Alan dragged all of his suitcases up from the basement to the living room, from the tiny tin valise plastered with genuine vintage deco railway stickers to the steamer trunk that he’d always intended to refurbish as a bathroom cabinet. He hadn’t been home in fifteen years. What should he bring?Clothes were the easiest. It was coming up on the cusp of July and August, and he remembered boyhood summers on the mountain’s slopes abuzz with blackflies and syrupy heat. White T-shirts, lightweight trousers, high-tech hiking boots that breathed, a thin jacket for the mosquitoes at dusk.He decided to pack four changes of clothes, which made a very small pile on the sofa. Small suitcase. The little rolling carry-on? The wheels would be useless on the rough cave floor.He paced and looked at the spines of his books, and paced more, into the kitchen. It was a beautiful summer day and the tall grasses in the back yard nodded in the soft breeze. He stepped through the screen door and out into the garden and let the wild grasses scrape over his thighs. Ivy and wild sunflowers climbed the fence that separated his yard from his neighbors, and through the chinks in the green armor, he saw someone moving.Mimi.Pacing her garden, neatly tended vegetable beds, some flowering bulbs. Skirt and a cream linen blazer that rucked up over her shoulders, moving restlessly. Powerfully.Alan’s breath caught in his throat. Her pale, round calves flashed in the sun. He felt himself harden, painfully. He must have gasped, or given some sign, or perhaps she heard his skin tighten over his body into a great goosepimply mass. Her head turned.Their eyes met and he jolted. He was frozen in his footsteps by her gaze. One cheek was livid with a purple bruise, the eye above it slitted and puffed. She took a step toward him, her jacket opening to reveal a shapeless grey sweatshirt stained with food and—blood?“Mimi?” he breathed.She squeezed her eyes shut, her face turning into a fright mask.“Abel,” she said. “Nice day.”“Are you all right?” he said. He’d had his girls, his employees, show up for work in this state before. He knew the signs. “Is he in the house now?”She pulled up a corner of her lip into a sneer and he saw that it was split, and a trickle of blood wet her teeth and stained them pink.“Sleeping,” she said.He swallowed. “I can call the cops, or a shelter, or both.”She laughed. “I gave as good as I got,” she said. “We’re more than even.”“I don’t care,” he said. “’Even’ is irrelevant. Are yousafe?”“Safe as houses,” she said. “Thanks for your concern.” She turned back toward her back door.“Wait,” he said. She shrugged and the wings under her jacket strained against the fabric. She reached for the door. He jammed his fingers into the chain-link near the top and hauled himself, scrambling, over the fence, landing on all fours in a splintering of tomato plants and sticks.He got to his feet and bridged the distance between them.“I don’t believe you, Mimi,” he said. “I don’t believe you. Come over to my place and let me get you a cup of coffee and an ice pack and we’ll talk about it, please?”“Fuck off,” she said tugging at the door. He wedged his toe in it, took her wrist gently.“Please,” she said. “We’ll wake him.”“Come over,” he said. “We won’t wake him.”She cracked her arm like a whip, shaking his hand off her wrist. She stared at him out of her swollen eye and he felt the jolt again. Some recognition. Some shock. Some mirror, his face tiny and distorted in her eye.She shivered.“Help me over the fence,” she said pulling her skirt between her knees—bruise on her thigh—and tucking it behind her into her waistband. She jammed her bare toes into the link and he gripped one hard, straining calf in one hand and put the other on her padded, soft bottom, helping her up onto a perch atop the fence. He scrambled over and then took one bare foot, one warm calf, and guided her down.“Come inside,” he said.She’d never been in his house. Natalie and Link went in and out to use his bathroom while they were enjoying the sunset on his porch, or to get a beer. But Mimi had never crossed his threshold. When she did, it felt like something he’d been missing there had been finally found.She looked around with a hint of a smile on her puffed lips. She ran her fingers over the cast-iron gas range he’d restored, caressing the bakelite knobs. She peered at the titles of the books in the kitchen bookcases, over the honey wood of the mismatched chairs and the smoothed-over scars of the big, simple table.“Come into the living room,” Alan said. “I’ll get you an ice pack.”She let him guide her by the elbow, then crossed decisively to the windows and drew the curtains, bringing on twilight. He moved aside his piles of clothes and stacked up the suitcases in a corner.“Going somewhere?”“To see my family,” he said. She smiled and her lip cracked anew, dripping a single dark droplet of blood onto the gleaming wood of the floor, where it beaded like water on wax paper.“Home again, home again, jiggety jig,” she said. Her nearly closed eye was bright and it darted around the room, taking in shelves, fireplace, chairs, clothes.“I’ll get you that ice pack,” he said. As he went back into the kitchen, he heard her walking around in the living room, and he remembered the first time he’d met her, of walking around her living room and thinking about slipping a VCD into his pocket.He found her halfway up the staircase with one of the shallow bric-a-brac cabinets open before her. She was holding a Made-in-Occupied-Japan tin robot, the paint crazed with age into craquelaire like a Dutch Master painting in a gallery.