachment, as though your life is borrowed now, and if you can only stumble away fast enough, far enough, you’ll be able to reclaim some elusive fragment, something completely your own.

You whimper. I brush the hair from your closed eyes, lids tender and bruised with sleep deprivation. For me, this is when the fears come hard and fast, when I see you so distant from me, so alone, that I feel my own anemic existence in your life couldn’t possibly be enough to bring you back from wherever you are. It wasn’t me who made ready a life and brought it forth. You rocked our glorious creation in the hammock of your hips for nine months.

It’s while you’re lying there that I slip out, off to the place I’ve found where the air isn’t quite so thick with your power and, for only a moment, I can feel freshly alive. The note I leave tells you that I’m on an errand. When you wake, you’ll swallow the news, unlike all those pills you refuse to take. You’ll wash it down quickly before you nurse the baby again. You’ll hold Jonathan until he’s asleep, and then you’ll succumb yourself. Sleep is the only medication you allow.

In dreams, you see the reality of my note. You imagine a restless, slender woman, raven-haired and childless. She is weaker than you, the Earth Mother goddess, yet powerful in different ways. As she leads me away, you see me checking back over my shoulder, stalked by a minivan with a rear-facing infant seat.

****

“You’re somewhere else,” my lover is saying to me. She’s sprawled like a panther after a satisfying hunt, head resting on one outstretched arm. I reach over and trace the outline of her breast with the back of my hand and feel her shudder. Her skin is cool and smooth, like wax.

I sense you drawing me back, feel your pull. It’s something like instinct, a blind driving need to return to my source, my home–you. “The room smells like sex,” I say, and I hurry off the bed, suddenly repulsed.

She laughs, too loud. She says, “You think?”

I’m cold. I pad to the bathroom and start a shower, running the water until it nearly scalds. I wash my genitals again and again, finding no pleasure in the ritual. The hot water boils off the scent of sex, of someone else. I want to come home to your now whole and worthy, but instead I emerge from the shower pink and steaming like a cooked shrimp, not cleansed…not really. I pull on my clothes while my lover scrutinizes me from her throne on the bed.

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” she says. I haven’t noticed before how harsh her voice sounds, rough edges and angles like broken glass, nothing like your buttery murmur.

“No,” I answer.

“Then Friday, maybe,” she says easily, and I look at her shaking my head.

“No,” I say. “No.”

****

I step into our house and instantly feel you there, smell your warm scent. Upstairs, I hear the water running. I go first to the baby’s room. He lies in the center of his crib wearing a fuzzy, footed sleeper. You removed his quilt—you read soft bedding contributes to sudden infant death—but you’ve made certain he is warm and secure. You are the guardian of his safety. I hear you saying, “He’s safer on his back. Babies are supposed to sleep on their backs.” But he’s on his stomach in the posture of a sleeping animal—legs hunched beneath, arms tucked close, tiny palms pressed against the mattress, head-on-hands. Such a little guy and he’s already able to flip himself over. I know you wouldn’t want this. As I turn him onto his back again, he smiles a twitchy sleep-smile, lips comically curled, eyelids fluttering. I press my hand to his chest to feel him breathing. He sighs and I inhale.

I leave our sleeping son and stand at the bathroom door, hand gripping the knob. I hear soft splashing, waterfall sounds, and a ragged sigh. It seems sighs, like everything else, age. The baby’s is one of quick contentment, the whispered sigh of new life. But as time wears us away, our sighs grow longer, more tattered. I hear you and know I’m not ready to beg your forgiveness. Still, it seems important just to want it.

I step into the bathroom and the steam wilts me. You recline in the tub, and through the shroud of bubbles I see glimpses of the body I’ve touched a thousand times. I notice the horizontal fault line cleanly dividing your softened abdomen from a tuft of dark pubic hair. I long to map this new body, eager fingers exploring the topography until the terrain is once again familiar, until I could walk blindfolded through you again and never lose my way.

You’re examining a bottle of Johnson’s shampoo, turning it in your hands like a huge amber gemstone. “Shampooing pour bebes,” you say without looking up. “That’s what it says here, see?” You hold the bottle up to me.

“It’s French,” I say. “Shampoo for babies, I guess. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

You nod. “Makes sense.”

I shiver despite the clinging warmth, and I’m smothered by the heavy purple aroma of lavender. I can’t ask you to forgive what I haven’t admitted, but I know you’re aware—if not of the whos and hows and whys, then at least of the whats. And still, you’re here, in the bathtub, warm and close and real.

“Shampooing pour bebes,” I say the words aloud again, testing them. “It sounds exotic. Almost makes you want to pick up and go someplace far away.”

