Read The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore for Free Online Page B

turn off the light in her cell she is visited by a bulldog with the face of a man and the tongue of a snake?
    I told her about the night sky visiting me. She lined the paintings edge to edge to edge until I began to think it was a message for me. Was it my father on the other side of the river trying to cross? Arms open to me. Or was it me? Was it me unable to cross to myself?
    One day I left a pencil behind and she gouged it into her arm, ripping open the vein.
    You didn’t talk much. On weekends, or at night, I’d make you hitch-hike to an empty part of the highway with me. The highway cut through the darkness. Sometimes all we could see was the yellow line. Every so often the pavement would vibrate through the rubber soles of our sneakers and the headlights from transport trucks came up from behind us. The lights swiped like giant paws over the trees and boulders until they overtook us and we fell back into darkness.
    I just talked and shouted and did cartwheels and the cancan with my parka open. I did chorus kicks all the way down the empty highway. I shrieked the lyrics from old musicals;
I got plenty of nothin’ and nothin’s plenty for me
. The hills climbed up on either side of us. Rain fell off the massive sky like the faces of buildings in an earthquake.
    It’s possible to imagine you have completely forgotten me.
    You were honest. That was a point with you. I’ve been with men who believe they’re honest, but the truth loses its shape around them. I prefer them. You never said you loved me, even when I begged you.
    Please say you love me just once. Please, please, please, please, I’ll devote my whole life to you, I’ll do anything. I was holding onto the hem of your jeans. We were in the echoey stairwell. I was flat on my belly, on the stairs, being dragged with each step you took, breathless with laughter. You drawing one leg up, then the other, pulling yourself up by the railing. In danger of losing your pants. Please say it, just say it for Christ’s sake.
    I’m trying to imagine what it must have felt like to be theobject of that much devotion. You were stern, that was your policy. In the face of obsession, be stern.
    I was in a high school play the night my father died. I stood on a ladder. I was Voice Number Three. I talked about spring coming, and wore a feather boa dyed orange. I changed a Styrofoam painting of autumn leaves on a plywood tree for a Styrofoam painting of green ones. Mom was waiting in the wings. She said I’d have to come right away, Dad was sick.
    That night the nurse told us he would die. A heart attack. It seemed to me an easy thing to fix. There must be some kind of syringe to suck the blood back into the heart so it can pump again, some surgery. I explained this to the nurse. I had an image of the heart as one of those hard plastic models stuck on a steel spike in the science lab. But a heart, in fact, must be like tissue paper, must come apart when it’s not pumping, must dissolve. He had wires attached to little white circles attached to his chest. He looked very tidy, not soaked in blood at all.
    The next day I wanted to go to school as though nothing had happened. My mother didn’t stop me. In school there was a surprise party for a teacher who was having a baby. Everybody chipped in on the present. She held it up, tissue paper over the sides of the box. She made a joke and everybody laughed uproariously, the excitement of a free period. Miss, Miss, Miss, and over the noise of my own laughter she mouthed the words, How’s your father? and I mouthed back, Dead.
    Her shock hit me in the stomach. The bell rang and everyonejumped up to leave. In the corridor I leaned against the wall, unable to hold myself up.
    We had sex outdoors a lot for lack of any other location, living as we were in student dorms, no boys on the girls’ floor, and vice versa. Once in the mud and yellow leaves, criss-crossing black branches above us, a