“Turn it upside down,” he said.She looked at him, then turned it over, revealing the insides of the tin, revealing the gaudily printed tuna-fish label from the original can that it had been fashioned from.“Huh,” she said and peered down into it. He hit the light switch at the bottom of the stairs so that she could see better. “Beautiful,” she said.“Have it,” he said surprising himself. He’d have to remove it from The Inventory. He restrained himself from going upstairs and doing it before he forgot.For the first time he could remember, she looked flustered. Her unbruised cheek went crimson.“I couldn’t,” she said.“It’s yours,” he said. He went up the stairs and closed the cabinet, then folded her fingers around the robot and led her by the wrist back down to the sofa. “Ice pack,” he said handing it to her, releasing her wrist.She sat stiff-spined in on the sofa, the hump of her wings behind her keeping her from reclining. She caught him staring.“It’s time to trim them,” she said.“Oh, yes?” he said, mind going back to the gridwork of old scars by her shoulders.“When they get too big, I can’t sit properly or lie on my back. At least not while I’m wearing a shirt.”“Couldn’t you, I don’t know, cut the back out of a shirt?”“Yeah,” she said. “Or go topless. Or wear a halter. But not in public.”“No, not in public. Secrets must be kept.”“You’ve got a lot of secrets, huh?” she said.“Some,” he said.“Deep, dark ones?”“All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That’s in the nature of secrets.”She pressed the towel-wrapped bag of ice to her face and rolled her head back and forth on her neck. He heard pops and crackles as her muscles and vertebrae unlimbered.“Hang on,” he said. He ran up to his room and dug through his T-shirt drawer until he found one that he didn’t mind parting with. He brought it back downstairs and held it up for her to see. “Steel Pole Bathtub,” he said. “Retro chic. I can cut the back out for you, at least while you’re here.”She closed her eyes. “I’d like that,” she said in a small voice.So he got his kitchen shears and went to work on the back of the shirt, cutting a sizable hole in the back of the fabric. He folded duct tape around the ragged edges to keep them from fraying. She watched bemusedly.“Freakshow Martha Stewart,” she said.He smiled and passed her the shirt. “I’ll give you some privacy,” he said, and went back into the kitchen and put away the shears and the tape. He tried not to listen to the soft rustle of clothing in the other room.“Alan,” she said—Alanand notAssholeorAbel—"I could use some help.”He stepped cautiously into the living room and saw there, in the curtained twilight, Mimi. She was topless, heavy breasts marked red with the outline of her bra straps and wires. They hung weightily, swaying, and stopped him in the doorway. She had her arms lifted over her head, tugging her round belly up, stretching her navel into a cat-eye slit. The T-shirt he’d given her was tangled in her arms and in her wings.Her magnificent wings.They were four feet long each, and they stretched, one through the neck hole and the other through the hole he’d cut in the T-shirt’s back. They were leathery as he remembered, covered in a downy fur that glowed where it was kissed by the few shafts of light piercing the gap in the drapes. He reached for the questing, almost prehensile tip of the one that was caught in the neck hole. It was muscular, like a strong finger, curling against his palm like a Masonic handshake.When he touched her wing, she gasped and shivered, indeterminately between erotic and outraged. They were as he imagined them, these wings, strong and primal and dark and spicy-smelling like an armpit after sex.He gently guided the tip down toward the neck hole and marveled at the intricate way that it folded in on itself, at the play of mysterious muscle and cartilage, the rustle of bristling hair, and the motility of the skin.It accordioned down and he tugged the shirt around it so that it came free, and then he slid the front of the shirt down over her breasts, painfully aware of his erection as the fabric rustled down over her rounded belly.As her head emerged through the shirt, she shook her hair out and then unfolded her wings, slowly and exquisitely, like a cat stretching out, bending forward, spreading them like sails. He ducked beneath one, feeling its puff of spiced air on his face, and found himself staring at the hash of scars and the rigid ropes of hyperextended muscle and joints. Tentatively, he traced the scars with his thumbs, then, when she made no move to stop him, he dug his thumbs into the muscles, into their tension.He kneaded at her flesh, grinding hard at the knots and feeling them give way, briskly rubbing the spots where they’d been to get the blood going. Her wings flapped gently around him as he worked, not caring that his body was pretzeled into a knot of its own to reach her back, since he didn’t want to break the spell to ask her to move over to give him a better angle.He could smell her armpit and her wings and her hair and he closed his eyes and worked by touch, following scar to muscle, muscle to knot, working his way the length and breadth of her back, following the muscle up from the ridge of her iliac crest like a treasure trail to the muscle of her left