Polite Fictions

What Happens After You Leave

After you leave me I clean out the fridge and think about someone else to fuck. Old collapsing peppers, a carton of mold, an order of szechuan beef that tasted of heat and sugar. Someone's out there, someone on whom I can unleash the tired months, the framed Klimt poster, the little midden of shoes in the hallway. The poster is gone. The cheese is pumpkin orange and the texture of paraffin. I pinch off a crumbled little corner and run it over my tongue.

After you leave me I move through the apartment, plucking out everything that marked our life together, photos and jewellery and bus tickets and the expired passport that took you to Europe and back. I put everything in a banker's box, except for a stray pair of dust-covered heels pinned against the back wall of the closet by a broken fax machine. I put those in an actual shoe box. The fax machine I throw into the dumpster. I stand at the dumpster and stare at the anonymous lumps and angles inside the bags other people have thrown in. The fax machine looks out of place on that bed of taut biodegradable plastic, and I wonder who I'll fuck next, when that will happen, whether we'll be in my bed or hers when it happens, or a car, or a hotel. Wherever it is people are fucking these days.

After you leave me I wonder who'll be next, the woman I find and fuck for days until I tell her that I love her, just as the silent moments begin to corrode the stretched surface of sex. She'll stay, bound by the shock and power of the word, until she understands my love more clearly. After you leave I wonder whether you'll be back, and I return the items in the box to their original places throughout the apartment. They wait for you. I drop off the shoes at a thrift store on my way to work.

What Happens After the Kiss

On Monday she couldn't look at him.

Despite months, possibly years, of being friends, she couldn't look at him. She wasn't convinced that he would brush her off but she also wasn't going to take the chance. In high school there is no room for logic, only decisive first strikes.

He'd had knee surgery just before hockey season and although he was still on the team (she still doesn't understand this, years later), he didn't play and preferred to sit in the bleachers with her. Or at least, he sat in the bleachers away from the rest of the team and she sat with him.

Yes, he was cute. Yes, he was a hockey player. But that wasn't it. There was something grown up about him. There was something that made him unlike the other high school boys. He was always a little apart, a little above. It was this apartness that made him approachable to her. She knew all about living apart from the rest of the team.

Friday was the last game of the season. They put him in for the first time and the team won – also for the first time. They celebrated. For the first time all season, she and he were part of the team. They played quarters, which she turned out to be quite good at. All that time in the physics lab finally had a real-life application others could appreciate.

After the last quarter splashed, he walked her to the car. With her hand on the door, she thought to herself “if I turn around now he will kiss me.” And so she turned around.

By her senior year, she had been kissed by a few random boys. It had made her want to throw up. The boys were, how to say this kindly, grossly unqualified. Messy, clumsy and unbidden. They were exactly what this kiss was not.

This kiss, from the minute she turned around, made the hairs on her neck stand up. She felt his breath on her cheek and wanted what she couldn't fathom with the clumsy ones. His hands were in her hair, his lips on her eyebrows (if the other boys had kissed her eyebrows it was because it was dark and they didn't know where they were going). And then his hands were around her and she wanted him close, so close.

She heard the car start. They were shoved into the back seat by someone else on the team. There was a point where they were supposed to stop, but she didn't know exactly when that was. She thinks it was somewhere between the party and her driveway but again, her only experience was with the unexperienced and she simply did not know. When she got out of the car, she was not sure what kind of girl she was.

She hoped he would call over the weekend, despite the fact they had never talked on the phone. All their meetings had been mutually accepted chance encounters. Hockey season was over and there would be no more chance encounters.

And so on Monday, she did what she did best. She put up walls. She pretended it didn't happen. She did not go out of her way to avoid him, but she was unable to meet his eye when she felt him near. “Near” being “in the same hall.” She always knew when he was in the same hall.

She was tall, thin and had the excellent posture insisted upon by her mother. Her body did not read “I'm scared” as much as “I don't have time for you.” She was almost always scared.

She doesn't know what would have happened if she had turned around to meet him in the light of day, in front of the entire senior class. She still wonders if she would have felt his hand in her hair and his breath on her cheek. She wonders if the two of them would have continued living apart and above. She wonders why she has never felt electrified since that first kiss, no matter how qualified the boys became.

These are questions she couldn't answer in the physics lab, where no one ever came to sit with her.

What Happens After The Happiest Day of Your Life

She picked up the glass, twirling the crystal stem in her fingers, holding the paper-thin bowl up to the light. They were the perfect glasses--Baccarat, not Waterford, as everyone knew Waterford was too fussy. All those facets, she thought bitterly.I don't want to drink out of the Chrysler building. 

She remembered the day they picked them out--well, the day she did, anyway, whirling around Neiman's with the glowing red gun. He resisted initially, insisting that they were too expensive. 

"Babe, I don't want my grandmother forking over $300 for a single water glass," he said. "Can't we get these instead?"

He'd pointed to a display of Lenox glasses. Goddamn LENOX. She rolled her eyes at the memory. As if I'd be caught dead entertaining with a $36 glass. She won him over by insisting that the glasses were an investment. 

"An investment in a lifetime of memories," she cooed. 

Stupid. I'm so stupid. 

