'Heart' by Mary Shelley

1822, Viareggio, Italy

In the gloaming, they kindled the fire to burn him. That man who washed up on the shore tangled with crab bellies and skeins of bladderwrack - the face, the hands, fleshless. They said he was my husband.

They made me stay in the carriage. I decided to spy on them.

"Ladies must not attend funerals." Jane sat there with my sleeping child in her arms, judging me.

I told her, "I love my husband as meat loves salt."

She scowled. My heart writhed under my ribs with the need to kiss his sleeping eyes and fuse our bodies together once more. Even as ashes. I leapt from the carriage and walked quietly towards the setting sun.

I came as far as this dune, where the marram grass pricked up in gold curtains I could peep through. I lay in the sand to watch them, soft grains spilling inside the neck of my dress, coating my palms and chin. Byron looked in my direction. I sank lower into the sand, catching sight of the body.

Where the fine, full lips and hazel eyes had been....

Nothing.

Between the mouldy collar and the strings of brown hair gaped a hole the tinge of calf’s liver. My body grew numb, cold. Light and heat seeped from the day.

The idea of holding him seemed like a ridiculous fantasy. What was left to kiss? I longed to be snug again in the carriage with Jane and the boy, but I couldn’t move.

Instead, I watched them work as if my eyes were sewn open.

They built the pyre from limbs of driftwood, talking amongst themselves in low voices, pausing sometimes to smoke or spit in the sea. Their eyes looked away from the body with its shirt and boots and trousers soaked and salted, sun-dried.

Trelawney knelt in the damp sand to cut the laces of the sodden boots with a pocket-knife, and saw at the leather. Byron stood back the while, his face cupped in his hands. I think he was weeping. With a grunt, Trelawney wrenched the left boot off and fell back in the sand. The exposed foot was long and flat, pale and bloated.

Not my husband’s.

You will think that grief and shock have made me lose my wits. But Percy had been my bedfellow since I was seventeen. I knew him head to toe. I had kissed the fine bones of his high-arched feet. The sea might have swollen them, but it could not have lengthened them, flattened them.

I felt hope that the storm which had swept him away from me two weeks before had washed him up safely somewhere else. Perhaps on some sunny Mediterranean island where he now coaxed a fire of his own into life and waited for a passing ship to bring him back to me.

We have always been passionate with each other, never companionable. He has had many other women and there have been times when I was driven to the brink of suicide thinking he would not come back. But he always has.

I remember the first night we stole to Old Saint Pancras Churchyard, hand in hand. He was married and I barely more than a child.

The churchyard gates were locked. Percy lifted me by the waist until my fingers grasped the top of the wall. He hoisted me up, then climbed over himself. The grass was long and wet and clasped my stockings. We wove between headstones, startling moths that fluttered up like dandelion seeds.

When we reached my mother’s grave I stretched out on the slab. Percy became my husband there, while I stared up at the full, yellow moon, my legs wound around his waist, my fingers grabbing his hair. After that, nothing could have torn us asunder, save death.

I was eighteen when I miscarried our first child. A misshapen abortion haunted me, hunted me to the shores of Lake Geneva where we stayed with Byron. I dreamt that the homunculus which had once lived inside me lived again, a huge and terrible man stalking the grounds of the house, desirous of my company. I wrote feverishly, desperate to purge my mind of the horror. The monster of my nightmares took on a voice. I published Frankenstein anonymously. People assumed the work was my husband's.

So I hid behind his superior glory, riding his coattails across Europe through infamy, adultery and debt. When we washed up here in Viareggio, the Villa Magni seemed a paradise to Percy, perched in grand isolation on the sea’s edge. He and Jane’s husband, Edward, went off each day, enjoying their perfect plaything for the summer. A sailing boat.