wing, which was softly twitching with pleasure.She went perfectly still again when he took the wing in his hands. It had its own geometry, hard to understand and irresistible. He followed the mysterious and powerful muscles and bones, the vast expanses of cartilage, finding knots and squeezing them, kneading her as he’d kneaded her back, and she groaned and went limp, leaning back against him so that his face was in her hair and smelling her scalp oil and stale shampoo and sweat. It was all he could do to keep himself from burying his face in her hair and gnawing at the muscles at the base of her skull.He moved as slow as a seaweed and ran his hands over to her other wing, giving it the same treatment. He was rock-hard, pressed against her, her wings all around him. He traced the line of her jaw to her chin, and they were breathing in unison, and his fingers found the tense place at the hinge and worked there, too.Then he brushed against her bruised cheek and she startled, and that shocked him back to reality. He dropped his hands to his sides and then stood, realized his erection was straining at his shorts, sat back down again in one of the club chairs, and crossed his legs.“Well,” he said.Mimi unfolded her wings over the sofa-back and let them spread out, then leaned back, eyes closed.“You should try the ice-pack again,” he said weakly. She groped blindly for it and draped it over her face.“Thank you,” she sighed.He suppressed the urge to apologize. “You’re welcome,” he said.“It started last week,” she said. “My wings had gotten longer. Too long. Krishna came home from the club and he was drunk and he wanted sex. Wanted me on the bottom. I couldn’t. My wings. He wanted to get the knife right away and cut them off. We do it about four times a year, using a big serrated hunting knife he bought at a sporting-goods store on Yonge Street, one of those places that sells dud grenades and camou pants and tasers.”She opened her eyes and looked at him, then closed them. He shivered and a goose walked over his grave.“We do it in the tub. I stand in the tub, naked, and he saws off the wings right to my shoulders. I don’t bleed much. He gives me a towel to bite on while he cuts. To scream into. And then we put them in garden trash bags and he puts them out just before the garbage men arrive, so the neighborhood dogs don’t get at them. For the meat.”He noticed that he was gripping the arm rests so tightly that his hands were cramping. He pried them loose and tucked them under his thighs.“He dragged me into the bathroom. One second, we were rolling around in bed, giggling like kids in love, and then he had me so hard by the wrist, dragging me naked to the bathroom, his knife in his other fist. I had to keep quiet, so that I wouldn’t wake Link and Natalie, but he was hurting me, and I was scared. I tried to say something to him, but I could only squeak. He hurled me into the tub and I cracked my head against the tile. I cried out and he crossed the bathroom and put his hand over my mouth and nose and then I couldn’t breathe, and my head was swimming.“He was naked and hard, and he had the knife in his fist, not like for slicing, but for stabbing, and his eyes were red from the smoke at the club, and the bathroom filled with the booze-breath smell, and I sank down in the tub, shrinking away from him as he grabbed for me.“He—growled. Saw that I was staring at the knife. Smiled. Horribly. There’s a piece of granite we use for a soap dish, balanced in the corner of the tub. Without thinking, I grabbed it and threw it as hard as I could at him. It broke his nose and he closed his eyes and reached for his face and I wrapped him up in the shower curtain and grabbed his arm and bit at the base of his thumb so hard I heard a bone break and he dropped the knife. I grabbed it and ran back to our room and threw it out the window and started to get dressed.”She’d fallen into a monotone now, but her wingtips twitched and her knees bounced like her motor was idling on high. She jiggled.“You don’t have to tell me this,” he said.She took off the ice pack. “Yes, I do,” she said. Her eyes seemed to have sunk into her skull, vanishing into dark pits. He’d thought her eyes were blue, or green, but they looked black now.“All right,” he said.“All right,” she said. “He came through the door and I didn’t scream. I didn’t want to wake up Link and Natalie. Isn’t that stupid? But I couldn’t get my sweatshirt on, and they would have seen my wings. He looked like he was going to kill me. Really. Hands in claws. Teeth out. Crouched down low like a chimp, ready to grab, ready to swing. And I was back in a corner again, just wearing track pants. He didn’t have the knife this time, though.“When he came for me, I went limp, like I was too scared to move, and squeezed my eyes shut. Listened to his footsteps approach. Felt the creak of the bed as he stepped up on it. Felt his breath as he reached for me.“I exploded. I’ve read books on women’s self-defense, and they talk about doing that, about exploding. You gather in all your energy and squeeze it tight, and then blamo boom, you explode. I was aiming for his soft parts: Balls. Eyes. Nose. Sternum. Ears. I’d misjudged where he was, though, so I missed most of my targets.