Clothed, Female Figure: Stories

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The summer before the millennium a coin turned through the air against the pewter lungs of a thunderhead. The grass where it would fall — tails up, in a moment — was cool before the torrent. By prior arrangement with myself, I set off for the city. My childhood was full of such solitary games and bargains.

People were talking about computer bugs, that summer. I pictured the seal-gray clumps of aphids in my mother’s garden and the ants that marched down the brick to milk them.

I found employment in a Fifth Avenue apartment with a climate of dog’s breath. From the fourteenth floor, the people on the street were as tiny as those aphids.

I worked under the hot wind of a little silver table fan, putting old auction house catalogs in new order. There was nothing but flat tonic in the refrigerator — it tasted like Freon. A corroded rubber band held the faucet together. The icemaker relinquished a plunk of cubes every quarter hour, and I melted them across my forehead.

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