Heavy with child, I stayed in the villa with Jane. As the summer staggered on, the villa became a dungeon. One night in June, I awoke with a sharp pain in my belly and lit the lamp. The sheets were soaked in blood. Percy was gone. I lurched up, trailing drops of blood along the floor to Jane’s room. She and Percy lay in each other’s arms and seemed embarrassed when they awoke that I had found them so entangled.

I woke in a bathtub full of ice. He could not find a doctor. Jane cradled my head and told me I would live. If I had been able to muster more strength, I would have bitten her.

Life grew darker still. My little boy was a changeling and I could not stay in the room with him. I kept to my bed and Percy kept to Jane’s. He came to me drunk sometimes, saying strange things. That he had a double who looked exactly like him and followed him everywhere. That people were trying to kill him and one man had shot at him. That there was a plot afoot.

One day, he sailed down the coast to Livorno with Edward and Captain Roberts. He was talking to Byron and Hunt about the launch of a magazine. On July 7th, he wrote to say he was setting off for home the following day. A few days later, a letter arrived for Percy from Hunt.

pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say you had bad weather after you sailed Monday & we are anxious.

The paper fell from my hands. I trembled all over.

Jane and I rushed to Livorno and then to Pisa in the hope that our husbands were still alive.

Two weeks later, three bodies washed up here and Byron came to tell me he thought it was Percy, Edward and a boatboy, that they would burn them on the beach.

I said, "Why did you not arrange a proper funeral?"

He shook his head and turned from me.

Jane told me a rumour was flying abroad that Percy wasn’t dead, but had run away. I felt too weak to hit her.

Late that night, sitting up alone with a burning candle, I remembered how Percy said he met his dopplegänger walking on the beach. It looked like the shadow of Death. Did Death have large, flat feet?

On the beach, the flames licked up high and yellow round the body that the sea had sucked. The moon rose in a darkening sky. The deed was done. Byron turned from the fire, his fingers clawing his face. As the corpse charred, Trelawny reached into the fire and snatched something out.

A heart.

They will present it to me to keep in an oak box. A half burnt heart like an eclipsed moon. It will stay with me always.

The heart they say is my husband’s.

Mary Shelley (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel-writer, best known for her Gothic novel, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

from Wikipedia

TIGHTLACE: the Last Words of a Murderess

Part 1, continued from below...

Manhattan 1926

I wore a blue Butterick dress, pearls and my fox fur wrap. It took that little extra something to perk me up. But by the time I’d dropped Laney and caught the Ferry and walked around Manhattan getting lost in my usual way, I was sticky and stale as Sunday picnic mayonnaise.

I spun through the revolving door at Henry’s and the hot air hit me like a clammy palm. Usually I love a Smörgåsbord and at Henry's there's a cheerful atmosphere with the egg-yolk walls and little square tables, each set with a silk carnation. What's more, you get served by waitresses instead of having to crowd into a buffet with the hoi polloi.

But that day, New York had got greedy and the place was packed. The prim little hostess – whose name I can never remember - minced over.

“Do you have a reservation?”

“I’m meeting Mrs. Kaufman here.”

“Mrs. Who?” said the brown mouse. She scurried to her station to run her finger down a list.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I come here practically every week. I’m astounded you don’t recall…”

“I can’t find that name at all. We’re awfully busy today.”

I was starting to feel fuzzy, a sure sign I was going to have one of my turns. I craned my neck, peering between tables. It was hard to see past the fat rear-ends of waitresses leaning over, giving the gents an eyeful for a bigger tip. My eyes were full of dots and colours by the time I spotted Karen. She was sitting at a corner table as at the far end of the buffet, painting on lipstick in an angry ox-blood square.

“That’s her!” I pointed, “That’s Mrs. Kaufman.”

I tried to sound haughty like those Manhattan ladies, but the words came out crackly and desperate.

“Oh. Mrs Kaufman,” said the brown mouse, enunciating. She snatched my wrap from me before I even had it off my arms.

“Watch it, Sister. That’s real fox fur.”

“I’ll be so careful,” she said.

