Whoosh.
The king shoots her an arctic glare. She looks at you, her dark eyes avid and level, her neck arched and her shoulders flung back.
She speaks your name.
It’s not possible.
The king grins a conquering, predatory grin. The queen turns away.
The world, which had been about to transform itself, changes back again. The world reveals itself to be nothing more than you, scuttling out of the throne room, hurrying through town, returning to the empty little house that’s always there, that’s always been there, waiting for you.
You stamp your right foot. You stamp it so hard, with such enchantment-compelled force, that it goes right through the marble floor, sinks to your ankle.
You stamp your left foot. Same thing. You are standing now, trembling, insane with fury and disappointment, ankle-deep in the royal floor.
The queen keeps her face averted. The king emits a peal of laughter that sounds like disdain itself.
And with that, you split in half.
It’s the strangest imaginable sensation. It’s as if some strip of invisible tape that’s been holding you together, from mid-forehead to crotch, has suddenly been stripped away. It’s no more painful than pulling off a bandage. And then you fall onto your knees, and you’re looking at yourself, twice, both of you pitched forward, blinking in astonishment at a self who is blinking in astonishment at you, who are blinking in astonishment at him, who is blinking in astonishment at you …
The queen silently summons two of the guards, who lift you in two pieces from the floor in which you’ve become mired, who carry you, one half apiece, out of the room. They take you all the way back to your place in the woods, and leave you there.
There are two of you now. Neither is sufficient unto itself, but you learn, over time, to join your two halves together, and hobble around. There are limits to what you can do, though you’re able to get from place to place. Each half, naturally enough, requires the cooperation of the other, and you find yourself getting snappish with yourself; you find yourself cursing yourself for your clumsiness, your overeagerness, your lack of consideration for your other half. You feel it doubly. Still, you go on. Still, you step in tandem, make your slow and careful way up and down the stairs, admonishing, warning, each of you urging the other to slow down, or speed up, or wait a second. What else can you do? Each would be helpless without the other. Each would be stranded, laid flat, abandoned, bereft.
STEADFAST; TIN
It’s his lucky night. She’s relented, after two years of aloof and chilly friendliness. Finally, cherries have appeared in all three of his slot machine windows. At the kegger thrown by his fraternity (it’s spring by the calendar, but wind still knifes in off the lake, the grass is still sere), she’s gotten a little drunker than she’d intended to, because she’s just been abandoned by a boy she’d thought she might love; a boy who, when he left, took with him her first ideas about a cogent and convincing future.
At the frat party, her best friend whispers to her, Go with that guy, give both of you a break, haven’t you already observed your second anniversary of him mooning over you? And hey, the friend whispers, he’s just hot enough and just dumb enough for tonight, which, honestly sweetheart, you could use right now, it’s part of your recovery program, it’s your post-asshole-boyfriend vacation, just take the poor fuck for a spin, it’ll make you feel better, you need a little, how to put it, unintensity.
He’s drawn to remote girls, unavailable girls, girls who don’t fall for it, being, as he is, a boy who might have been carved by Michelangelo; one of those exceptional beings who wear their beauty as if it were a common human state, and not an aberration. A remote and unavailable girl is rare for him.
Upstairs, in his room, he’s got her shirt unbuttoned, he’s fingering her crotch, which is pleasant for her, but only pleasant. She’s been right, since he first locked eyes with her in Humanities 101—these hunky, uber-confident guys are never truly adept, they’ve never had to be, they’ve received their educations at the hands of girls who were too grateful, too enamored; girls who failed to teach them properly. This rough groping, these inexpert kisses, have been enough for those simple and besotted girls whose main objective was to keep him coming around. He must have had sex with a hundred girls, more than a hundred, and every one of them, it seems, has done little more than cooperate; than assure him that he’s been right all along about what a girl wants, what a girl needs.
She’s not that patient. She’s not that interested.
So she steps back out of his embrace and strips, with the quick mechanical carelessness of a teammate in the locker room.
Oh. Well. Wow. This is a new one on him, this matter-of-fact, let’s-get-on-with-it attitude.
It means he hasn’t had time to prepare her, to slip her the abashed confession that’s worked every other time, since he started college.
Disconcerted, confused, he strips as well. He can’t think of anything else to do.
And there it is, unannounced.
All he can manage is “It’s a prosthetic.” He detaches it, tosses it carelessly, callously, onto the floor.
His right leg ends just above the knee.
Car accident, he tells her. When I was seventeen. The summer after high school.
The tossed-away lower leg sits on the floor. It looks like an accident, all by itself: the flesh-colored plastic calf tapering to an ankle that sprouts a toeless foot.
He stands before her. He has no trouble balancing on one leg.
He tells her — he always tells this story, to every girl — that the other car was driven by a fifteen-year-old who’d just stolen it, and was being chased by the police. It matters to him that he was not in any way at fault; that a young criminal, a demon of sorts, took his leg from him.
She needs a moment to fully apprehend the missing lower leg. His body, from the broad farmhand shoulders to the crop-rows of abdominals, is as flawless as she’d expected it to be.
He’s harmed, though. He’s been bluffing, since that car accident, which got him right after he’d emerged from high school, laureled and impeccable. It seems that some devil delivered the punch line before the joke had been set up, and that the joke, in its earliest stages (no time for a talking dog or a rabbi or a crazy wager), can deliver only a surreal and macabre finish.
So, this really handsome guy walks into a bar and … The bar blows up and kills everybody.
The bravado she’s never liked in him, the thuggish self-assurance that’s turned her off, reveals itself to have been a trick, a way of coping. He’s come off as cartoonishly confident because that’s what he’s needed to do.
He knows about damage the way a woman does. He knows, the way a woman knows, how to carry on as if nothing’s wrong.
* * *
Sometimes the fabric that separates us tears just enough for love to shine through. Sometimes the tear is surprisingly small.