You stare at me knowingly for a moment, sensing I’ve issued a test. When you smile, you close your eyes. “Everything we need is here.”

Short fiction by Karen Hertzberg

We were pulling into adjacent spaces in the parking lot at Foodmart when he dinged the fender of my old Pontiac. Though we didn’t bother to exchange insurance information, the next morning I woke up with him in my bed.

“Good morning.” He sat up and grinned at me, like he knew something I didn’t. His red hair stood up on top of his head like flames off the tip of a match. Freckles spattered his cheeks. I shook off the startled sensation of waking with a new man and barely remembering what he looked like from the night before.

“Hey,” I answered. As he glided out from between the sheets with easy confidence, the evening started coming back; the stirring of muscles under the pale skin of his solid thighs, like the flanks of a horse in full gallop. Something sparked inside me and I swallowed fire. I stared as he pulled on paisley boxer shorts. Cotton, thank God.

The next thing I knew the man was in my kitchen. “Where do you keep your coffee filters?” he asked. I watched his shoulders surge as he reached up to explore the top shelf of my cupboard. I always view a half-naked man standing in my kitchen scrounging for coffee filters as a fortunate turn of events.

I stumbled over and stood next to him, arms crossed over the front of my satin robe, both of us staring into the same cupboard. “I’m probably out,” I said. “Use a paper towel.”

He made coffee, this guy, good, strong coffee that eroded the cotton batting in my head. And he made scrambled eggs and bacon. I was afraid to tell him how long the eggs had probably been in the old Kenmore. I rarely cook. Still, they tasted better than restaurant eggs. The guy watched me fork food into my mouth like a starving child and winked at me. Winked!

“I add a dash of cinnamon,” he told me. Somehow he’d managed to harvest cinnamon from my barren cupboards. He gestured a lot as he spoke, and I watched his hair tumble around his head with every twitch and nod. “Cinnamon gives it a special sort of flavor. Makes it taste less . . . eggy. Gives it class, I think.”

After we finished breakfast, I told him he’d better go. He looked at me like he was a frail old man and I was the evil landlord booting him out onto the streets so the building could go condo.

“But, can I see you again?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“Jane, if I’d known you wouldn’t want –”

I leaned against the door frame and nodded for him to step out into the hall, which he obediently did. “It’s not like we’re soul mates,” I said. “We met over a dented fender. We found an interesting way to kill an evening. It’s biology.”

“I thought –” he stopped and turned away. “Never mind what I thought. It doesn’t matter. Take it easy, okay?”

“Yeah, you too.”

I watched him for a moment as he walked away, my eyes locked on the wave of hair at the nape of his neck. There’s something vulnerable about the back of a man’s neck. I closed the door behind him and listened to the sound of his footfalls trailing off down the apartment hallway. I imagined a horse’s flanks under his faded Levis, and I may have listened to him trotting away a little longer than I usually do.

Three weeks later I saw him at Foodmart. It was about the same time of day, and on a Wednesday, the same day of the week as when I’d met him the first time. It wasn’t like I’d planned it. The guy must have shopped on a predictable schedule.

I walked up beside him in the produce section and picked up a head of lettuce, hoisting it in my hand and squeezing it to see if it had some bulk. My mother always warned me if you buy light, squishy lettuce you get fewer greens because it’s filled with air. I noticed the guy fondling lettuce, too.

“Hey, it’s you,” I said to him.

He turned and grinned. “Hi, Jane.”

He was a little more handsome than I remembered. His red hair was tamer that day. His skin glowed with the honey-colored tan fair skinned people get, which made his green eyes emerald.

“You squeeze lettuce,” I said.

“My mother taught me to be a smart consumer.”

I laughed at that. I gave him a real, genuine laugh to keep, and I knew he started thinking he might actually have a chance with me. He cocked one red caterpillar eyebrow and smiled.

“Well, see you later,” I said, and turned away in pursuit of pasta.

A few hours later, we were back at my apartment. It seemed our meeting at the store was some sort of karma because we were both shopping for the ingredients for spaghetti dinner. It seemed a waste, us preparing the same meals at different apartments, so he offered to cook for me. I accepted because I never pass up the opportunity to lay back while somebody else cooks.

After dinner, I waited for us to tumble into my bed. The scenario shouldn’t have been awkward for him. My apartment was a studio, so the living room and the bedroom were one in the same. He sauntered over to the couch instead and I thought, okay, different venue tonight. I sat down next to him as he leaned his head back against the cushions and smiled like a large, contented animal, reclining and gazing up at the ceiling as though he saw a field of stars.