I showed myself to my table, squeezing in between the straining rumps swaddled in their smudgy white pinafores. I could see what courses the girls’d served already from the colour of the hand-marks on their asses. By the time I’d crossed the room, I’d counted dill sauce, beetroot salad, potato casserole and stewed brown cabbage.

Before I even sat down, Karen seemed to sense my state of mind.

“Oh Honey, I’ll order aquavit,” she said, “Excuse me, waitress! You know, they’re darn deaf here, Tommy, I think I’ll have to get my blouse undone before anyone'll take notice.”

Tommy – that’s Karen and everyone else’s nickname for me. Gay Tommy, because I’m always the life of the party, the living spirit of the Jazz Age. I slumped down in the chair across from her.

“Where are we going shopping?”

“You don’t look like you could hold a fork, let alone fight your corner in the Macy’s sales. Besides, I’ve got something else in mind to pick us up.”

“What? Like a forklift truck?” I said.

“See, there’s the Tommy I like having lunch with.”

The waitress brought us a bottle of aquavit and two tiny glasses, cute as baby shoes. She took our order and I poured us shots and we toasted skål and downed them. It was only sugar-water, of course. But as soon as the waitress was out of sight, Karen slipped a flask out of her purse. I knew she kept it filled up with bootleg gin she scooped out of Maisie Olsen’s bathtub every Saturday. I often spotted her in Church, taking a covert belt during a boring sermon. On this occasion, she decided to be Christian and share.

“Fuck. You could clean the John with this, Karen!”

“There’s some hope for your potty-mouth, then.”

“Sorry. It’s as if this other voice pops out of me sometimes…damn demon in me, making me cuss. Then Albert’s slamming the door and Laney’s crying…”

“Hun, you’re a foul-mouthed so-and-so and a drunk and a terrible mother, just like me. We should’ve been gaiety girls or fan-dancers but instead we’re stuck elbow-deep in dirty laundry.”

“I know! I’m there hanging Albert’s pants and socks on the line and I hear music coming from a few blocks away. Teenagers. I just want to drop the wet clothes on the grass and kick my shoes off...”

“But you’re not young any more, Ruth. You’re over the hill. Anyway, you have your fun. Out of school too. Except recently. You’ve been hiding out. It's what I'm seeking to rectify.”

She was referring to a man I’d been seeing for a while behind Albert’s back. It made me uncomfortable that she was so free with the information. I belted another shot.

“Yes, it’s been a while. Albert keeps me so busy, you know, doing the man’s jobs too. Fixing the sink. Pulling the dead leaves off the roof. He says he’s too tired from his busy life working at the magazine.”

“Ohhh....yes, Bobby gets just knocked out sitting in his office all day, with that twelve-year-old brunette waiting on him hand and foot. But if he doesn’t fix the guttering soon, I’ll strangle him and then he'll know what's what...”

“Snap! If Albert doesn’t put a fresh lick of paint in the parlor, I’ll shoot him through both temples...”

“...or I might poison Bobby’s steak. It would only be fitting since he picks his teeth at the table. If he says I'm off it, he knows who to blame.”

I laughed. But it made me sad, because it was true.

“Seriously, though,” I said, “sometimes I get so darn mad. I do just feel like smothering Albert in his sleep. It would mean we use our bed for something…”

Yes, I came out with it and I regret that every day. You see, Karen was one of the main character witnesses at my trial. The irony is - I didn’t even mean it at the time. It’s just that I could feel her wringing the misery out of me like blood from a towel and I had to spill. All that pain that had been bottled up inside me finally had a chance to be poured into her big, generous, brandy-glass of a soul.

I knew she would serve it with a smile to the next girl she took out to lunch. I didn’t care. It felt good.

Before I knew it, the flask was empty. The waitress stood over us with heaping plates of gravlax and pickled herring, potatoes, eels and hardboiled eggs, dill sauce, mustard and mayonnaise, two shots of steaming fake-soda-snaps to chase the aquavit. It was so good, so familiar. Though I couldn’t eat it without thinking of my poor Ma begging for köttbullar and prinskorv when she got sick, my Pa telling her Vi er i Amerika nå. For Kristi skyld, woman! Speak English!

