Circling the Drain by Amanda Davis Read Free Book Online Page A

loved him even more.
    Though she didn’t know how to tell him so.
    But then I could ride and you could leap aboard and carry me away on your big blue horse, she said. He sipped his beer and said: Nah, rope wouldn’t hold and my balance’d be off and besides if you want to ride Wonder, he’s out front so why go through all that?
    And she saw he had no romantic imagination, but she just loved him more.
    Ma, I’m in love with a boy who chases trains, she said, stirring potato soup and staring dreamily at the flat land spread from one end of her vision to the other like her feelings for him.
    That’s nice dear, her mother said and pushed a tiny needle in a tiny stitch through a tiny hole in her tiny flowered design. She held the fabric close enough so the flowers were huge dots of color and she could see only them, flowers waiting to be threaded, waiting to be brought to life by her hand, while off in the distance her daughter’s heart was bruised and aching.
    Ma, I’m in love with him and he rides a big blue horse and I don’t know what to do.
    That’s nice, that’s nice.
    Â 
    He thundered across the flat desert and up the greenest of green hills. He flew in the dust and held his arms out and laughed wildly. Sky filled his belly and tickled him and tousled his hair and he couldn’t understand how there could be anything else. It seemed like all there was.
    But he did like to drink beer in the bar with Lily.
    They sat facing rows of colored bottles, butts on worn bar stools, in the one-room restaurant attached to the gas stationand motel along the dusty highway. She wore her most shapely dress and sucked in her stomach and told jokes. They spent time making faces at each other in the mirror above the bar. Lily stared at his eyes, wanting to own them, wanting to rein them in somehow, so they just saw her. But at the end of the evening he’d ride off on Wonder’s back, leaving her alone with an empty beer and a starry view.
    He ate at her house when she asked him. He even drank the very last drops of her potato soup, tossed twinkling glances her way, patted his stomach and stretched. And once, after a particularly fine bowl, he winked.
    But he didn’t seem to know what was brewing inside her and didn’t seem to notice what more there was than trains and sky and food and Wonder. And as an afterthought: her. His pal Lily.
    She couldn’t bear the rhythm of it. Lily couldn’t stand that he disappeared some days and she never knew when he’d be back with his windblown hair and his smile as big as the earth. So one day Lily concocted a plan to capture the boy.
    At first she thought she should feed him her love, but that seemed wrong when she spun it around in her mind. She didn’t want the boy to just taste her desire, she wanted to wrap him up in it. So she boiled all of her love in a soup pot and in it she soaked a hundred yards of blue thread. Then she stitched him a blue-threaded, love-soaked shirt and packed it carefully in tissue paper and waited.
    That night was clear and the air was sharp. When the boy thundered to her, tied up Wonder outside and sauntered in, sheepish and ragged, Lily gave it to him.
    He unfolded the paper and an ocean crossed his face and he held up the shirt and was blinded by her love. He stood frozen long enough for Lily to breathe in and out and to worry about him. Long enough for her to say: Hey?
    As he turned toward her, his face was the mountains, the plains and the sea and she smiled at him: I made it for you.
    He put it on and was so beautiful that she gasped. He walked around in a proud circle basking in the soft fabric of her love and then he said: I’m gonna go show Wonder, Lily, thanks.
    As he strolled outside, her heart began to leak. She saw them through the window, the boy who chased trains, with Wonder nibbling his ear, and suddenly she knew what she was up against: his heart belonged to his horse.
    Whoa,