Open by Lisa Moore Read Free Book Online

long
spoons. It’s lunchtime, and at first Mina is
distracted by the passing lawyers and
teenagers.
MINA
Do you know what Yvonique said, that
he developed my palate. Can you
believe that?
YOUNG WOMAN
He roasts a mean duck.
MINA
Like I’m trailer trash.
(giggles)
It’s true.
YOUNG WOMAN
Me too. I’m trailer trash too.
MINA
Lay it here, sister.
(they slap hands in the air)
YOUNG WOMAN
But don’t you love him?
MINA
We were both coming out of heavy
relationships and we agreed not to
get emotionally involved. But the
sex was so good. So good. We justkept going like that, a month, two
months. This was Paris. Then I told
him I cared if he slept with someone
else.
We hear Mina’s voice while watching her run
through a sparse birch forest. She’s wearing
a white cotton dress and white sneakers, she
is running very fast. Her feet hardly touching
the ground, sunlight crashing through the
overhead branches, she is just a blur.
MINA (V.O.)
That’s what we agreed we’d say if we
found ourselves getting emotionally
involved. I care if you sleep with
someone else. And he said,
run
. Just
that one word,
run
. I wrote it on a
piece of paper in big block letters
with a highlighter at work. RUN. I
just stared at the word. I kept it
on my desk for a long time. It would
turn up under a pile of books. It
was my father all over again.
    After midnight on New Year’s Eve the digital artist and Yvonique got lost in the crowd on the waterfront. They fell into a snowbank together, kissing.
    Everyone did ecstasy, Mina says, it happens.
    And that doesn’t bother you, I ask.
    She’s sucking the last bit of meat from a lobster claw.
    Not
really
. She thinks for a minute, wipes her lips with the back of her hand. I mean, if it
meant something
I guess it would bother me. I
guess
it would bother me if it meant something. I’m not sure.
    Jason and I sit with the car warming up in the parking lot of the Avalon Mall, Cuban music on the radio. I think of a tropical ravine we passed once, in a tourist bus, and a band that came out and played at a dusty bus stop at ten o’clock in the morning, an hour outside Havana. There was a corrugated roof of green plastic and the musicians wore white straw hats and white pants that looked green under the shelter. Jason bought an orange. How charged the musicians were. I had licked a drop of orange juice before it dripped off Jason’s chin. I think of the possibility of him kissing someone else in a snowbank, just kissing. It would bother me.
    Mina tells us while we’re eating that she smuggled the cheese through Customs.
    She says, It’s illegal outside of France, unpasteurized cheese, it’s a problem with the EU. The other countries want to ban it. But the French, you can imagine how they feel. They’re so passionate.
    Jason lays his fork on his plate, wipes his mouth with a serviette. I put down my fork.
    I say, I’m breastfeeding you know, there could be anything in that.
    Mina says, We used to give our hens lobster shells and the yolks would be bright red. Bright red yolks in a cast iron skillet. Too bad this film isn’t about a red insect.
    She’s fastening a necklace with a pendant of medicine-blue beach glass.
    Fold your limbs like an insect, I say. Mina raises her arms to the back of her neck, elbows jutting. The green velvet dress she got married in.
    Lean into the mirror and put on lipstick, I say.
    I’m getting all this on video, then I capture stills on the computer, print them. Twenty-four pictures for one second of film. I’ll loop the clip of the lipstick moving over her mouth. During the twenty-four frames her eyelids droop and close, then open. An amber ring on her finger fires a sparkle of light in frame twelve. A bar of sunlight moves over her nose and across one cheek. I’ll colour the background with oil pastels, lime green, lemon, emerald, an ocean of grass.
    Jason looks at the print I’ve tacked to the wall over the computer. He says, Mina O’Leary could be a movie star.
    You