When I left home at seventeen, I swore I would never have a marriage like my parents’. So traditional. So boring. The original immigrants - Ma crocheting shawls and crooning Arve Moen Bergset to herself. Pa, the melancholy Norwegian, ignoring her, whittling ships out of scrap alder and dreaming about his life as a sailor. Så skjønn, så ledig at sea, until she dry-docked him.

In one sense I honored my oath. My marriage was something else - for all their quiet unhappiness, my Pa never tortured my Ma to get his kicks and my Ma never wrung Pa's neck.

“You’ve got dill-sauce down your chin. You look like a pig,” said my companion.

“Well, you have pickle between your front teeth."

“That’s not the point. There’s someone coming over. Here, have my compact. And put some lipstick on, for God’s sake! I don't want you to show me up.”

Karen thrust her little gold clamshell into my hand. While I dabbed my greasy mouth with my napkin, she twisted a Chanel tube.

“The New York Times says it makes your mouth look like an engorged you know,” said Karen.

“How lovely,” I said.“Isn’t it rude to put your you know on in public?"

“No, Silly! It’s all the rage. Go on. I don't want him to think I keep plain company.”

I felt like the whole room was watching me as I slid the little red penis over my mouth, trying drunkenly to colour inside the lines. I squeezed my lips together and pouted into the mirror. A dark shape hovered behind my head, stealing my light. Someone bumped against my chair and jogged my hand. The lipstick hit my neck.

“Hey!” I said, spinning round, “I’m trying to freshen up here!”

A wiry man wearing a well-cut suit stood behind me. He pushed his specs up his snub-nose and smiled lopsidedly. This was who she was trying so hard to impress?

“You seem plenty fresh to me,” he said and looked me up and down like I was the new Packard in the dealership.

“Tommy –Judd. Judd – Tommy,” said Karen. She batted her eyelids. “Judd, be a champ and ask the waitress to fetch us another chair?”

“As long as I can sit between you two beauties,” said Judd, thumbing the groove in his angular jaw.

“Well now, it is a square table,” said Karen.

She had her head cocked to one side and was curling a damp strand of sandy-coloured hair around her finger. I thought she was about to start chewing it. As soon as Judd went to chat up the waitress, she grabbed my wrist.

“Gimme my lipstick back, you klutz!”

“Ow, you’re pinching me!”

“God, you’re blotto! Wipe your throat!”

“What's wrong with my throat?”

I stared into the mirror. It looked like someone had cut me with a straight razor, the way the lipstick was smeared across it.

“I’ll have that back before you smash it,” said Karen, snatching her compact and shutting it with a snap.

I hunched down and scrubbed my neck on my napkin. For a minute I thought I would puke, but I swallowed the bile back. When I looked up, Judd was sitting right next to me with his chin in his hands. I noticed the rectangle of pale skin on his ring finger.

“You’ve still got a bit of red stuff just under your chin,” he said.

“I can’t see because she’s taken her mirror back."

He smiled and nodded and took a folded handkerchief from his pocket that looked like it had been pressed by some good little homebody. It had initials embroidered on the corner in green thread. JG.

It will sound funny, but those simple letters stirred a wasps’ nest up in me, somewhere under my Butterick dress. Beneath the bandeau bra and the boobs and the ribcage, there was a mob of angry insects stinging each other without mercy.

See, my husband and I had a photo album on our shelf with the very same initials on the cover. And hanging from the wall of our family room was a large, misty-eyed portrait of their owner: the lovely Miss Jessie Guischard, who had been Albert’s fiancée until her untimely demise from pneumonia. Can you guess who held her hand when she finally slipped away?

