60
More Fiction from Milkweed Editions
for Ryan
Preamble
It was Binelli’s brainchild and only he knew all the specifics. Many many lists were involved. They were drawn up, copied, distributed, et cetera, with the terse minimum of words regarding the next set of Assignments and travel arrangements. We waited for them like someone might wait for something else. Christmas say, or aurora borealis. Dawn. The lists told us the what and where and when of it all, which in this particular instance were specifically and respectively: pillows, in the center lane of fifty-two lanes, and night.
The first had some leeway.
For instance, when I realized that hauling away all the unusually heavy pillows meant there’d be no pillows on the bed for when we returned, for certainly we would return, eventually, at Binelli’s of course discretion, I sent Murphy back with the blue one. He dug up from god knows where some old baseball jerseys in exchange, and that seemed to go over okay. Although I found that I also kind of liked the jerseys, all shrunken yellow arms and age-cracked words and the like. I held one up against myself even, to suggest perhaps that a jersey, just one, should be mine, but no one took notice or commented favorably on yellow being my color and the size, though made for young boys, being perfectly suited to my frame. And I couldn’t be greedy and Binelli had his eye on me anyhow.
—Binelli, I said to him, nodding casually.
—Finley, he said back with an equivalent head gesture.
We suspect him of being connected.
I’ve come to think he may in fact be dreamy as well and would sometimes not much mind maybe cranking it up a notch or two between us, but there was right then the plan to consider and right then I imagined he needed all his faculties intact.
Though there’s nothing, I imagine, still to this day, quite so effective as a girl in a little boy’s baseball jersey to set hearts to racing. Or some other anatomical specific.
Though racing would not then seem quite right.
Call to attention, perhaps.
Neither here nor there. I had no jersey, we were short one pillow, and I’ve found over the course of my admittedly limited experience that an overall sense of just-having-lifted-oneself-from-a-dip-in-the-lake dampness provides much the same stimulation any one article of clothing could. I keep a spray bottle and some thin white T-shirts close at hand.
Addendum to Preamble
I kept also, I might as well admit at this point for the sake of accuracy, the jersey, on the sly.
I am terribly covetous.
1
It was all over gravel, but better than the last place. There was all over swampland and crocodiles.
2
At the designated location were many men of pleasing visage.
But if one begins with such a high class of word, a word in need of italic, of accent, one can hardly go on with the report. The stakes upped, as it were.
There were many men of pleasing countenance.
Aspect?
Many, anyway. So many so as to be unusual; on occasion there might be one; two, rarely; but here so many as to be unusual. I had to wonder. I was confused, besotted in no less than nine different directions. Confusion made me suspect, suspicion made me paranoid, paranoia made me appear insane, insanity made me desirable, and from no less than nine different directions did the eyes fall upon me. Centered as I was at a central table, and so desirable with insanity.
I am not desirable.
It’s no single thing.
I have red hair and no freckles. The hair is straight as the edge of a page. There are other things, but I offer these three to illustrate the nature of the difficulty: I lack the appropriate combinations. Red hair is acceptable if freckles are involved. If there are no freckles but only a broad expanse of milky skin, one should be curly. Et cetera. I excused myself with perhaps an excess of formality. I used excuses that clashed and contradicted one another. I, I dare say, protested too much. I took my leave.
Binelli found me. He finds us all, every time. I should likely not have stopped so soon for a shrimp cocktail, but the stand was right there, all the little shrimps so pink and pearly.
—Finley, he said.
—Binelli, I