Onion Songs by Steve Rasnic Tem Read Free Book Online Page A

could see. For Michael was holding Mr. McGregor ’s rifle.
     
    And now: He was going to be late for his appointment again. On the bus an elderly woman thought she knew him. She called him “Joe” and told him all about her daughter, whom he used to date, and how she was doing—married, three kids in Chicago. He tried to remember if the story she was telling might be true.
    “ She was always a good dancer,” he said.
    “ Oh, the best! The very best! She won awards!”
    “ I used to watch her dance and I’d think of Ginger Rogers,” he said.
    “ Oh, you were much too young to remember Ginger Rogers.” The old lady looked worried.
    “ I used to watch her dance and I’d think of Ann-Margret,” he said.
    The old lady smiled. “She’s as beautiful as ever,” she said. “She hasn’t changed at all. A good marriage will do that for you. Are you married?”
    He stared at her, trying to remember if he had ever been close to marriage, because he wanted to say yes, even though he knew it couldn ’t be true. But after all these years, how could he not even have come close to marriage? Could he be that different from everyone else in the world? “No,” he finally said. “I’m afraid not.”
    The old lady pursed her lips, patted his knee. “Well, you really should consider it, young man. It would do you a world of good.” And then she sat up straight and looked away from him, out the window at all the stores and people they were passing, as if she were through with him, as if she had immediately forgotten he’d ever existed.
    For the rest of the bus ride he tried to imagine what he might have been like if his name had been Joe. He tried to imagine himself married to this old lady ’s daughter, having this old woman as a mother-in-law. It all seemed perfectly plausible.
    He closed his eyes and could see the daughter dancing, kicking her feet high up into the air, twirling, a bright red flower pinned to her breast.
     
    The Therapist: “Sometimes it’s as if I’ve lost track,” he told the therapist, a woman who always wore dark glasses during their sessions. “As if the events in my life have become subtly disordered. It becomes too easy to believe that something that’s past, that’s over, hasn’t occurred yet, or maybe won’t even occur at all. My relationships don’t end—they just go on and on. The time frame seems too irrelevant. Michael tells me things every day. Tomorrow my mother will send me to school for the first time. Next week I’ll meet a woman I last dated over a year ago, but I’ll be meeting her for the first time.”
    “ We all want to know where we came from and where we’re going,” the therapist said.
    “ Maybe if you took something out, or manipulated a muscle or a bone or two,” he said. “Maybe then all these aimless... connections, these resonances... wouldn’t bother me so much.”
    “ We all want to know how long we have in this world,” the therapist said. “That makes you no different than the rest of us.”
    “ I think I may have already died,” he said. “Once or twice. Maybe more.”
    Sometimes, if the conditions were right, he could feel the edges of the blades as they touched his thoughts. They entered cleanly most of the time, but occasionally there would be the slightest vibration, so that events might jar, one against the other, and the faces of the people in his memories would show their anxiety.
     
    Dream: It has been a long kiss, a very long kiss. He thinks he may even have slept through parts of it, only to awaken again and continue his participation. The lips against his are bare, loose, almost impossibly mobile. They make him feel hard and unyielding by comparison, like metal or brick.
    When he finally pulls away he sees it is Michael he has been kissing. But Michael ’s lips are wider than he remembers them. Michael’s head lolls, his eyes still and fixed as a doll’s. Michael’s smile spreads loosely to both sides of his face, wide as a