Sometimes, when his colleagues used to come to dinner and he forgot I was there, he’d start harping on her name. How she understood art and books and yachts and could talk to him for hours. How she was the best woman he ever knew. The last time I waited until he was at work and snuck and unhooked that portrait, we didn’t speak for a month. I was so beat-down I went to stay with my folks. When I stepped back in the door all ready to forgive him, the first thing I clapped eyes on was JG.

I wasn’t getting muddled, though. Clearly this man had his own set of initials, JG. And I was guessing that his wife had sewn them on his handkerchief so that he didn't mix it up with his tennis partner's.

Like the meatloaf crumbs, the initials appeared to me to be an omen. When Judd moistened the handkerchief with his tongue and began dabbing at my neck, I didn’t smack his hand away.

“You have a beautiful throat,” he said.

“Really?”

“It’s like a cat’s. I can feel it purring under my hand.”

“Well, you sure know how to stroke a cat,” I said.

My eyes were half shut. Through my lashes, I saw a chair pushed back and a napkin hurled spitefully on the table. My last glimpse of Karen was her bony ass running away from the scene of defeat. Judd was still dabbing my throat, drawing the job out. Meanwhile, something had unwound in me - the rattler had been charmed. The wasps had been smoked to sleep by the caresses of a greenhorn. And I had the whole weekend to myself while Albert yachted and Laney played at Anne’s.

“Are you good for the cheque?" I drawled.

"Sure am, ma'am. I'm loaded at the minute. I just got paid."

"And what d’you do for a living, Judd, apart from freshening up ladies' necks?”

“I sell intimate garments,” he said, “intimate garments for ladies.”

To be continued…

TIGHTLACE: the Last Words of a Murderess

or The True Confessions of Ruth Snyder

PART 1: the fire

from the Diary of Ruth Snyder, Sing Sing prison January 10^th 1928

It begins with a tickle on the soles of your feet. Then that high-pitched whine you hear from broken telephone wires before the lineman comes. Notes that make the small hairs on your arms stand on end.

A jive beat thrumming through the door of a Honky Tonk, up through the street, up through the heel of your shoe. Making you tap your toes and dance despite yourself, feeling the heat of it. A lover leaving red hot smooches on your forehead. An August day when the fan’s not working and you melt together, your bodies on fire.

That’s how it feels in my dreams each night. I’m jitterbugging, my heart exploding in stardust that falls down onto my eyelids like the first tiny flakes of snow.

***

Something was dropping on my eyes. I forced them open.

“Time to wake up, pretty girl,” said a hoarse voice that could’ve been a man’s.

It was the prison guard, Maxine, come to blow my morning nicotine fix in my face.

“You unlocked my cell very quiet,” I said.

The words caught in my dry throat and I started to cough. Maxine pulled me up by the arm, thumping my back like she cared if I lived or died.

“You were shouting in your sleep again. I came to check on you,” she said and jingled her keys in front of my eyes.

My hacking cough died down to a faint splutter.

“I was having that dream…”

“Oh…the one where you’re melting and dancing and having hot sex all at the same time? That’ll be a good one for your memoir…show the punters your soft side and your hot side. Less of Ruthless Ruth, the Granite Woman, more of…”

I stopped listening to her pleasantries, my attention caught by the murmur of birds and bees outside my window. Unseasonal in January. Something was definitely buzzing. As I strained my ears, it took on a rhythmic quality, a single word, chanted over and over.

“Firefly,” I said, "listen. You can hear it coming through the bars."

Maxine tipped back her head. Her black, short-cropped hair was so heavily pomaded it was barely affected by gravity. I watched some silent emotion ripple through her flat chest and up the thick column of her neck until it tumbled out, a pure guffaw of joy. After a moment or two, she recovered herself.

“Honey, it’s your fanclub out there. They had to bus them in today. Thousands of them. We’re selling tickets. Listen closer.”

“I'm trying to.”

This time I heard it unmistakeably.

“Fry, Ruth, fry. Fry, Ruth, fry. Fry, Ruth, fry, Ruth, fry Ruth, fry Ruth FRY!”

