THE RIVER PATH

dear friends, here is a story that will not make the cut into my new book of collected short stories, which are all shorter, stranger and more interesting than this, strong as an ox too

It was a blue steak and peach syrup sky and to call it anything else that afternoon would have been abnormal. The mulberry tree had gone clean mad from a two day love affair with the wind; she tap-danced on the car roof playing her ecstatic drums until by morning, the ground was littered with the wild folly of her joy. Magpies scratched through the rouge mess, looking for their best tuning forks.

The two heads of unbrushed hair enjoyed watching them fall from the branches as they set off in the morning, smoking out the window in search of coffee. She always woke earlier than him and spent the subtle hour collecting interesting stones and bottle caps and stored them in her coat pocket. They were travelling around Canada before moving to Montreal, where they would have to find jobs and live together in a small apartment with leaking radiators and polished linoleum, if that was what they still wanted. 

The young man had taken her to a river he knew from younger days, a place she had never visited before. Having slept knotted inside the car for weeks, he promised her a proper bed in his childhood home, for he swore the new owners were a delightful older couple who would receive them with open arms and a hot meal. The mountains behind cradled lakes in their strong arms; looked like someone had spilled pearls into the sack of potatoes. Strict shadows began straightening ties under itchy jumpers as evening drew even closer. The girl walked with a limp, noticeable only to physicians and the more observant members of society – her vertebrae was born too soft, and she wore a leather brace into her teenage years.

“Could you imagine if the moon is an inflatable ball with light behind it placed by a clever scientist just to please us?” Vincent asked the pretty girl wearing plum boots.
“No.” She said, quietly.
“Well I can.” And – he clasped her hand –  “I’ve found someone else to love instead of you”. He had short, dark cropped hair and his features sat perched on his face, as if designed for a person much smaller than him. 
“I think the moon is quite alive” She said, a little louder than she meant to.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Oh, I heard you. I’ve actually been sleeping with other men. A new one every night.”
“What! I just said that to trick you!” He feigned anger.
“Well I said that back to trick you! I’d never touch another man!” Her long hair was done in shiny black buttons down her neck and he wanted to undo them.
“Well I’m only lying again! I have been sleeping with someone who looks just like you and there’s nothing you can do to stop me!”
“Fine!” 
“My love, does it bother you?”
“Not a tiny bit.”
“Does it bother you that she looks just like you, and sounds like you too?”
“It pleases me”
“She’s very beautiful.”
“Why wouldn’t she be very beautiful?”

Vincent thought for a second.

“Because she looks for another lover every time I go away, even if for one afternoon. Because her eyes are very bright. Because her back keeps running out of space for my stories.” He prodded her deep in the back for effect.

“Don’t hit me”. She said
“I barely touched you.”
“You did. You hit me. And I’m so weak in that spot. And you hit me right there. Everybody here saw it”
“There’s no one else around”
“I guess nobody will know that you hit me.”
“—or that you’re sleeping with someone else” she added, quietly, as he laughed alongside her, like a pair of gold coins in a dry pocket.

The two carried on walking hand in hand along the river dimpled with radish holes, where the fish swam upward for a closer look. The young Vincent walked straight inside the grey melt of water with his shoes and coat on and cupped his palms to bring the water to his lips then spat it out. A few droplets collected in the gutter of his unshaved beard, which hung like a bird’s nest in an empty chapel. The sky was a dark blue and all in one piece except the hole the sun had made and the tassels of treetops at the end. The longer part of his coat floated to the surface and surrounded him like a strange brown lily pad. He stood grinning at the pale animal, who often ate out of his dry palm like a hungry fawn.

“Come over here, girl”
“No way.”
“Come on. I want to talk to you about something.”
“You can sure fine talk to me from over there. Aint a chance in hell I’m getting my new boots wet. You bought them for me, so they have meaning now”
“Stuff the new boots!”
“Stuff you!”

The boy thought to himself for a second, splashing the water like a bathtub.

“Well, I aint getting out of here till you come in, and I know for a fact you don’t know the way to my old house on your sweet lonesome.”

The girl sat down, crossed her legs and placed her chin in silk glove hands, with her back to him. She reminded him of an expensive fruit, going off inside a brown paper bag.

“Come on, my best girl. I aint really sleeping with anyone else. How could I? I’ve had you in my arms every night. I haven’t had a chance to find a new girl. I only said that to see what you’d say. Can’t you see it’s because I care about you and I want to know you care about me too?”

