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  • Bad Aim
  • Katie Wudel (bio)

After Harry's neighbor, Roger, that old son of a bitch in 6B, died of something completely anachronistic like the fucking grippe, a couple moved in. Married. Skinny. Bohemians. Real ones, grunting to each other in a phlegmy-sounding language as they stomped around in steel-toed boots. They brought with them a half-starved cat that always got out and always scratched at Harry's door. (6C.)

Roger would be pissed. The way these two let their lives spill out into the hall: arguments about Christ-knows-what that sent the wife screaming to the street; the foreign newspapers they subscribed to but never bothered to take inside. When the bugs got into them, Harry scooped the papers up himself, photographs of rubble crumbling in his hands. The papers smelled of mold, gunpowder, the homeland they must have fled. Roger may have had his flaws—the cigars just the half of it—but at least he kept the door closed on his shit.

Of course the husband saw another woman, the wife out for hours in a starched orange shirt and a nametag that said Donald. Sometimes the woman waited for him against the couple's door, drenched in a melon-sweet perfume that sent Harry scrambling to adjust his trousers. The other woman wasn't angry like the wife. Through the walls, Harry compared and contrasted their bedroom dispositions, the mistress soft as her own skin, the wife prickly. Hard to crack.

Inevitable: the woman left behind her panties, maybe lipstick on an ear. Things like this always end like this. Harry rolled his eyes at the shattering china, the howling cat, the crush of drywall against the husband's fist. He understood then that the wife had not been angry until now. Her actual fury? Silent. Did she come to this godforsaken country just for him? Did she have anyone else to run to? Harry put a juice glass to the wall and listened to words he didn't know; heard three metallic clanks. [End Page 148]

Boots. On the fire escape.

Harry knew what must be coming and thought it wise to stretch first—he made it an admirable distance toward his toes—then climbed out his window to keep her from jumping. She had a hard face, true, but lovely like this, flushed and glittering with tears. She didn't jump. She pulled a cigar from her jacket. Lit up. Tossed Harry another, plus the lighter, and Harry actually even caught them. Stared six flights down in disbelief. The cigars—Roger's, of course. (Stale, rank-ass shit.) They sucked them to the nubs and listened to the city, her husband's wails lost to sirens and other couples fighting on the street.

Dizzy with nicotine, Harry felt he could tell her anything, how his wife had cheated with many other men before she died—of heart failure, ha ha. Roger. Harry caught him once, embracing her, on this very balcony, and shot six bullets out the window, straight at their goddamn sorry skulls. How to explain? What Harry wouldn't give to see those assholes just once more? Harry turned to tell her but the wife had already swung down the ladder, took it two steps at a time. That bastard of a cat leapt after her, twisting till he landed, as cats tend to, on his feet. [End Page 149]

Katie Wudel

Katie Wudel's short fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Rumpus, Monkeybicycle, and other publications. Her story "Tongueless" was listed among Wigleaf Magazine's Top [Very] Short Fictions of 2011.

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