***

The melting dream – all that jiving. That’s what that’s about. In two days’ time they’ll dip me like a donut. I may seem to you to be a dumb broad because I’m in here, but in actual fact I’ve got smarts. I know how it works and I've had plenty of time to think about it here in this worn, grey eight-by-ten with its smelly bunk and potty hole.

“It’s a sure-fire way to go,” Maxine had said to me one day when she was eating my leftovers, “the humane solution.”

“More humane than that cornbread,” I said, “you wouldn't find a rock like that at my house...”

“Save it, Sister. There’s no ‘my house’ now. It's the property of the state. You koshed your husband with a sash-weight and wrung his neck with picture wire, just to be sure. Oh and you chloroformed him too, remember? Then, like a genius, you hid your best jewels under the mattress, three feet from the corpse.”

“That’s not how it happened,” I said flatly. I was tired of saying it.

“You’ve sung that song a million times and you had your day in court. The jury didn't take to you.”

“Go to hell!” I shouted and figured it would bring the other wardens running.

But it didn’t, because they aren’t afraid of me. They all just think I’m a dope. Maxine sat brushing her stained teeth with her fingertip.

“Do they ever throw the switches wrong?” I asked.

“No. They’ve tested it out on cats and dogs. On Irish men, black man, Italian men. Worked on all of ‘em so far.”

“And women?”

“Well you’re special, ain’t you? Not all women love to cook and clean and raise their kids. A lot of chickens want to peck the rooster's head off. You’re just the first one for a while that was blonde enough to go through with it...and get caught.”

I felt myself go quiet inside, like I was sitting with some belching, thick-necked, muscled version of my Ma and she was telling me a crummy kind of bedtime story.

“How will it be?”

“Well…they’ll come for you in the evening, diaper you up like a baby and take you to the Death Room. There will be people there - reporters, the vic’s family cursing your name, and people who like watching other people die. The Executioner’ll strap ya in a chair and put the muzzle on you. And then he’ll dip the ol' battery wires in salt-water, stick the first one on your leg...”

“Stop it!”

“The second one…oh yes, and I forgot…we shave your hair…second one goes on the head like a top hat or a copper mixing bowl you might use for baking pound cake. Except it’s not cakes we bake...”

“Please stop.”

Maxine pressed her scabby knuckles up to her mouth like a child on Christmas morning. Her presents? My sense of dread. My fear.

“As for the rest,” she said, spit spraying through the gaps in her clenched fingers, “your guess is as good as mine. Number of people that have lived to tell the tale? Zero.”

I must've dozed off from her little tale and she must've got bored and left. Because I woke up alone in a hell-sweat, hot as a spit-roast pig, thinking they'd done the deed and I was already burning in everlasting damnation. I thought of my little girl, my Lorraine, and how I wasn’t nice enough to her. How we never seemed to have enough time together, even though we shared the same house every day.

The light was fading, but I had a firebug in me like you do sometimes right in the middle of the night. A need for something, be it dancing or drink or just to laugh until you get a gut-ache.

I’ve always been at the mercy of bugs such as those. This one demanded that I set the record straight, tell it all like it really happened. The truth about the tangle I got myself into. One day, an ordinary housewife. The next, deep in a world you can't possibly know about.

There are things I did there I was once too ashamed to tell a living soul. Worse than whatever's waiting for me down there in the Death Room.

I write them here, my memoir, my last confession.

***

It all began the day I met Judd. A warm June day when I didn’t have much except dress-shopping on my mind. I had a luncheon date with my neighbour Karen, a nosy so-and-so who always kept an eye on all the goings-on around us and consequently had the best gossip. She’d told me the ins and outs of the Robinson’s marriage as if she were living down the block in their bedroom bureau drawer. She practically notaried their decree nisi.

I knew she dined out just as often on the rows coming through the walls of my house. But fair is fair. If I was giggling at other people’s business, then I'm sure they deserved a hoot or two from mine.