She remained silent and limp. The river snorted like a buffalo around him.

“It’s getting awful chilly in here. Might catch my death. It’d be your fault if I died.”
“You’re sick in the head” she shouted over her shoulder as she stood up and walked in the wrong direction.
“It aint right for little girls to act like men” He called after her, but she’d already vanished.
“You’ll find things worse than me out there!”

She was so stuck in thought she didn’t notice the character inside his tent, lighting a match. As she walked in a very straight line and heard the leaves crunch beneath her feet, she found something interesting inside a quiet room of her head to ask the young man – so ran back and pointed at him, accusingly.

“How far would you go to have me?”
He stared at her a little.
“I said – how far?” 
“It depends.”
“On what?” She grew desperate, her red face contracting. The loosening light made the edges of things even sharper, everything yellow or black. Like a honeybee clock.

“Well” –he took his time with speaking. “On what you have to offer me”. He splashed the water again, then looked into her eyes.

“I asked the question first. I make the rules around here now.” And with that, she ran off once more.

The young man, having satisfied himself with his reply, grew calm and detached because he knew the only point of that girl was to leave his desires unsatisfied, so he would chase after her again and again, to no fulfilment – and repeat. She was a prize for the weak men and a challenge for the strong men. And wasn’t he raised a strong man? He reached into the top of his coat pocket, wriggled his toes within his boots, took a cigarette out and lit up inside his hand home, watching pieces of algae collect around his body then bounce off. He waited. A strong man. A cold, strong man.

She came back, briefly. 

“I know what I have to offer you. A life of misery. Herds of badly behaved children who rip your precious books and spit in your beer. Silent, long arguments. Sleeping with our backs to each other. I’ll want to know where you are all the time. Dinner at 7 oclock every night, and if you’re late I’ll chop your head off. All the bad parts. That’s what I can offer you.” And with that, she ran off for the last time.

When the moon finally did come out, it looked more like an actress waiting backstage, peeking her face behind the side curtains and receiving a round of applause only from her admirer, with hostile glances from the sensible eyes around him. The young man clapped and whooped, trod his feet up and down, scratched his beard, then walked, half wet like a photograph dunked in the dark room, to his childhood home. He felt he was so huge he would not fit through the front door. The sky clouded over as he ate dinner, thicker than a steel fence post. Vincent told them the girl was sleeping in the car as she was not feeling well. Maybe next time – you’ll meet her, he said. 

By the time the thunder had lost the war with the sky, and the general upstairs had come to an agreement with the enemy to fill the river up and be done with violence, he was tucked into a soft bed, smoking a cigarette, falling asleep with ease.




Many years later, a woman stands at the kitchen sink, resembling dust being lifted from a sheet, shaken briefly, then landing again for a very long time. She waters the pot plants from inside the window, quenching a thousand thirsts and looks at the garden thinking to herself – in that clearing, Seth was conceived and later, feeling he was being left out, threw baby William to the ground from his pram and ripped a part of his rope like a spinal cord, so William would never walk again, nor would he ever be a terribly clever person. Then there was Annie, two days old, who screamed in unknown pain for seven hours, turned blue, got better and smiled for a day, and – when nobody was looking anymore, died in her father’s whisky arms, by the fireplace. 

They dug a hole and buried her and went to bed. And then got up again, coffee and a jam tart for breakfast, Seth had his first taste of a cigarette, eight years old and little William – from his chair asked, when is the baby coming back, with his long black hair covering his eyes and his father wheeled him into the garden, left him staring at that rose bush, pruned badly so it resembled more of an octopus.

 The woman walks around her empty house as she does every hour or so – Seth having left for the army, William in a home which smells like peanuts and urine. Little Annie in the garden like an apricot seed swallowed in hazy childhood. Someone is lingering with indecision as to whether to knock on the door and reveal a silver grey light, a deaf light, and honest light, a bunny hopping light, or perhaps a bouquet of helium balloons. Coffee with a bonnet served with cold slices of ham which has no smell, prepared on the table. Nobody else is awake yet.
She goes to the attic and begins looking through photographs. A silver box encourages a blue cylinder of light. The old man, with his tangled beard can hear her up there, and follows quietly.

