Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005
- Автор: Dean David, Dempsey Timothy F.
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: ISSN 1054-8122
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
Copyright ©; 2005 by The Estate of David Williams.
Waiting
by Derek Nikitas
Since we first published Derek Nikitas last year, the Brockport, N.Y., author has sold non-genre stories to the literary magazines Traffic East and Chelsea, and a mystery to Judas E-Zine. Mr. Nikitas is the recipient of an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina. Joyce Carol Oates has called his stories “very subtly written, and quite touching and powerful.”
Anne had been waiting, preserving herself for over twenty-six years. Not for religious practice — though growing up she’d gone to church most holidays — and not unwillingly. She wasn’t desperate, either. Maybe rather gangly, kind of moonfaced and pale, and a couple matchsticks taller than most girls, but not ugly. Not by anyone’s standard.
Was it fear, maybe? Some nights thoughts of love would strobe through her mind, but whether those flashes brought thrill or dread she couldn’t tell. When she imagined her deflowering and what came afterward, it all looked just black, like the inner wall of a cocoon, as if she’d get reborn from it all malformed, thrashing around, unfit for survival.
But then Anne met and fell in love with Daniel Green, a theology graduate student at SUNY Hammersport. Met him when he walked into World Wide Travel, where she worked as an agent. Said he wanted to book a flight to Israel for thesis research. Tall enough to duck under the blow-up plastic airplanes that dangled by twine from the ceiling. A bit chubby, balding at his crown, dressed in a brown corduroy suit coat and pants. His first words to her were, “’Scuse me, ma’am. I hate so much to bother you.” For real, and spoken in all seriousness with a Southern twang she later learned was Georgian. He’d asked her to join him at a college art opening, and after that first date several weeks passed before Anne truly understood that they were a couple. Before he even tried to kiss her.
Now, six months later, Anne and Daniel were alone in her bedroom, where frigid air leaked through the window cracks and plastic insulation screens. The radiator clicked out its thin warmth, and Daniel knelt beside the bed like a child praying before sleep. He looked away from Anne whenever he spoke. He was shirtless, wearing his slacks and shoes, belt unbuckled.
On the bed, Anne lay above the comforter — naked for the first time in someone else’s presence. She wore only her white ankle socks. Goosebumps sprouted on her arms and legs, and she clenched her teeth to stop their chattering.
After a while Daniel removed his glasses, rested his head against her hipbone, and squinted at his own fingers sweeping along her belly. His fingers tapped her ribs as if he were playing piano keys, playing a song that she’d heard often in her dreams.
Anne tried not to look at her own body. Instead she pushed her fingers through Daniel’s thinning hair. A tea candle on her desk cast faint shuddering light across her bedroom, outlining the open closet door, the twin bed, the flat map of Earth on the wall beside her. The planet’s continents shrank and bulged as they dragged away from the Equator. Anne had traveled across that distorted globe — to Mexico and Sweden, the Bahamas. Back in college she’d studied in France and for a while taken on the style of the young Parisian women she admired — pageboy haircut, dark skirts, and knee-high boots.
“Are you sure you want to?” Daniel asked.
“Yes — of course,” she said. “I love you.” She chose Daniel for better reasons than mere attraction. She chose him because she knew he’d guide her carefully and patiently into what awaited her after tonight.
“Do you hear something?” Daniel asked her.
“What?” She covered herself with her arms.
“I thought I heard something.” He pushed himself up, groaning. His pale gut glowed yellowish in the candlelight. Anne looked away, into the darkness of her bedroom doorway. It was empty at first, but as she watched, the blackness in the entrance took on a human shape.
Someone else was standing there.
“Who are you?” Daniel said toward the door.
“Richard?” said Anne. Her voice came out raspy — the remnants of a recent flu. Daniel’s hands were no longer touching her. In an instant she was unanchored and drifting. She wanted to grab something to cover herself, but her arms wouldn’t budge.
“Gloria?” It was Richard. Her roommate Gloria’s boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. He spoke from where he stood at the doorway to Anne’s bedroom. The wrong bedroom. He spoke Gloria’s name as if it belonged to him.
Daniel started to rise, but then he dropped just as swiftly back to the throw rug on the floor. The gust of his fall doused the tea candle and darkened the room. Through that fresh dark came an afterimage of Richard’s arm swiping, striking at Daniel. Then the thump of something hard against flesh.
Anne slid herself against the world map and thrust her knees against her chest, covered herself with a pillow. She couldn’t see through the darkness to where Daniel had dropped to the floor.
“Gloria?” It was Richard’s voice again.
“Richard,” Anne said.
“Anne? Is that Anne?” Richard said.
“What are you doing? Daniel? Did you hit Daniel?” Her shrill panicked voice rattled even her own heart. She was plummeting from the steady confidence she’d clutched just seconds before.
“Who?” Richard said. “What’s... where’s Gloria?”
“She’s not here!” Anne said. “This is my room!”
A sudden light shined, the overhead lamp, and it burned her eyes. She squinted at the vision that came blurred and bright like tropical noon. Daniel lay on his back with one arm crossed over his face. His skin looked all wrong to her, rubbery.
Richard was brush-cut and unshaven, darkness stamped in both his eye sockets. He clutched a chef’s blade that he must have stolen from Anne and Gloria’s kitchen. In the other hand he held a rock that was wet from melting snow and no bigger than a softball. It could have come from anywhere out there in that winter night, that rock he’d used to strike Daniel.
“I hit him. I thought you were Gloria,” Richard said in a voice unhinged. He struck the rock against his own forehead — a thick, meaty thump. Then he hissed at the pain.
“This is my room! What are you doing?” Anne said.
“Dammit! I thought she was in here with somebody — hiding in here — messing around. I took this rock first, and then the knife — I couldn’t stand it — hearing her in here with somebody else. I saw you people — naked — I didn’t think—”
Anne cringed at his voice, recoiled as if the air swarmed with razors all bearing down on her. She couldn’t hold her body tight enough in her own grasp. She wanted Richard to rush away, backwards, reversing everything, everything mistaken restored. All the way back to before they’d met him.
Maybe even to the time she and Gloria had waited under the sunburned Mexican sky for the old hombre who every afternoon led two horses toward their hotel and offered half-hour excursions.
High tide had thrust the Pacific waters against the promenade and drowned the steps leading down to the beach. White and Mexican vacationers bobbed like driftwood in waves that were warm as blood. At their table Anne and Gloria drank margaritas from plastic cups, and they swatted the fuzz-brown bees that had tracked the liquor scent. The Mexican heat siphoned sweat from their bodies. Even the hotel pools boiled. The booze worked more quickly in these sultry highs, hazing through the brain like a gas.
Like Anne, Gloria worked at the World Wide Travel Agency in downtown Hammersport. She was born Brazilian, raised in Brooklyn. At her desk back home she could fling reservations and confirmations across the known world — simultaneous calls in English, Spanish, Portuguese — as her fingers swiped over the desk globe as if she knew how to find by mountainous contours those places she speed-dialed. Gloria wore shirts that told secrets about her body — the silver waist chain attached to her belly-button ring, the vaccination scar burned onto her shoulder.