I glanced at the ceiling myself and saw nothing but a long, jagged fault line zig-zagging through the plaster. “Dinner was great,” I said.

He focused his eyes on me now, still leaning back. I wondered if he expected me to do something to him. It would figure that he was one of those guys who like aggressive women.

“You know,” I said, the words stumbling out of my mouth, “I’m really not the type to make the first move, and I didn’t think you were the sort of guy who just lays around and waits for it, either.”

“What?”

I tucked my hands between my thighs, a trick I’d learned to warm my always-frigid fingers. “I like things to be sort of mutual,” I continued. “You know. I attack you, you attack me. Mutual lust. I’m not really up to a passive guy.”

“I was just thinking we’d sit here and talk. I didn’t think anybody would be attacking anybody.” There was a seductive curl to his pale pink lips.

“You didn’t?”

“No.”

“Talk?”

“Yeah. It’s this concept where I say something, and then you respond to what I said, and vice versa. Once you get the hang of it, it’s easy.”

I plucked my icy hands from between my legs and planted my chin between them to cool the embarrassment painting my cheeks. My own fidgeting made me nervous – foolish and clumsy. The guys I’d known rarely wanted to talk about much of anything. Even so, we ended up draped across my couch, talking.

He told me as a teenager he lived on the south side of Milwaukee, next to a black family, and the little kids called him Spark because of the red hair. Their mother was a single parent, there were six children, and this poor woman would walk to work each morning hunched against the damp Milwaukee cold, her kids trailing behind.

One bitterly cold February morning he hadn’t seen them heading off down the street. It worried him because every weekday they marched, no matter what the weather. He went over to the house and knocked on the door and when nobody answered he just walked in. He found the kids huddled around a still form on the floor, sniffling and clinging to each other. He called 911 and the kids ended up in foster care for months until their mother was well enough to care for them again.

Somehow, I found myself leaning in closer as he told his story, though what he was saying sounded like a CBS Movie of the Week. It seemed foreign to me, listening to somebody talk instead of the steady spanking of skin on skin punctuated by sighs and grunts. That sort of thing I knew. This talking and dining together made me feel strange and twitchy.

“Now, you tell me something,” he said.

I blinked at him and stared, but he held his silence.

“There’s nothing to tell,” I finally said. I leaned back and away, crossing my arms over my chest and fixing my eyes on the street light outside the window. I’d found myself doing this from time to time, staring into the amber light and letting my eyes un-focus, and that fuzzy glow would look like a halo, or a light at the end of the tunnel.

“Well, how about telling me where you grew up, or something like that. What was it like being you, as a kid?”

“Dull,” I answered. I had no harrowing story.

“One-word answers don’t make for very interesting conversation.”

“Okay,” I sighed. “Dull and stupid.”

“What was your family like?”

“White trash, I suppose. Middle class pretending to be something special.” I snapped my gaze back toward him. “You want to play twenty questions, or what?”

“There must’ve been something you liked,” he said.

“My horse. Nothing else. Just my horse.” This was ridiculous.

“Your horse,” he said. “So you had a horse. That’s cool. Kind of rich-kid, isn’t it? I mean, not too many people I know could afford to own a horse.”

“Neither could we,” I said. “My parents ended up selling him.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “So, what was his name?”

I turned my head away from him and rolled my eyes. “His name was Yeats, except my mom either pronounced it `yeets’ or spelled it `Y-a-t-e-s’.”

“So, I take it your mom didn’t name your horse, then?”

“No.” I stared at the fissure in the plaster again. “I did.”

He stared up again, too, and said softly, “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths…”

I recognized the words. I turned my head away and waved a hand in the air, “Yeah, that.”

Later, as I watched him walk down the hall, staring at the hole in his jeans just below his back pocket, I called after him, “Hey, Spark!”

He turned and shot me that sexy smile again.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Let me give you my phone number.”

I darted into the house and scratched my number onto a piece of paper towel with a dried-up pen. I thrust it out the door at him.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

I never give men my phone number, because they never call, but I was certain this guy would. He had that sort of trustworthy steadiness, like a horse.

“You don’t remember my name,” he said out of the blue.

He was right. I didn’t.

“Actually, I kinda like Spark,” I said. Seemed like a good answer.

“I’ll call you,” he promised, “But when you answer the phone, you have to say my name or I’m hanging up. Deal?”

“That’s so stupid.”

He was slowly vanishing into the dimness of the hallway.

“It’s not stupid at all,” he said. “Goodnight… Jane.”