I got up before everyone and went downstairs in my nightgown and slippers to make breakfast. Pancakes and syrup for Lorraine, bacon and eggs for Arnold. The sky was dark and vague, like Lorraine’s eyes when you’ve just woken her for school and she can’t quite seem to place you, as if you were a stranger perched on the end of her bed. It used to make me laugh to see her doze right off as soon as I’d woken her.

Standing at the kitchen sink, beating batter in the copper mixing bowl, I watched the moon fade and heard our resident blackbirds stirring. A pair of jays were nesting somewhere nearby. I’d seen one startle from under a rosebush when I was carrying washing to the line a few days before. The spread of its wings made my heart thrill. Later on, the same bird was hunched over the blackbirds’ nest with something pink and wriggling stuffed in its beak. It caught me looking and I realized what beady eyes it had. Then it flew off to its mate with the chick still struggling and squeaking, the wings spreading out, bright as lapis.

My father was a carpenter by trade. He carved and joined and stained our round kitchen table as a wedding present. That day there were crumbs of dried-out mince on it from last night’s meatloaf. An omen, maybe, of something mincing and crummy about to come into my life.

I scooped them into my palm and wiped the table clean, laid out the second-best placemats, napkins, cutlery. Meanwhile, bacon sizzled and popped under the broiler and the eggs shimmied in the pan. On the griddle, steam rose up from dirt I hadn't quite scrubbed off. I poured the batter on in four full moons, watching them bubble, flipping them with a flourish, singing under my breath they say that Spring means just one little thing to little lovebirds.

“For goodness sake Ruth, your voice is about as melodious as a rusty drain in a rainstorm,” said Albert.

Like a dose of Hill's Bromide, I swallowed down his big words along with the notes he hated so much. I could imagine his face, the nostrils curling in disgust, the thin-lipped scowl.

“I wanted to fix you your favourite.”

“Oh, there’s that little girl simper I so adore. Your favourite, Albert. It’s greasy eggs and blackened bacon. You know I have heard tell of blackened chicken when I’ve traveled South on business, but I have never heard...”

It was as much as I could stand. I spun around to face him, my hand still clenched around the frying pan handle, “Don’t start with that again, you bastard.”

Lorraine stood in the doorway, hugging her arms around her thin chest. It was too late. The eggs were over easy on the floor. The bad word was out of my mouth.

“It saddens me,” said Albert, “to hear you use that language.”

“I’m sorry. I…”

“Don’t waste your breath. I’m going out.”

I turned back to the stove. I didn’t want Lorraine to see me looking beat-down. The bacon was indeed black and the pancakes were getting there. I scraped them off the griddle and slid them onto a plate.

“Sit to the table, Laney,” I said.

“I already am.”

“Well, here.”

I set the plate in front of her and passed her the syrup. She hesitated.

“Eat up, kiddo. I'm not made of pancakes.”

She stared up at me, those wide eyes the colour of the jay’s wings. I expected her to sass me about the mess I’d just handed her. But she just picked up her fork and started eating the damn things.

The door slammed. Albert gone for the day. Normally I would’ve breathed a sigh. But something was coiled up inside me like a rattler and it wouldn't let me be easy. Lorraine nibbled at her pancakes, not fit for a dog to eat. A teardrop splashed onto her fork and rolled into a puddle of maple syrup.

“I’m sorry. I’m in a terrible state,” I said.

I knelt down on the floor beside her chair and laid my head in her lap. She patted my hair like I was one of her dolls. I breathed in her familiar smell and heard the tell-tale slurp of her wiping her snot on her sleeve.

“Anne’s got a new kitten. Can I sleep over there tonight?”

Just like me, shining up quick as a shoe.

"Of course you can," I mumbled, my voice muffled by her nightdress, “I hope I didn’t frighten you."

“No. I’m not scared of you,” she said.

to be continued...