“And then he was on me, kneeling on my tits, hands at my throat. I bucked him but I couldn’t get him off. My chest and throat were crushed, my wings splayed out behind me. I flapped them and saw his hair move in the breeze. He was sweating hard, off his forehead and off his nose and lips. It was all so detailed. And silent. Neither of us made a sound louder than a grunt. Quieter than our sex noises.NowI wanted to scream,wantedto wake up Link and Natalie, but I couldn’t get a breath.“I worked one hand free and I reached for the erection that I could feel just below my tits, reached as fast as a striking snake, grabbed it, grabbed his balls, and I yanked and I squeezed like I was trying to tear them off.“I was.“Nowhewas trying to get away and I had him cornered. I kept squeezing. That’s when he kicked me in the face. I was dazed. He kicked me twice more, and I ran downstairs and got a parka from the closet and ran out into the front yard and out to the park and hid in the bushes until morning.“He was asleep when I came back in, after Natalie and Link had gone out. I found the knife beside the house and I went up to our room and I stood there, by the window, listening to you talk to them, holding the knife.”She plumped herself on the cushions and flapped her wings once, softly, another puff of that warm air wafting over him. She picked up the tin robot he’d given her from the coffee table and turned it over in her hands, staring up its skirts at the tuna-fish illustration and the Japanese ideograms.“I had the knife, and I felt like I had to use it. You know Chekhov? ‘If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third.’ I write one-act plays. Wrote. But it seemed to me that the knife had been in act one, when Krishna dragged me into the bathroom.“Or maybe act one was when he brought it home, after I showed him my wings.“And act two had been my night in the park. And act three was then, standing over him with the knife, cold and sore and tired, looking at the blood crusted on his face.”Her face and her voice got very, very small, her expression distant. “I almost used it on myself. I almost opened my wrists onto his face. He liked it when I… rode… his face. Like the hot juices. Seemed mean-spirited to spill all that hot juice and deny him that pleasure. I thought about using it on him, too, but only for a second.“Only for a second.“And then he rolled over and his hands clenched into fists in his sleep and his expression changed, like he was dreaming about something that made him angry. So I left.“Do you want to know about when I first showed him these?” she said, and flapped her wings lazily.She took the ice pack from her face and he could see that the swelling had gone down, the discoloration faded to a dim shadow tinged with yellows and umbers.He did, but he didn’t. The breeze of her great wings was strangely intimate, that smell more intimate than his touches or the moment in which he’d glimpsed her fine, weighty breasts with their texture of stretch marks and underwire grooves. He was awkward, foolish feeling.“I don’t think I do,” he said at last. “I think that we should save some things to tell each other for later.”She blinked, slow and lazy, and one tear rolled down and dripped off her nose, splashing on the red T-shirt and darkening it to wineish purple.“Will you sit with me?” she said.He crossed the room and sat on the other end of the sofa, his hand on the seam that joined the two halves together, crossing the border into her territory, an invitation that could be refused without awkwardness.She covered his hand with hers, and hers was cold and smooth but not distant: immediate, scritching and twitching against his skin. Slowly, slowly, she leaned toward him, curling her wing round his far shoulder like a blanket or a lover’s arm, head coming to rest on his chest, breath hot on his nipple through the thin fabric of his T-shirt.“Alan?” she murmured into his chest.“Yes?”“What are we?” she said.“Huh?”“Are we human? Where do we come from? How did we get here? Why do I have wings?”He closed his eyes and found that they’d welled up with tears. Once the first tear slid down his cheek, the rest came, and he was crying, weeping silently at first and then braying like a donkey in sobs that started in his balls and emerged from his throat like vomit, gushing out with hot tears and hot snot.Mimi enveloped him in her wings and kissed his tears away, working down his cheeks to his neck, his Adam’s apple.He snuffled back a mouthful of mucus and salt and wailed, “I don’t know!”She snugged her mouth up against his collarbone. “Krishna does,” she whispered into his skin. She tugged at the skin with her teeth. “What about your family?”He swallowed a couple of times, painfully aware of her lips and breath on his skin, the enveloping coolth of her wings, and the smell in every breath he took. He wanted to blow his nose, but he couldn’t move without breaking the spell, so he hoarked his sinuses back into his throat and drank the oozing oyster of self-pity that slid down his throat.“My family?”“I don’t have a family, but you do,” she said. “Your family must know.”“They don’t,” he said.“Maybe you haven’t asked them properly. When are you leaving?”“Today.”“Driving?”“Got a rental car,” he said.“Room for one more?”“Yes,” he said.“Then take me,” she said.“All right,” he said. She raised her head and kissed him on the lips, and he could taste the smell now, and the blood roared in his ears as she straddled his lap, grinding her mons—hot through the thin cotton of her skirt—against him. They slid down on the sofa and they groaned into each others’ mouths, his voice box resonating with hers.
