Knife Fight and Other Struggles by David Nickle Read Free Book Online

him.
    “Keep in touch, Mrs. Reesor,” he said, finally loud enough for all to hear. “In case . . . you know.”
    She looked at him with such intensity then—turning away only as her husband turned.
    “So he’s fine?” he said.
    McGill nodded, and chin down, headed for the door.
    “I gave him the cheque,” she said when McGill had left, and her husband tried to look her in the eye.
    “As long as you’re okay now,” he said.

    Oh, she was fine. Better than the day that I arrived in that house, that’s for certain. She had been such a melancholic one, that day that I crawled from the dishwater, and slithered on my belly across the kitchen and up and around her leg, to the breast where the infant fussed and suckled. He would not sleep. He kicked and squalled. She was chained to him, that’s how she felt. And when I entered him, through the pinhole door in his skull, and had him bite down—he made her shriek. Might she’ve killed him? Mothers do, sometimes. Their hearts harden. They see the lay of the barren years ahead, serving hand and foot to their child, and its father now grown cold to the touch.
    How many times have I been called up by a neglected husband who’d found my name in a grimoire, and begged me on the strength of my reputation, to irrigate the drying slits of their fading brides?
    Ah, it would have been the easiest thing for me, to turn her pearl as she looked on her husband—to whisper and suggest—to indicate and to remind her, of what joys the old hunger brings.
    But that wasn’t why I came to that house. So I held my peace, until McGill came. His aching hunger was nothing I had to tweak.
    All I had to do was lay her before him, and reaching into her as McGill reached into me, tweak her heart so, and set her on her course.

    Her husband made her dinner.
    It involved shrimp and couscous and dried fruit, some curry flakes and fish stock to round it out. He understood it to be a favourite of hers. She did nothing to correct the misapprehension. She washed up, and saw to the baby, and joined him in bed. When he asked if everything was all right, she said yes. When he touched her, she made a noise that he understood to mean no.
    In the deep night, I awoke to find her over my crib.
    The next morning, after he left for work, she took me out for the second outdoor excursion since I arrived. As she had that first time, she installed me in a great blue stroller, with thick rubber tires, multiple straps to hold me tight and a pouch behind my head filled with the mysterious tools of the mothering trade. It was warmer out of doors than that first time. She wore a red-and-white cotton dress; I, a tiny blue terrycloth jumper.
    We made it quite a way—well past the bank building at the corner of the street where things had gone so badly that last time—along past a filling station—and across another street, to a park with a playground and some benches in the shade of thick, blossoming maple trees. She stopped in front of one of these benches, and looked at me and it, and finally she did sit, and turned the stroller around so that I faced her, and she looked at me again—and it dawned on me that she wasn’t looking at me . . . she was searching for me, in the empty stare of her little son’s eye.
    Searching for some pretext, perhaps, to call?

    Six days she searched in vain. On the morning of the seventh, she picked up the phone.
    I could tell it was not McGill she called by her bright and easy tone. “Hey, you!” she said, and after a pause, “Yeah, things are better now.” And another pause, as the phone chirped brightly in her ear. “I know!” And more chirping. “Yeah! Right?” She nodded, her smile brighter than I believe I’d ever seen it. “So it’s okay if I come? You sure?”
    And finally: “Great!”
    She switched off her phone and leaned over the bassinet.
    “Guess where we’re going, Simon?” she cooed. “Can you say ‘Brannigan’s’?”
    The infant blew a snot