“I like this one of us. Just after Seth was born. Outside the chapel.”
“It’s a nice one.”
“And this one, too – Vince look, look at William’s big smile.”
“Sweet boy he was”
“What is this one of a pair of boots?” She holds it with her left hand, though she is right handed.
“Let me see that closer.”
“Here. They’re almost purple. They’re lovely.”
“Plum. Plum coloured boots. Don’t you know they’re plum coloured?” He looks at her, hoping to boil himself long enough he’d slip out his lobster shell unnoticed.
“An old girlfriend of yours?”
“Something like that.”
“What happened? She left you?”
“Why do you think she left me?”
“You’re the sort of man most women leave.”
“As a matter of fact, I left her.”
“Why? Such lovely plum boots.”
“You can’t stay with a woman just because she has nice boots.”
“Where is she now?”
“Lord only knows.” He smiles at her, long and hard.

His wife laughs, sweetly, then her face twists as she remembers something. 
“Don’t ruin the morning already, my love, It’s barely eight.”
“Remember what you said to me in bed when we were younger? Living in the city? Remember? When you’d been out drinking all night and came home early in the morning, you said – one life just doesn’t allow for the possibilities of a single man. As if I had settled for something less than you. It is just not natural for a man’s face to light up for the same woman six months straight, you said. A man needs more than one partner, it’s only right. Think of the wild, you said. And then you climbed into bed with me, pleased with yourself, and I just let you do whatever you wanted to me.”
“You remember the strangest things.”
“And afterwards. After all the awfulness, you said-”
“Two men are inside me, remember the other one. The one who did not do this to you.”
“Yes” The woman says, quietly, into her shirt collar.
“Why must you always remember things I have done wrong, just when we are finally happy with each other. I think you enjoy being miserable.”
“You think I sit here every day, weaving a fine tapestry into a miserable landscape? We make each other miserable. I just remember things better than you. It’s not my fault. These things burst right into my head and I have to tell you.”
“I wish you’d keep it to yourself.”
“Its all your fault anyway. You aren’t half the man I once thought you were”. Her eyes are the skin of sour milk.

The man sighs and walks back downstairs. “Coffee in the kitchen, when you’re ready to be my friend again”
The woman comes into the kitchen five minutes later, where he is reading the newspaper, curled like a pinched worm.

“The neighbours put their rubbish in our bin again. I saw them from the window”
“Did they? Does it bother us? We don’t have that much rubbish with just the two of us.” He does not look up from the article he is reading.
“It’s about principles. It’s our bin. Don’t you care?”
“I see. I do care. Want me to go out right now and speak to them?”
“Oh, because I’m your frail wife I can’t deal with things on my own anymore?”
The man sighs and leaps back to his newspaper, muttering –
“Doubt you’ll be going out there anytime soon anyway”
“The way he treats that little girl of theirs, that alone, they should hang him for it.” 
“Yes, dear”
“You’re not even listening to me. You don’t care that next door a little girl is being hurt, do you?”
He says nothing, carries on reading. Takes a drink of coffee without looking up.
“I hear it, all the time” She whispers.
“Maybe they’re playing”
“It frightens me. You don’t know what it’s like. I hear every noise. When I see her walking for the school bus I almost can’t look. Makes me feel sick inside. Such a precious gift is a little girl, and those monsters go and ruin it. Don’t you care about that?”
He silently reads.
“You don’t care a damned bit about anything I have to say”

He looks up, at her wrinkled and thin face, the blush she has put on – she must have put it on after the photographs, her punishment red lipstick overflowing, her hair scraped back, her ugliness all on show. 

“I aint never seen anything bad happen to that girl with my own two eyes.” And he looks back down at his paper.
“And them plum boots? You aint never seen them with your own two eyes either?”
He raises an eyebrow, not looking, but speaks.
“She’s dead now. Don’t let it bother you. I took those boots and gave them to someone else.”
“I bet you didn’t give them away. Bet you keep them under your pillow and kiss them when I’m not looking. How do you know she’s dead?”
“Because I killed her.”
“Be serious with me”
“She hit her head, lost her memory and then she became you. A witch.”
“Can’t you ever just be honest for once?”
“She was raped and tortured on a cold night by the river, she gave birth to a little girl, and the little girl is you. A wicked old witch.”
“Stop talking like that”
“I’m going out.”
“Good.”