Alan dragged all of his suitcases up from the basement to the living room, from the tiny tin valise plastered with genuine vintage deco railway stickers to the steamer trunk that he’d always intended to refurbish as a bathroom cabinet. He hadn’t been home in fifteen years. What should he bring?
Clothes were the easiest. It was coming up on the cusp of July and August, and he remembered boyhood summers on the mountain’s slopes abuzz with blackflies and syrupy heat. White T-shirts, lightweight trousers, high-tech hiking boots that breathed, a thin jacket for the mosquitoes at dusk.
He decided to pack four changes of clothes, which made a very small pile on the sofa. Small suitcase. The little rolling carry-on? The wheels would be useless on the rough cave floor.
He paced and looked at the spines of his books, and paced more, into the kitchen. It was a beautiful summer day and the tall grasses in the back yard nodded in the soft breeze. He stepped through the screen door and out into the garden and let the wild grasses scrape over his thighs. Ivy and wild sunflowers climbed the fence that separated his yard from his neighbors, and through the chinks in the green armor, he saw someone moving.
Mimi.
Pacing her garden, neatly tended vegetable beds, some flowering bulbs. Skirt and a cream linen blazer that rucked up over her shoulders, moving restlessly. Powerfully.
Alan’s breath caught in his throat. Her pale, round calves flashed in the sun. He felt himself harden, painfully. He must have gasped, or given some sign, or perhaps she heard his skin tighten over his body into a great goosepimply mass. Her head turned.
Their eyes met and he jolted. He was frozen in his footsteps by her gaze. One cheek was livid with a purple bruise, the eye above it slitted and puffed. She took a step toward him, her jacket opening to reveal a shapeless grey sweatshirt stained with food and—blood?
“Mimi?” he breathed.
She squeezed her eyes shut, her face turning into a fright mask.
“Abel,” she said. “Nice day.”
“Are you all right?” he said. He’d had his girls, his employees, show up for work in this state before. He knew the signs. “Is he in the house now?”
She pulled up a corner of her lip into a sneer and he saw that it was split, and a trickle of blood wet her teeth and stained them pink.
“Sleeping,” she said.
He swallowed. “I can call the cops, or a shelter, or both.”
She laughed. “I gave as good as I got,” she said. “We’re more than even.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “’Even’ is irrelevant. Are yousafe?”
“Safe as houses,” she said. “Thanks for your concern.” She turned back toward her back door.
“Wait,” he said. She shrugged and the wings under her jacket strained against the fabric. She reached for the door. He jammed his fingers into the chain-link near the top and hauled himself, scrambling, over the fence, landing on all fours in a splintering of tomato plants and sticks.
He got to his feet and bridged the distance between them.
“I don’t believe you, Mimi,” he said. “I don’t believe you. Come over to my place and let me get you a cup of coffee and an ice pack and we’ll talk about it, please?”
“Fuck off,” she said tugging at the door. He wedged his toe in it, took her wrist gently.
“Please,” she said. “We’ll wake him.”
“Come over,” he said. “We won’t wake him.”
She cracked her arm like a whip, shaking his hand off her wrist. She stared at him out of her swollen eye and he felt the jolt again. Some recognition. Some shock. Some mirror, his face tiny and distorted in her eye.
She shivered.
“Help me over the fence,” she said pulling her skirt between her knees—bruise on her thigh—and tucking it behind her into her waistband. She jammed her bare toes into the link and he gripped one hard, straining calf in one hand and put the other on her padded, soft bottom, helping her up onto a perch atop the fence. He scrambled over and then took one bare foot, one warm calf, and guided her down.
“Come inside,” he said.
She’d never been in his house. Natalie and Link went in and out to use his bathroom while they were enjoying the sunset on his porch, or to get a beer. But Mimi had never crossed his threshold. When she did, it felt like something he’d been missing there had been finally found.
She looked around with a hint of a smile on her puffed lips. She ran her fingers over the cast-iron gas range he’d restored, caressing the bakelite knobs. She peered at the titles of the books in the kitchen bookcases, over the honey wood of the mismatched chairs and the smoothed-over scars of the big, simple table.
“Come into the living room,” Alan said. “I’ll get you an ice pack.”
She let him guide her by the elbow, then crossed decisively to the windows and drew the curtains, bringing on twilight. He moved aside his piles of clothes and stacked up the suitcases in a corner.
“Going somewhere?”
“To see my family,” he said. She smiled and her lip cracked anew, dripping a single dark droplet of blood onto the gleaming wood of the floor, where it beaded like water on wax paper.
“Home again, home again, jiggety jig,” she said. Her nearly closed eye was bright and it darted around the room, taking in shelves, fireplace, chairs, clothes.
“I’ll get you that ice pack,” he said. As he went back into the kitchen, he heard her walking around in the living room, and he remembered the first time he’d met her, of walking around her living room and thinking about slipping a VCD into his pocket.
