It was the hint of exotic in her features that began to sink into him now. What exotic locale they suggested he could not imagine, but someplace different. It was not the look of a gypsy. Until the woman with parrot fever, which ended it all, his father had often embalmed and buried gypsies; he had a friendship with the old gypsy queen’s son. He’d buried the queen, in that grand ceremony they’d conducted down 8th Street to the old cemetery west of town, Rose Hill. But she was not a gypsy. Her name, now he remembered, was Littleton, that was fitting. Constance Littleton, they called her Connie. Little Connie Littleton, here alone with Parnell. He leaned down and kissed her lips. Dry as desiccated clay. No give there. No, there was the faintest. She was not entirely cold. Still fresh in death, still sweet in passing. Still between the living and the dead, her spirit not entirely removed. He gently pulled the sheet down across her body, and off her small toes.
She was all small. And if she’d worn her nightgown in death his father had removed it, to prepare for embalming. She barely had feminine breasts. Her arms and legs were thin, her wrists no bigger round than stalks of sugarcane. Her shins and ankles almost bird-narrow, ending in the slim flat feet. Her waist was like a boy’s, not narrow and flaring into her hips. Her hands were turned up, as if she were consciously laid out in sacrifice, merely drugged by the high priests who’d laid her there.
He imagined that if he had known her, they would have walked to a little clearing in the woods. She would be silent, as always, and hardly able to look at him in her shyness. And in his own, little else to say. They would have sat together in slanting afternoon sunlight and let the quiet sounds of the woods gather around them for their company. He took the robe off and stood there a long moment with his eyes closed.
— I love you, he said to her. -You have to know that.
He began to cry a little, his eyes welled up. He had loved her and he hadn’t even known it. He began to be flooded by memories of her. He’d seen her eating by herself or with a couple of almost equally silent girlfriends in the school cafeteria. He’d seen her sitting on a bench beside the stadium reading a book and eating an apple one day. She wore a sweater and a tartan skirt and penny loafers. He imagined her helping him remove them, one by one, the light sweater, the skirt and shoes and socks off her feet, her underwear and a little brasiere there more for modesty than support.
The table hardly creaked when he climbed atop it and lay in the narrow space beside her. -I do love you, he whispered. He had hardly to push apart her thin legs, she was in the attitude to receive him already. At her neck, and behind her ears, in her hair, the musty sweet-and-sour smell of a week’s neglect in her bed. He could hardly hear the sounds he made for the louder sound of the blood rushing behind his eyes.
As he laid his weight upon her, her lips parted and an almost imperceptible exhalation escaped them, the odor of something strange and familiar too, an animal’s breath, and rotten flowers, the scum of an iron-rich creek near the swamps, the odor of richly decaying life, life in death, the dying always overtaking the living so the richness of the roots of life must push up unevolved from the earth and into an almost instant decomposition. She was thick and solid in her tissue, hard in parts of protruding bone like stones beneath a mat of firm moss, and cool but dry. Inside her was thick and cool and close but not entirely unyielding, his hard prick like a rigid fetus inside a cold womb. He moved himself deeper, slowly, with a wild restraint born of his barely contained respect and love for her, which fought within each second in his mind with a violent lust. He gripped the delicate knobs of her shoulders, which fit snugly into the palms of his own small, childlike hands. His mouth was at her ear, and into it he whispered desperate declarations of his passion, her beauty, oh how she was giving more of herself to him each moment. Some heated current ran its hot millipede fingers up his spine, shocked through his brain and out his scalp, his follicles pure heat valves, his jaw thrown open as if to eject his own heart, some shout must have rolled out of his diaphram though he could no more distinguish sound from some other force than if it had occurred in a world yet to know any living, breathing thing, his drool on her neck making a wet spot he could see, when he could see again, spreading beside her lank dark hair on the table beneath them.
He closed his eyes and lay there, his breath returning slowly to normal, his heart returning to a dreaded calm, when he heard the little noise that made him open his eyes again. It was a sound like the first little cheep you hear sometimes outside your window at dawn when a bird wakes up in its nest. And when he looked he saw first her mouth move, the lips press together, and then her narrow brow furrow over her thick dark eyebrows. His own breath caught in him like he’d been delivered a blow just as she caught her own, and her eyes opened like those of a child who’s been sleeping long and hard and he was up and off her still thumping gently with the last of what he’d done, and standing there watching her.
She lay there blinking for a long moment, then sat up.
— Mama?
Her voice small and crusty, weak. A thick gray cloud in her eyes, clearing.
— Where am I?
Parnell had retreated further away from her into a darker corner. Now she was blinking her eyes and looking at him.
— Where am I?
He couldn’t move. She stared at him a moment, then felt on her right shoulder where Parnell had drooled, looked at the faint glint of moisture on her hand. She looked down and tentatively touched her lower abdomen, her tummy, felt herself, made a quiet hnngh sound, an almost delicate expression of puzzlement. She saw the sheet still bunched at her feet and reached down to get it. She pulled it up over her waist, and then held it while she got down from the embalming table. Her bare toes flexing as they touched the cold concrete floor. She fixed the sheet around her shoulders like some kind of biblical robe and found the door with her eyes and started for it slowly, like a sleepwalker. She had forgotten him. She was not fully awake. He did not know what. He did not know what this was. Her hand found the doorknob and she opened the door and then stood there a minute in the doorway, looking out, looking up the stairs. And then she started up the stairs, going slowly, a little shaky, her hand on the railing. At the top of the stairs she opened the door to the main floor and stepped through.
Parnell snatched up his robe and put it on and followed her quietly in his slippers. When he got to the top of the steps she was almost to the front door at the end of the entrance hallway. She pulled on the door a second, and Parnell almost cried out, thinking she would not be able to open it and his parents would wake at her rattling the knob. Then he heard the lock tumbler click and the door creaked open, not too loudly, and she walked out into the streetlamp light on the front porch. He hurried forward to catch the door before it shut to and just did catch it and opened it to look out. The girl was out to the sidewalk now, still looking about her as if in a dream.