In front of the mirror, Rennel rubbed his chest and belly with a soiled towel. He smirked at Carlotta while he rubbed lasciviously at his nipples, cupped one of his breasts in his hand. He dropped the towel and watched himself and Carlotta in the mirror as he untied his pajama cord. The pajamas fell to his ankles and he stood there in his underpants. He flexed his arms, rolled his belly a little while he watched it in the mirror. I smirked; Carlotta and Sam weren’t paying any attention to him. They were still smiling at each other.

Rennel realized no one was watching him and scowled, snorted. He climbed into his leathers, slipped on his socks and heavy black boots.

“You people ready?”

The raised blade

There came a day I was in no way prepared for. Fifteen years had passed since I had seen Sam and Carlotta. I was thirty-six years old and living in Boston. Time had ripped me out of my holdings, out of my natural domain, and stranded me on my back looking at a horizon altogether too far away. I had blunted my mind beneath blossoming trees and written my little books in feeble defiance of mortality. I had spun exuberant lies and told crass truths, all to avoid pain and unpleasant incidents. I had dutifully loved and later settled for not loving. After years thick with colorful scenes and phantasmagoria, my life had gone gray, dull, and bereft of my own will, an abandonment of volition that carried me into the cold and out again, like a sand flea in the surf.

I had spent the past many months pursuing a young man. A poet. Jack. He was beautiful, and he despised me. First, I had given him money. When the money ran out I went to work again at odd jobs that seemed to separate me from him more than the hours accounted for. While I was away he took long walks or visited old girlfriends. He spoke well, too, and was a loyalist—novel after all my years with revolutionaries. He disliked my name and changed it. “Sally” he refused, and referred to me, when necessary, as “Miss Gunnar.” For months I had tailed him. Eventually I moved in with him and ignored his talk of previous affairs and his sick, hungry staring at slim women. I was fat by then. No longer just round, but thickening and clumsy.

We lived in a large room with high ceilings and an elegant blanked-out fireplace in one wall. We had moved the hot plate into the closet and dined at a small table in a corner. In another corner was the bed, narrow and too soft, where we smothered each other nightly. And two hunched, high-backed chairs stood near the table on which he wrote late into the night to avoid climbing into bed with me.