He found her halfway up the staircase with one of the shallow bric-a-brac cabinets open before her. She was holding a Made-in-Occupied-Japan tin robot, the paint crazed with age into craquelaire like a Dutch Master painting in a gallery.
“Turn it upside down,” he said.
She looked at him, then turned it over, revealing the insides of the tin, revealing the gaudily printed tuna-fish label from the original can that it had been fashioned from.
“Huh,” she said and peered down into it. He hit the light switch at the bottom of the stairs so that she could see better. “Beautiful,” she said.
“Have it,” he said surprising himself. He’d have to remove it from The Inventory. He restrained himself from going upstairs and doing it before he forgot.
For the first time he could remember, she looked flustered. Her unbruised cheek went crimson.
“I couldn’t,” she said.
“It’s yours,” he said. He went up the stairs and closed the cabinet, then folded her fingers around the robot and led her by the wrist back down to the sofa. “Ice pack,” he said handing it to her, releasing her wrist.
She sat stiff-spined in on the sofa, the hump of her wings behind her keeping her from reclining. She caught him staring.
“It’s time to trim them,” she said.
“Oh, yes?” he said, mind going back to the gridwork of old scars by her shoulders.
“When they get too big, I can’t sit properly or lie on my back. At least not while I’m wearing a shirt.”
“Couldn’t you, I don’t know, cut the back out of a shirt?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Or go topless. Or wear a halter. But not in public.”
“No, not in public. Secrets must be kept.”
“You’ve got a lot of secrets, huh?” she said.
“Some,” he said.
“Deep, dark ones?”
“All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That’s in the nature of secrets.”
She pressed the towel-wrapped bag of ice to her face and rolled her head back and forth on her neck. He heard pops and crackles as her muscles and vertebrae unlimbered.
“Hang on,” he said. He ran up to his room and dug through his T-shirt drawer until he found one that he didn’t mind parting with. He brought it back downstairs and held it up for her to see. “Steel Pole Bathtub,” he said. “Retro chic. I can cut the back out for you, at least while you’re here.”
She closed her eyes. “I’d like that,” she said in a small voice.
So he got his kitchen shears and went to work on the back of the shirt, cutting a sizable hole in the back of the fabric. He folded duct tape around the ragged edges to keep them from fraying. She watched bemusedly.
“Freakshow Martha Stewart,” she said.
He smiled and passed her the shirt. “I’ll give you some privacy,” he said, and went back into the kitchen and put away the shears and the tape. He tried not to listen to the soft rustle of clothing in the other room.
“Alan,” she said—Alanand notAssholeorAbel—"I could use some help.”
He stepped cautiously into the living room and saw there, in the curtained twilight, Mimi. She was topless, heavy breasts marked red with the outline of her bra straps and wires. They hung weightily, swaying, and stopped him in the doorway. She had her arms lifted over her head, tugging her round belly up, stretching her navel into a cat-eye slit. The T-shirt he’d given her was tangled in her arms and in her wings.
Her magnificent wings.
They were four feet long each, and they stretched, one through the neck hole and the other through the hole he’d cut in the T-shirt’s back. They were leathery as he remembered, covered in a downy fur that glowed where it was kissed by the few shafts of light piercing the gap in the drapes. He reached for the questing, almost prehensile tip of the one that was caught in the neck hole. It was muscular, like a strong finger, curling against his palm like a Masonic handshake.
When he touched her wing, she gasped and shivered, indeterminately between erotic and outraged. They were as he imagined them, these wings, strong and primal and dark and spicy-smelling like an armpit after sex.
He gently guided the tip down toward the neck hole and marveled at the intricate way that it folded in on itself, at the play of mysterious muscle and cartilage, the rustle of bristling hair, and the motility of the skin.
It accordioned down and he tugged the shirt around it so that it came free, and then he slid the front of the shirt down over her breasts, painfully aware of his erection as the fabric rustled down over her rounded belly.
As her head emerged through the shirt, she shook her hair out and then unfolded her wings, slowly and exquisitely, like a cat stretching out, bending forward, spreading them like sails. He ducked beneath one, feeling its puff of spiced air on his face, and found himself staring at the hash of scars and the rigid ropes of hyperextended muscle and joints. Tentatively, he traced the scars with his thumbs, then, when she made no move to stop him, he dug his thumbs into the muscles, into their tension.
He kneaded at her flesh, grinding hard at the knots and feeling them give way, briskly rubbing the spots where they’d been to get the blood going. Her wings flapped gently around him as he worked, not caring that his body was pretzeled into a knot of its own to reach her back, since he didn’t want to break the spell to ask her to move over to give him a better angle.
He could smell her armpit and her wings and her hair and he closed his eyes and worked by touch, following scar to muscle, muscle to knot, working his way the length and breadth of her back, following the muscle up from the ridge of her iliac crest like a treasure trail to the muscle of her left wing, which was softly twitching with pleasure.