She turned the Baccarat upside down again, watching the light bounce off the rounded stem. She put it back on the table and twisted her hands for a moment before letting them fall into her lap. They rustled in the folds of her tulle slip, and she realized with horror that she was still wearing her wedding dress.

Her hands smoothed the fabric as she glanced down at herself admiringly. 

Well, no one can say I didn't look fabulous. 

She almost snorted. Of course she looked fabulous--she was wearing a seven-thousand dollar dress. She'd loved it immediately--made of the softest silk, it was strapless and perfectly fitted to the waist before cascading into a million tiny little ruffles so fine they looked like delicate feathers. Monique Lhuillier herself probably hired twenty thousand Filipino children to hand-stitch each individual fold in the fabric. 

That, too, had been an argument -- this time, with her father. Her parents were generous to a fault, but even they were less than thrilled with the cost of the dress. They'd asked her to stay under three thousand dollars -- a perfectly reasonable sum, she now realized -- but she'd wheedled and begged, insisting on its critical role in the most important day of her life. It was her father who finally caved, and when he'd written the check, she was oddly triumphant. She'd known he wouldn't refuse her. 

She sat back in her chair and picked up the glass again. The day had been perfect, she realized. Precisely what she'd always wanted. The flowers -- cascading orchids in the deepest velvet purple -- were of a dream. The cost of those, too, had been staggering, fueled by their purported rarity. 

She buried her head in her hands. All those details, she thought. The centerpieces. The dupioni silk custom chair covers blended of the subtlest of colors -- a light cream and the softest pearl. 

She lifted her head and looked at her engagement ring. Nine months later, and it still took her breath away. She twisted it around, remembering that just yesterday it had stood alone. Yesterday, when things were completely different than they were today. Yesterday, when she was happy and warm with the anticipation of her wedding day. 

Yesterday, before she realized this was all a horrible mistake. 

What Happens After The Leaving

"We'll name her Moses," Marla said, grinning.

"We will do no such thing!" Dan replied.

The basket sat on the doorstep, no note pinned to a blanket, nothing. Just a basket, with a prize inside. Marla's first name choice had, in fact, been "Cracker Jack." Dan gave her a negative on that. Or as he put it "Ixnay on hatyay."

"You mean atthay, Dan," Marla put in. She smirked as she said it, not sure why she took such pleasure in knowing pig latin better than he did. "Hat yay is when I find a really primo fedora in a used clothes store for, like, three bucks. Canadian."

Dan laughed and reached into the basket to run a fingertip along the prize inside. Small little thing though she was, she still knew when attention was being given to her and lifted her chin helpfully to accommodate the finger. "Canadian monetary deals or not, we aren't going to name her Cracker Jack."

Which is when Marla came up with Moses. The entire time this went on, there wasn't a peep from the basket. Both Marla and Dan thought it strange but decided to not think too deeply about it just yet. Thinking deeply would mean that the basket was theirs for good now and as long as the basket, and its contents, were separate from Marla and Dan, then it would be something that simply got accidentally left on their doorstep.

Which was, thought Dan, rather odd to begin with. Who left living things on other people's doorsteps anymore? Who did that? And, for those few who considered themselves desperate or unfortunate enough that their circumstances warranted something like that - who took the time to choose a basket?

Maybe the basket was pre-owned. Perhaps there was an Easter accident that left the owner with an extra basket and that basket had sat in a closet for years, waiting for something useful to happen to it. And now here it was, the star of the day, with only some cotton swaddling as padding and a live, squirming thing in it that was oddly quiet.

Marla took one look in the basket and knew there was no way in the world that basket was not coming inside with them. In fact, spending a minute or two pretending that maybe it wouldn't was funny. Spending five minutes pretending was starting to feel creepy and evil to her. She looked at Dan and nudged him with a shoulder.

"Hey! Don't make me drop the..."

"Oh, come on, I only kinda nudged you, Dan."

"With your freakish strength you might've broken my arm. Medic! I think I need to go to the hospital. At the very least I need to go take a nap and think about what you've done."

"What I've done? Dan, who did this? How can they... can you imagine? Standing here, a basket with a baby inside and staring it down? Staring down your own morality, your own life that way? Knowing that there was no going back? What was that like, can you imagine?" Marla took a deep breath to steady herself.

"Well they could come back."

"No, come on, in years, fine. But I mean fifteen minutes from now. Think of it."

"Oh man," Dan wanted to laugh, "that's terrible but yeah, how would that even play?"

"Badly. So we keep her."

"Do we?"

"Can we not?" Marla asked. "Is there some situation where we don't?"

"No."

"No. Exactly. And we can name her Bingo. B. I. N. G. O."

"We are not naming her Bingo."

"But Bingo was her..." The need to laugh spurred her on, and she knew that Dan knew it.

"It was never her name-o, it is not her name-o and it will not be her name-o," he said, wondering if they would keep the basket forever, as a reminder, as the only thing left from before.

"Spoil-sport."

"Let's get inside and call a doctor, we should make sure she's healthy, she's really quiet."

"Tough little girl, but yeah, let's." Marla took the basket in hand and smiled down into it. "Silly little Ming. We'll get you fixed up. I'll be mom."

"We're not calling her Ming."

"She's gonna be merciless. Look at her."

Dan looked into the basket as he held the door open for Marla. "Not Ming," he said. He let the door close behind him and couldn't help but smile.