I closed my eyes before closing the door and remembered the last lines of the Yeats poem:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams
I have spread my dreams under your feet
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

The phone rang at 11:30 that night. I picked it up and said, “Dave?”

“Nope,” a voice answered. “Talk to you tomorrow, Jane.”

Click.

Then the phone jangled me awake at 6 A.M.

“Brian?”

“Two strikes.”

“Three and I’m out?”

“Nah. You get unlimited strikes in this game.”

Click.

At 7 P.M. that night: “Kevin?”

“Nice try.”

Click.

Midnight. “Rumpelstiltskin?”

“Aw, so close!”

“Is it an R name, then?”

“Maybe.”

“Ryan?”

“You only get one guess per phone call, Jane.”

“Give me a hint. Is it a weird name, or a normal one?”

“I’ll give you one hint. It’s a popular name, and it’s not Rumpelstiltskin.”

“That’s two hints.”

“Consider it a bonus.”

Click.

4 A.M., waking me from a sound sleep. I literally screamed into the phone, “Ron, Randy, Robert, Raymond, Rick!”

Static silence. I heard life on the other end of the line, soft breathing.

“Mom?” I said.

A snorted laugh answered.

“Spark!”

“It’s one of those names you just shouted at me,” he said slowly. “And by the way, thank you. I’m deaf in one ear now.”

“Which one?” I cried. “Not which ear. I mean, which name?”

“You tell me,” he purred. “If you can tell me in one guess, I’ll come over right now.”

I pinched my legs together to savor the luscious swelling in my groin. I felt a familiar glow rising in my body. I was fire-eating again. “If you come over, are we going to talk some more?”

“At four in the morning? No. I was thinking we’d make love. But if you’d rather talk, or sleep…”

“No!”

He laughed like warm syrup.

“I mean, no. I like talking, but right now –”

“One guess.”

I couldn’t believe how he’d made me want him. The thing of it was, I don’t think until that moment he’d even known he was doing it. But in the midst of the talking and the curiosity, somehow this had become a sexy little game. I breathed consciously, closing my eyes in the darkness, memorizing his fiery hair and gemstone eyes, how I’d straddled his hips that evening after the car accident, picturing the hole in his jeans where a patch of alabaster flesh shone through. And remembering how I’d told him about Yeats and he’d actually listened and not laughed.

“Rick,” I whispered my guess.

Click.

Robert, Raymond, Randy . . . what was the other name? I had to remember the other name I’d shouted. I knew I’d yelled five names. For some reason, I remembered the cadence. Rick was one of them, and he’d hung up. Robert. He didn’t look much like a Robert, or a Raymond, for that matter. Randy was a possibility. I decided that the next time he called, I would use Randy and hope it worked. Otherwise, I had three more names to go, one of which I couldn’t remember.

I stared into the darkness, sprawled across my bed with the covers pulled up to my chin. The ticking of the alarm clock beside my head drummed on. I glanced over to look at the glowing hands on its face. It was about 4:30 A.M. The mattress groaned beneath me as I turned my back to the glaring clock. Tonight I was wide awake and I knew there would be no more sleep.

Suddenly I slammed upright in bed. I remembered that the phone company had this thing where you could dial star-69 and they would tell you the last number that called your line. Giddy, I turned on the desk lamp and dialed, a pen poised in my hand over a hot-pink Post-it notepad. I would turn the tables and call him with my next guess.

“We’re sorry,” the sugared electronic voice on the phone said, “The last number to call your line is not available.”

I howled my defeat, slammed the phone down, turned off the light and flopped back onto the lumpy bed. I couldn’t remember ever feeling this way about a guy. After the high school crushes, the ones you always remember with bittersweet nostalgia, there was nothing memorable. It was easier when they didn’t stay and you didn’t get attached. It was easier when you didn’t give phone numbers and you just said goodbye at the door in the morning – or even that same night – and they went their merry way.

I closed my eyes, hoping to sleep for just a while. I silently made plans to spend the coming morning in bed, at least until noon. I waited for the phone to ring again. I wanted my next chance. It had to be Randy. It was either Randy or that other name I couldn’t remember. When I opened my eyes again to stare up at the ceiling some more, the room was a subtle shade lighter.

Then I heard the knocking.

I stumbled out of bed and shrugged into my robe, naked beneath. When I flung the apartment door open, light from the hallway spilled in and I blinked at the shadow in the doorframe. All I could see, haloed by the hall light behind, was a tumble of matchstick red hair. I could hear his steady breathing and feel his solid presence there in the dimness. I could smell him, a soft natural scent like wind and sunlight.

“Rick!” I cried, and dragged him in the door.