She went perfectly still again when he took the wing in his hands. It had its own geometry, hard to understand and irresistible. He followed the mysterious and powerful muscles and bones, the vast expanses of cartilage, finding knots and squeezing them, kneading her as he’d kneaded her back, and she groaned and went limp, leaning back against him so that his face was in her hair and smelling her scalp oil and stale shampoo and sweat. It was all he could do to keep himself from burying his face in her hair and gnawing at the muscles at the base of her skull.
He moved as slow as a seaweed and ran his hands over to her other wing, giving it the same treatment. He was rock-hard, pressed against her, her wings all around him. He traced the line of her jaw to her chin, and they were breathing in unison, and his fingers found the tense place at the hinge and worked there, too.
Then he brushed against her bruised cheek and she startled, and that shocked him back to reality. He dropped his hands to his sides and then stood, realized his erection was straining at his shorts, sat back down again in one of the club chairs, and crossed his legs.
“Well,” he said.
Mimi unfolded her wings over the sofa-back and let them spread out, then leaned back, eyes closed.
“You should try the ice-pack again,” he said weakly. She groped blindly for it and draped it over her face.
“Thank you,” she sighed.
He suppressed the urge to apologize. “You’re welcome,” he said.
“It started last week,” she said. “My wings had gotten longer. Too long. Krishna came home from the club and he was drunk and he wanted sex. Wanted me on the bottom. I couldn’t. My wings. He wanted to get the knife right away and cut them off. We do it about four times a year, using a big serrated hunting knife he bought at a sporting-goods store on Yonge Street, one of those places that sells dud grenades and camou pants and tasers.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him, then closed them. He shivered and a goose walked over his grave.
“We do it in the tub. I stand in the tub, naked, and he saws off the wings right to my shoulders. I don’t bleed much. He gives me a towel to bite on while he cuts. To scream into. And then we put them in garden trash bags and he puts them out just before the garbage men arrive, so the neighborhood dogs don’t get at them. For the meat.”
He noticed that he was gripping the arm rests so tightly that his hands were cramping. He pried them loose and tucked them under his thighs.
“He dragged me into the bathroom. One second, we were rolling around in bed, giggling like kids in love, and then he had me so hard by the wrist, dragging me naked to the bathroom, his knife in his other fist. I had to keep quiet, so that I wouldn’t wake Link and Natalie, but he was hurting me, and I was scared. I tried to say something to him, but I could only squeak. He hurled me into the tub and I cracked my head against the tile. I cried out and he crossed the bathroom and put his hand over my mouth and nose and then I couldn’t breathe, and my head was swimming.
“He was naked and hard, and he had the knife in his fist, not like for slicing, but for stabbing, and his eyes were red from the smoke at the club, and the bathroom filled with the booze-breath smell, and I sank down in the tub, shrinking away from him as he grabbed for me.
“He—growled. Saw that I was staring at the knife. Smiled. Horribly. There’s a piece of granite we use for a soap dish, balanced in the corner of the tub. Without thinking, I grabbed it and threw it as hard as I could at him. It broke his nose and he closed his eyes and reached for his face and I wrapped him up in the shower curtain and grabbed his arm and bit at the base of his thumb so hard I heard a bone break and he dropped the knife. I grabbed it and ran back to our room and threw it out the window and started to get dressed.”
She’d fallen into a monotone now, but her wingtips twitched and her knees bounced like her motor was idling on high. She jiggled.
“You don’t have to tell me this,” he said.
She took off the ice pack. “Yes, I do,” she said. Her eyes seemed to have sunk into her skull, vanishing into dark pits. He’d thought her eyes were blue, or green, but they looked black now.
“All right,” he said.
“All right,” she said. “He came through the door and I didn’t scream. I didn’t want to wake up Link and Natalie. Isn’t that stupid? But I couldn’t get my sweatshirt on, and they would have seen my wings. He looked like he was going to kill me. Really. Hands in claws. Teeth out. Crouched down low like a chimp, ready to grab, ready to swing. And I was back in a corner again, just wearing track pants. He didn’t have the knife this time, though.
“When he came for me, I went limp, like I was too scared to move, and squeezed my eyes shut. Listened to his footsteps approach. Felt the creak of the bed as he stepped up on it. Felt his breath as he reached for me.
“I exploded. I’ve read books on women’s self-defense, and they talk about doing that, about exploding. You gather in all your energy and squeeze it tight, and then blamo boom, you explode. I was aiming for his soft parts: Balls. Eyes. Nose. Sternum. Ears. I’d misjudged where he was, though, so I missed most of my targets.