A date with Black Venus

You want to touch it, hein? I've felt you staring this past hour, pretending to drink your tea, taking a big slurp now and then to let me know you're still there.

It’s hard to resist getting obsessed, the way she shimmers like silk. Go on cher, stroke that little black cat. Her ears are soft. She’ll lick the salt right off your palms.

She loves to curl up between my legs and just sun herself here by the window, hearing the hawkers’ banter in the street below, the slops thrown, the clatter of wheels. When you rang my bell and ran up those five flights of stairs and flung down breathless... Well, I knew you must have guessed my chatte’s the best in Paris. It’s no secret. I could make a mint just showing her to people, raising my skirt for a second. Then dropping it, letting them throw gold in my lap before I do anything more.

But for you? You seem so nice. Don’t even talk much. Just sit there breathing. And sometimes slurp your tea. For you, I won’t charge a single franc.

Baudelaire? You'd like to hear more about him? Ah. Sometimes people want that too.

You know he called me his Vénus Noire? And there are poems he wrote about me that some people still read. Maybe you do too...you're some sort of student...or worse, a critic. I never much cared for his work. He could take an easy thing like sex and tangle it up until it was hard to grasp as physics. Or he'd get hold of a tricky idea like love and made it simple and ugly as dirt. Just like all writers, hein? You know, I wasn't much more than a scent to him sometimes. Or a pair of tits. Or a head of hair. A metaphor.

And I’ll tell you something else about Charles Baudelaire...

Come over here. Feel those chancres on my upper thigh? Those weren’t there before him. One night with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury, they say. I know how it works. You think just because I’m blind that I can’t think straight?

I’ve got my wits about me! Like this old shawl gathered up around my hips. Pretty, isn’t it? So many patches of colour sewn up together. When the world began to fade, I couldn’t stand to look out at the sunshine. So I watched this shawl more every day. Starting with an hour or two figuring out how red bleeds into mauve. Then an afternoon skipping between green and blue and dusky plum coloured squares. A whole evening just looking at yellow shining. Put your hand on it, right there. Yes, because yellow has a nubbier feel, I can tell which one it is.

After it got dark, the only colours I had were in my head. Some days I sit here, smoking, remembering. I think about the time I met Charles in Port au Prince. I was only a child. And him the funny white man hopping between candy-striped awnings hung with shade, afraid of the liquid sky above him. Not wanting the sun to hit his pale face. I tell you, it made him look like a boiled crab when it caught him!

I was fifteen, I think. I coiffed the ladies on Sundays before church, smoothing their oiled curls into chignons, feeling the memories sleeping in those heads of hair. My fingers working fast, mouth full of pins, the sweat gathering in the seams of my cheap dress. He came in a fine white suit, sat and watched me sweep cuttings and stretch to pick up hairs between floorboards.

And the way he looked at me – like he saw flames coming up inside me. Like you’re doing now, eh? Well, I didn’t know anything. That’s how I ended up here.

My heart bursts when I think of being back there. Back on my lazy island where the mangoes twist cool and ripe into your hand and tamarinds scent the boatman’s song. In the evening. In the autumn. When the harbour opens like a lover’s arms and fills with sails. Then I could see. I could walk.

But that must be a dream. I smell only the mouse-traps of Appartement Six, Rue de la Femme-sans-tête.

You’re leaving so soon? You didn’t even finish your tea.

Ah well. Come visit any time.

Jeanne Duval was a Haitian-born actress and dancer of mixed French and black African ancestry. For 20 years, she was the muse of French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire. They met in 1842, when Duval left Haiti for France, and the two remained together, albeit stormily, for the next two decades. Duval is said to have been the woman whom Baudelaire loved most in his life, after his mother. Some sources say Duval died of syphilis in 1862, and Baudelaire died five years later, also of syphilis. Others claim that Duval survived Baudelaire, that she was seen last in 1870 — blind and on crutches, suffering heavily from syphilis.

from Wikipedia