In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 0 8 Y C I G A R E T T E S G E O R G E D A V I D C L A R K It’s August, hot, and the newly-married dental student and his wife have left the window partly open to the night and road noise while they make love on a futon in the dark. After, while he breathes heavy on the pillow beside her and a thin clear cord of semen still almost seems to quiver on the white guitar that is her belly, she sighs and says, Oh, now I wish I had a cigarette. He’s been thinking he should pull the sheets from where they’ve bunched along the floor and it takes him a moment to understand that cigarettes – which both of them detest and she has never tried – are not her point. She phrases it that way because pleasure is complicated, more so perhaps than su√ering. It will augment and diminish, both: how ancient priests removed the organs of dead pharaohs to clean the bodies’ cavities with myrrh and frankincense and palm wine. Freights of fragrance in the hollows after. She means that monuments to rapture should be light to carry and combustible, toxic in small quantities even secondhand, and with an odor that darkens one’s clothes. Somehow he comprehends this vaguely. It reminds him of a concert he attended in high school, the massive outdoor stage 1 0 9 R where the band played one encore, a second, then mangled their guitars across the amps and footlights: sparks, debris, electric howling. Stoned and riding home with his ears fuzzing in the back of a friend’s Topaz, he felt invincible and fantasized about a car crash. He’d passed out then, and later, coming to sore-throated and coughing on his parent’s porch where the guys had left him, it was as though some fire-scorched song – all glass and metal in his mind – had wrecked around him. He rose there slowly and limped out of it the way a man emerges from a shattered windshield, the live adrenaline already funneling o√, but with a few stray echoes still looping through his chest like feedback. Tonight on the far side of the room the infinite lungs of the wall clock exhale long gray minutes. Eyes shut, motionless, his wife leans into sleep. Her teeth are tingling faintly, very white but crooked on the bottom row. She has clenched and ground them during sex again and now she estimates the possibility of braces in her future. Her habit is to run the backside of her tongue across the misalignments where the frets of wire might someday run, and for a moment her mouth becomes the smoky back room in a downtown bar where a struggling band from out of state is just about to plug in their Les Pauls. Nascent music crackles in the outlets, jittering, almost perceptibly, the ashtrays. A breeze sleepwalks the curtains back into the room and out again. Back and out. Her husband slides his heel along her calf and starts to tell her they should set his legs on fire (she could inhale while they kiss), 1 1 0 Y but no, she has already gone unconscious. Instead, he pulls a sheet up to their shoulders, thinking, as he dissolves beside her, how from a distance they would look like two thin cylinders wrapped in white. Their minds, these grainy filters in their heads. Asleep before he gets to what might smoke them and why, his breathing slows and deepens. The room cools slightly. The road noise lulls outside and the sex aroma dissipates until it’s only their viscera sonorous and redolent. ...

pdf

Share