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Animalia
- The University of Alabama Press
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Animalia She’s young, he’s younger. Outside, it is night and spring is deeper and colder than it was yesterday. But the girl wears her tight white tee-shirt, for the sex of it, for bringing on the season, an invocation of magic. Her breasts are so full of rain, and so ready. Boys always look younger. But on the back bench of the Horse’s Tavern in the 6th arrondissement, the boy is the teacher. He is teaching her spiked tongue. 80 berdeshevsky These two don’t want a bed; they would have to go outside now, and it is dank and raining. They want this long slick bench, this heat, this kissing, this giggled pecking that has a language. Their benchleather slides against them like melting silver. The waiter walks past, shoes turned sharply out like platypus fins. He will bring their vin ordinaire, in just a little minute, and he toddles away. This splits their childish ribs, and each holds the other ’s cage, to keep it from breaking. They hook their sneakers around their table-post, to anchor and slither. And they giggle. For the moment, they are making the older American lady in the far corner laugh out loud. But her laughter is a mime, an exaggerated and densely silent cartoon that she cannot seem to stop. She is remembering the stranger whom she straddled on a dark Air France red-eye, seasons ago. —Didn’t you even know him? Her daughter would have asked her. Layla was never a good mother. —No, Polly, she would have said, seriously. No. If I did, I probably wouldn’t have done it. Her breasts are very tender tonight. Too much coffee. Her breasts are descending, aging toward her hands with their perfect red coral manicure. So the girl is young and the boy is younger. So what? Their sterling tongue-spikes hook and can’t be separated for a long minute, they are crying into each other’s mouths, metallic, in a silent French. And then they laugh louder, at the lonely wild brunette. —That table , over there, see? A hyena! She’s a crazy bitch, like your mother. Layla is worried, she hopes they don’t think she’s scorning them, it’s so lovely to tempt the small and the irrational, just from her corner . And to laugh. To be so young, so young, so—hurtable. It hurts her, hints at something uncomfortable as springtime’s awful April surges. She stands up on her chair. She hears a melody that snaps her fingers, involuntarily, that jerks her waist, her thin shoulders, her arms lift like gull wings, to find the legato of it, then her smooth tailored hips join in. She is slow dancing, now, for the laughter. [3.90.33.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:37 GMT) animalia 81 The waiter doesn’t like it. He appears below her elbow, a firm grasp, and he escorts her out, to the rain. Which has angry wet feet. • In the rain, beyond Layla, there is another woman for whom it is so cold tonight. The gargoyles are breathing ice, she sees. The possible dragons of the river and their shape-shifted forms that can deceive children, don’t deceive an exhausted rat. Riverine. Clocharde. Not this old one. She knows a shape when she meets it, animal, or fish. Well, she knows these shapes—and she lifts her chilled pinky finger at them and she wiggles it. A beau geste. The rest of her hand is busy holding her black clothing together against a quick dusk. The pinky. Its single long fingernail. The other nails are broken as she is. But the one nail, pointed, honed, speaks all she can bear to mutter to shapes. It’s too cold. She’s too tired, she’s too angry with the cold. She piles herself up to a standing pose. She rearranges the several shawls to cover her numbed head and her bulk. She is moving her lips without making any words. She cannot be bothered to bend again, and tie her shoes, so she shuffles. Clears her lungs with a dull wet coughing. —You’re polluting me, she bellows. This is one of her terrors. Another one is babies, she still remembers their shape, bloated and near, in ugly dreams. And she makes a tangled black path up the Boulevard Saint Michel. Tonight, the university. Inside the Sorbonne, it is as it has been...