The man looks at his wife, long and hard in the corridor, as if trying to ascertain what time it is, from the shadow beneath her nose.
“Did you ever enjoy spending time me?” He asks in a concrete voice. Sounds like a glass of beer waiting for someone to come back, knowing they will never come back.
“I’m not sure I ever really did.”
“I think I knew that” He says, quietly, and packs his briefcase with an old book, a pencil and a tin water bottle. 
“Maybe in the early days”, she says quietly.
“See you later then.” He answers.
“Dinners at seven. Don’t be late.”
“I won’t, my love”
“Have fun out there. Take me with you in your head, won’t you.”
He nods and smiles from the side of a tooth. He goes to walk away.
“Hey – remember. Don’t be late”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”

They kiss goodbye in an old fashioned way. She strokes his cheek and closes the door very slowly behind him, watching him walk down the straight, straight path to the train station. She has not gone through the front door a single time since the boys left home. There was a period of two weeks when she could manage the post-box, but soon that became unbearable. 

Her husband gets the groceries, spare parts and is more than enough company for her, she has no reason to leave the house anymore – it’s better this way, she says. Easier to make decisions when you are only deciding which room of the house to sit inside of, and anyway – what with her sore back coming down and tapping pain screws into her hip, it’s far too difficult going for walks out there. He has no complaints about this arrangement – although it feels like breaking out of a jail cell; only to find himself in a larger cell, shaped like a real room, the bars plastered over with floral wallpaper.

He takes the train two stations north, skips a short distance through eclectic houses down the cobbled street, where he lands and knocks playfully on a ruby red door. A pair of old plum boots answers. They kiss and rush straight to the bedroom.


“What’s up with you today?” She asks, afterwards. “Have you been working too hard?”
“It’s getting bad again” He says, in a handsome way, stroking her hips, working his way up to her neck, which he holds tight.
“I don’t know why you don’t just leave her already. The kids are gone.” She pushes his hand off and begins to roll away. Outside the window, clouds pass like bleached tectonic plates.
“We’ve been through this” He places his hand back on her neck, bringing her closer to him.
“I know. What can I do?” Her face, real as the dog who follows you home and does not force herself inside the front door, just lingers.
“Nothing. Just let me inside when I need you.” 
“I cannot understand you at all. I don’t think there is anyone else on this earth who would put up with the daily routines you suffer through. And you do. Suffer. So much, for her.”
“It seemed to make sense to you a few months ago”
“You feel bad about what happened when you were younger, blah blah blah.” She throws her hands into the air. “Doesn’t mean you had to punish yourself for thirty years, Vincent, letting her drag you down into her hermit abyss. You were a child, anyway. Everyone makes mistakes. Especially little boys. It’s not like you did those awful things to that poor girl. You were just being stubborn. Fooling around. Ain’t your fault.” She tries to move away a second time, the shadows on her bedroom wall furnished with genitals. 

“I feel responsible. You know that.” He grips her harder and with his left hand, holds her thigh down. “You understand me, don’t you” He encourages, as she stops trying to pull away. “You understand why I can’t leave her, don’t you? She wouldn’t survive on her own. How would she go out to buy food? She’d just starve to death, I know she would.”
“I know. At least I’m happy when I’m with you. I wish we lived together. But this is enough. I’m happy just like this. Are you happy just like this?” She has gone pale and looks a little frightened.
He kisses her cheek, loosens his grip.
“How’s William?” The woman begins plaiting her grizzly, blonde hair.
Vincent does not reply but takes his hands off her, tucks them both between his own thighs.
“He thinks the world of you. Poor boy. No mother, no father.” The young woman says quieter this time, tempting him. “Put your hands back on me, I’m cold over here.” The paunch of her belly is soft and healthy, like a bleating lamb.

“He’s got a mother and father.” Vincent turns his back and faces the wall. “He’s got a perfectly decent mother and father and he’s more than capable of taking himself on a little journey to visit us. He keeps himself locked away to make us feel guilty. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s a sly little thing.”
“It’s funny, the ones you feel responsible for. I reckon you’ve got it all wrong.”
“Oh you reckon?” He asks, with sudden anger. 
“I do reckon!” She shouts back.
“You reckon I’ve got everything wrong?” He holds her around the chin very tight and leans close, breathes his sour breath, stares into her crow eyes. They stay like this for a whole minute. His inhibitions against violence, though they have waned – are not perfect.

He begins tickling her, “You reckon I’ve got everything wrong little lady?” She shrieks and wriggles away, then lays her head back on his warm chest. “You staying tonight? I’d like to talk to you about something.”

He thinks for a second. Kisses her shoulder. Thinks some more.
“Can’t tonight. Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow. Perfect. Tomorrow is even more perfect than tonight. Do you know something, you’re the only man I’ve ever been with – who, when he goes away, I’m sure as hell fire he’ll come back for me. The only man.” He smiles, pleased with himself. A feeling of ropes around his feet arrives without so much as a knock on the front door. It feels comfortable, to pull at the tether.
“What did you want to talk about?”
“It can wait till tomorrow.”

