from: The Oyster

Ann Pedone

I

The day after Heinrich Scheimann discovered the ancient city of Troy, all the she-goats came down from the mountain and stated quite matter-of-factly that they refused to ever be inseminated again. Like a man who proposes but then refuses to eat any of the jumbo shrimp at his own reception. “In the game of language, there are no real winners” he tells his mother-in-law right just as she reaches to cut the cake.

A footnote here reads in part, “Must be cross-referenced with the series of lists I made when I was in Split last February. The usual things. All the prepositional phrases used in the hotel bar menu, the 

Five etymologies of the word “cicada” I picked up from the man who offered to go down on me when I stopped at a laundromat to ask for directions.” 

Whenever I’m in a new city I study what I can of how the women in town go about making a straight line. I write down a few loose phone numbers on the back of my hand. This is my ribbon work. 

II

When it’s just past four am. The ablative has gone all out of your face, I turn to him and say. 

The small bit of wallpaper that’s come loose in his mother’s dining room. The plates they still have stored downstairs, the ones the Germans used during Occupation. 

There’s no point in being subtle about it. The house is large and bright, easy as cold weather. And yet obscene as those one or two words Homer always insisted on leaving in the past tense. 

VI

You know the story? The sandwiches left on the counter were chilled, but inexact. Without putting them back into the refrigerator, a small, hard feeling started to creep about three quarters of the way up inside of her vaginal canal. 

Four years earlier, a man she had been talking to in the International Terminal had offered to insert something in her. And now she wondered whether or not it was still there.

She pulled a lint roller out of the drawer. 

The baby, the older woman in the light blue pant suit who had intentionally bumped into her in line at the post office, her seeming inability to ever rip a piece of green silk cleanly. Or if there were a less obscene equivalent.