“And then he was on me, kneeling on my tits, hands at my throat. I bucked him but I couldn’t get him off. My chest and throat were crushed, my wings splayed out behind me. I flapped them and saw his hair move in the breeze. He was sweating hard, off his forehead and off his nose and lips. It was all so detailed. And silent. Neither of us made a sound louder than a grunt. Quieter than our sex noises.NowI wanted to scream,wantedto wake up Link and Natalie, but I couldn’t get a breath.
“I worked one hand free and I reached for the erection that I could feel just below my tits, reached as fast as a striking snake, grabbed it, grabbed his balls, and I yanked and I squeezed like I was trying to tear them off.
“I was.
“Nowhewas trying to get away and I had him cornered. I kept squeezing. That’s when he kicked me in the face. I was dazed. He kicked me twice more, and I ran downstairs and got a parka from the closet and ran out into the front yard and out to the park and hid in the bushes until morning.
“He was asleep when I came back in, after Natalie and Link had gone out. I found the knife beside the house and I went up to our room and I stood there, by the window, listening to you talk to them, holding the knife.”
She plumped herself on the cushions and flapped her wings once, softly, another puff of that warm air wafting over him. She picked up the tin robot he’d given her from the coffee table and turned it over in her hands, staring up its skirts at the tuna-fish illustration and the Japanese ideograms.
“I had the knife, and I felt like I had to use it. You know Chekhov? ‘If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third.’ I write one-act plays. Wrote. But it seemed to me that the knife had been in act one, when Krishna dragged me into the bathroom.
“Or maybe act one was when he brought it home, after I showed him my wings.
“And act two had been my night in the park. And act three was then, standing over him with the knife, cold and sore and tired, looking at the blood crusted on his face.”
Her face and her voice got very, very small, her expression distant. “I almost used it on myself. I almost opened my wrists onto his face. He liked it when I… rode… his face. Like the hot juices. Seemed mean-spirited to spill all that hot juice and deny him that pleasure. I thought about using it on him, too, but only for a second.
“Only for a second.
“And then he rolled over and his hands clenched into fists in his sleep and his expression changed, like he was dreaming about something that made him angry. So I left.
“Do you want to know about when I first showed him these?” she said, and flapped her wings lazily.
She took the ice pack from her face and he could see that the swelling had gone down, the discoloration faded to a dim shadow tinged with yellows and umbers.
He did, but he didn’t. The breeze of her great wings was strangely intimate, that smell more intimate than his touches or the moment in which he’d glimpsed her fine, weighty breasts with their texture of stretch marks and underwire grooves. He was awkward, foolish feeling.
“I don’t think I do,” he said at last. “I think that we should save some things to tell each other for later.”
She blinked, slow and lazy, and one tear rolled down and dripped off her nose, splashing on the red T-shirt and darkening it to wineish purple.
“Will you sit with me?” she said.
He crossed the room and sat on the other end of the sofa, his hand on the seam that joined the two halves together, crossing the border into her territory, an invitation that could be refused without awkwardness.
She covered his hand with hers, and hers was cold and smooth but not distant: immediate, scritching and twitching against his skin. Slowly, slowly, she leaned toward him, curling her wing round his far shoulder like a blanket or a lover’s arm, head coming to rest on his chest, breath hot on his nipple through the thin fabric of his T-shirt.
“Alan?” she murmured into his chest.
“Yes?”
“What are we?” she said.
“Huh?”
“Are we human? Where do we come from? How did we get here? Why do I have wings?”
He closed his eyes and found that they’d welled up with tears. Once the first tear slid down his cheek, the rest came, and he was crying, weeping silently at first and then braying like a donkey in sobs that started in his balls and emerged from his throat like vomit, gushing out with hot tears and hot snot.
Mimi enveloped him in her wings and kissed his tears away, working down his cheeks to his neck, his Adam’s apple.
He snuffled back a mouthful of mucus and salt and wailed, “I don’t know!”
She snugged her mouth up against his collarbone. “Krishna does,” she whispered into his skin. She tugged at the skin with her teeth. “What about your family?”
He swallowed a couple of times, painfully aware of her lips and breath on his skin, the enveloping coolth of her wings, and the smell in every breath he took. He wanted to blow his nose, but he couldn’t move without breaking the spell, so he hoarked his sinuses back into his throat and drank the oozing oyster of self-pity that slid down his throat.
“My family?”
“I don’t have a family, but you do,” she said. “Your family must know.”
“They don’t,” he said.
“Maybe you haven’t asked them properly. When are you leaving?”
“Today.”
“Driving?”
“Got a rental car,” he said.
“Room for one more?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then take me,” she said.
“All right,” he said. She raised her head and kissed him on the lips, and he could taste the smell now, and the blood roared in his ears as she straddled his lap, grinding her mons—hot through the thin cotton of her skirt—against him. They slid down on the sofa and they groaned into each others’ mouths, his voice box resonating with hers.