And with that, they both fall asleep; a deep, luxurious sleep, granted only to the lovers who wring themselves out thoroughly enough, leaving the best of their salted flesh to dry on the sheets. His wife, at home, holds her own arms tight around her chest at the unflowered kitchen table. She drinks from the cold wine glass, stringing her mind’s shoelaces with the past. Her hair is stiff and white, rattles when it moves. 

The woman puts a green tea towel around the mess, and two corners stand up like rabbit ears. She stands up and looks at herself in the cabinet mirror, puts more lipstick on. She gets one of her husband’s cigarettes and watches herself. More lipstick, till it goes right up her nose. Suddenly, the woman points accusingly at her own eyes. She shouts to herself. 

“How long you gonna keep this up for, sweetheart?”

She takes a big breath, smokes the cigarette again, looks out the window then back at her reflection. She takes her clothes off, without speed or an ounce of sex – the way one undresses before bed, not thinking. The woman is very skinny, and pale, all one colour – that of an unwashed pillowcase left to dry on a fence post, encouraging big trucks to fly past and splash puddles onto her naked thighs. Stood revealed apart from her socks, she grabs her own cheeks then points into the mirror again, bashing the glass with a long finger.

“He didn’t come looking for you at the river and you made up that ghastly story to punish him. You never knew he’d bend so much. You couldn’t have told the truth could you, about the nice man in the tent and all the orange juice you drank and the card games. You had to make something terrible and violent up, so he’d feel sorry for you when he found you the next morning. Had to bash yourself with rocks and fling yourself against trees, stuff twigs inside yourself. Have you got what you wanted now? Have you? Is the revenge beautiful and sweet tasting? Caramel revenge? Is it, you old bitch?”

She takes a drag of the cigarette, and looks, thoughtfully. Unwraps the tea towel, slowly. Her hair stays upright.

“But you know, don’t you darling” She whispers to herself, stroking her bottom lip and pulling it out, pushing it back all the way inside her mouth till her fingers are red too.

“You know he’d have left you if you didn’t make him feel so bad for you. There would be no lovely home, no William and no Seth, nobody to kiss you at night. You’d be all alone. You had to lie, didn’t you honey. You lied so you’d have this good, sweet life together. So, you’d never be alone. It’s alright. There, there.”

A single tear, oily and fat falls down her right cheek, which is a field in drought. It disappears into a thirsty ravine. As when it is sunny outside and someone chooses instead to sit in a dark room, the iris inside her eyes slumps over. Tiny translucent slivers of light weave in and out and of her gaunt stomach and hollow uterus, her shrivelled kidneys and castration scars, where a pair of breasts should hang, traveling up and throughout her throat arteries, needlepoints of light, fireworks in a lake of thick water, the body burns into itself, silver crackles, frozen sea black inside her ears, her ribcage an aquarium, the fish undoing their tartan waistcoats, asking if by any chance, she has a light.

“This is what you wanted” She explains, and stubs her cigarette out on the soap bar, then walks off for a little lie down, though it is warm and there is no breeze, she cannot sleep, she just lies there, clutching the pillow, staring at a crack on the wall, which looks like an owls face – without so much as a tiny mouse of hope inside. The cemetery of her throat is dry, she does not swallow.

After an hour of thinking, she falls almost asleep; dreams a strange dream of a large grocery store, with the lights off. She asks a young, pock marked boy behind the counter for a receipt. “I’m sorry”, he whispers to her. “We don’t do that in this department.” Meanwhile her husband dreams of nothing and the woman lying beside him, with a small life kicking in her belly, dreams of an orange snake with long, black lines along its tight, legless body. She wakes, briefly, leans her head silently upon his chest and drops her full heart into the hand of every beggar living on each rib. The whole bedroom reeks of tonsils and sex, cascades of pearls began to drop from the sky’s earlobes outside, rain lulls her back to sleep. I am happy, I am very, very happy with you, Vincent – she whispers, and then – on the train home at six thirty two, Vincent collapses, taking with him buckets and buckets of river water, to fill heaven’s long standing drought. In the garden, the barren elbow of early evening blossomed with flowers warming his wife’s cheeks from the windowsill, as she stared at the clock, encouraging his long-gone golden hands to return – hot as a cooked tomato, bringing with them everything she needs to stay alive.

,