The Burning House. Paul Lisicky

for the help, big fuck,” I said to myself.

      But the buds of his iPod saved me this time.

      I stood before the urinal in the locker room. I sprayed an especially deep stream of yellow against the moth cake. Two guys wandered in from the pool, stepped one leg at a time out of their royal blue bathing suits, squeezed them out at the sink. Neither would have guessed the extremity of my position but five minutes before, and there was no reason to tell them that, in spite of winning, I’d died a little death. The air smelled fetid, humid, of crusty towels and bacteria. I tasted iron in my mouth. I stepped out of my pants, certain I should have felt overjoyed at my good fortune, but I only sat on the bench. I stared at the grout lines in the floor tile until I recovered myself.

      I wanted to clean them with a brush until they were white as teeth.

      If there was a difference between how Joan and I looked at things, it was something like this: think of the difference between sitting on a train backward and sitting on a train forward. If you were sitting backward, by the time your eye caught on something, say, the honey locust by the fire tower, it was already in your past; it was already sucking away from you, never to be recovered. I preferred to see what was ahead. Unlike Joan, I wanted to see my future coming toward me.

      I still had an hour. A whole container of an hour to use exactly how I wanted. It might have been the gift of a year, handed over to me from my Russian ancestors, wrapped like a present. I drove with impressive composure to the back of the shopping center, where I parked beside a dumpster under a mimosa (messy tree: little pink wisps on my windshield) and started walking two blocks to the east, past the other houses. Something calmed me about other lives in action: the snap of green beans broken over a bowl, a downy black spaniel rolling on her back against the grass. I was shocked and silently pleased that my mouth wasn’t dry, that my deodorant hadn’t given out, souring my shirt, making me nasty.

      “The baby’s in bed,” she said, upon opening the door.

      “And hello to you too,” I said, laughing, too happy to be stung.

      She looked directly at me, flyaway pieces of blonde, waist-length hair sticking to her lips. She looked ready to taste it, the hard tang of its minerals, but she blew it away, a wicked smile on her face. That was all it took, and I pushed her backward inside her house (one step, two), nudged the door shut with my shoe, and covered her. At once I felt myself melt, a pat of butter in a frying pan. The top of my head crackled; I laughed, and I knew I was home.

      How long had it been since I felt so large?

      We fucked. Crude as it sounds, we fucked away the hour. There really wasn’t any other word for it. We moved from the hallway, upstairs to the bed, rolling and rocking, until she was sitting on my lap, and I was pushing inside her with such force that I worried she’d bleed and think I was cruel by tomorrow. Though she seemed to be entirely into it and want it that way. She kept nodding yes and yes, and we never said a word the whole time, nothing about family or friends, or any life beyond this nine by ten-foot room with the little jalousie window overlooking the lagoon.

      Her name was Janet, though I took great pains to forget her name, as I believed she did mine. We’d met six months ago, walking up and down the aisles of the Super Fresh, where she was looking for Italian breadcrumbs and I was looking for grated cheese, as it was another of those nights when Laura was working late at the store and I wanted to surprise her with pasta, a late dinner. I followed the woman to the parking lot, she slid inside her car and sat there for a moment, face turned to the left, abstractedly toward the trees. She looked ahead, challenging me, even though I couldn’t quite see her features. She flashed on her headlights, then off. On and off. I did it back. Was this all that was required? God help me. Soon I was tailing the red lights of her car as it wound through the streets of Lumina.

      Miraculously, we’d been able to keep things tidy, the rule being as little talk as possible, which was fine because I wasn’t even sure I trusted the sound of her voice. She fucked like a woman who’d been around, which was exactly what I’d wanted. I knew she had a husband, a husband who spent a great deal of time away from home, probably with the military, a spy? There were flags flying about the house, little medals in dishes and trays, but I tried my best not to take it all in, as I was afraid we might get ourselves into trouble if we started talking. All that mattered was that she had a body completely different from my wife’s. (The tight and shallow navel, the lightest blonde hair on her calves, her downy underarms.) We’d figured out a way to do what we’d needed to do without being entered by our history, the world, and that was no small thing.

      I looked on the sheets for fluids spilled but everything felt dry.

      The little girl—whom I never saw and never hoped to see—slept in the next room, quiet as a mummy.

      I stood. I kissed her chastely, on the top of the head, only vaguely aware that I had only five more minutes to get home. She smiled ruefully, extravagantly naked, picking at the stitches of a pillowcase. The room felt stale now and stuffed, a drawer shut up with forgotten clothes. I wanted to throw open the window, to let in the smell of the lilacs and the bay, the hose water on the leaves, but I knew it was time to get on. I was needed elsewhere.