Claudia, cheeks dusty rose, picked her way (in her own adverbation, in her own mode de maneuver) across a landscape of religio-historical instruction, stung here, struck there.
“Oooof!” she cried. “These fucking ferns!”
On the floor of what was now and again a forest, Claudia stepped gently, on point, among the wildlife: among the dovetails and quicklace, the fundibula and carroway, carbon and the pearls. And singing, the only one who sang. But can this be it, she wondered, and stops, sits (flies come), swats, waits, naps, hums…sitting on a cloud ruminating on a cloud you are floating on a cloud you are becoming a cloud…she resists the pull and, rising, walks on.
She picked her way gingerly then, across fallen columns in the sand but despite her caution, tripped, fell, hit her head smartly and bled. Omigod, she thought, now they’ll see me bleeding. They’ll know right away. It’s a dead giveaway. They’ll cream me! They’ll know where I’ve been. They’ll know who I am. He’ll tell them, that’s for sure. Once he sees the blood he’ll forget himself and traitorize me. He’ll involve me in a duplicity!
Then why am I smiling? She wondered. What has possessed me in this age of soliloquy? And she rose and walked until she came to a fork in the road necessitating that she choose one way or the other way.
The roads being rose beige and bing rose, Claudia saw herself doing back-up vocals in ice-green with The Last of the Dynamite Seizures: that is, doing their bit for the boys, chomping on a bit for the boys, licking just a bit of the boys.
(Portent of Things to Come: The Last of the Dynamite Seizures being investigated by the foundation, being a carpenter’s trick, looking up through the jaws of Marcuse. The senator smiles, releases his toga, falls to the ground and giggles/sizzles.)
“You’re bleeding.”
She touched her temple lightly, probing for several seconds until she found the hole. The clotting factor had been at work (fibrinogen, vitamin K etc…) and the worst might be said to be over.
“I was sleeping,” she said sheepishly, unused to the facial niceties of deception, especially when accused of something that could prove fatal if proven.
Oh what do men want?
Thinking quickly, she thought that one way to stay alive was to say this to him: “Look: are you wafting my way with intentions sweet and mellow? I’d love to see you soaped up and eye dry. I’d love to use your neck as a hitching post. I’d love to distort your features, that is, go blind for you. I’d love to count your toes, just to be sure you understand. I’d love to have lunch on the backs of your knees, or is there a particular name for them? What exactly precisely my darling did you have in mind? Oh and pardon me while I do the bop.”
Another way to live would be simply to pretend to find him swell but Government Defense Plans being such that she can Safely Discredit him. But now she not only has two roads to choose from but two reasons for the blood. Before she can decide on which two of the two is most equable, his voice suggests yet another set.
“Such a pretty face for such an old lady.”
Claudia started, surprised. She had not thought of herself as an old lady. Back there, picking her way among the columns, humming songs of spring and thinking of tulips, she believed herself to be quite a young woman. But she had no mirror, no way to look at herself and see if she was as he said she was, an old lady. Of course, she thought sadly, I’m not absolutely sure of the difference. And old lady was definitely smaller, she knew, easier to hide, for example, in a closet. Young woman was too large, too big to hide, too slow to run, too big to slip between the pages of a bible the way an old lady could, soft and dry and thin, just whispering and hardly bleeding at all when struck. An old lady was more consistent too, an identity easier to bear, easier to live with than young woman which brought to mind an Amazonian heath filled with poisonous nectarines and the faint urinary tinge of prussic acid.
“How do you call me old lady then?” Claudia asked but she was alone. Men.
Left thus to think, although she was not sure such behavior would be approved of, she chose to examine the hole in her temple, compare it to the holes in the columns and try to figure out if some sort of analogy might guide her choice by adding still another fact to the bare solids of her diet life.
She knows that a point to consider is that to choose one way she could be somehow killed, could sort of die and to choose the other way might only have internal effects because no one on the outside would know.
But back on the road, so fine looking U.S. blue-on-white, Claudia was radiant in wraps of rose and gold, a nostalgic evocation of The Last of the Dynamite Seizures and picking her way through more things she came to the Realization Point, which is that while death just another way of dying, one way of dying is another way, and so the only purpose of living was to live. And in order to be permitted actually to die, ever, to include, that is, death in her game plan, she had to prove conclusively that she had once been alive.
She ran back to the fallen column, sensing that here was significant artifact. The column holes were crusty and dry, much like the scab on her head. Ah, Claudia thought, there is no significant difference between us. I am neither an old lady or a young woman. I am a fallen column, a useless inanimate gewgaw of a defunct civilization. I am as pointless as an overbred pup. She chanced then upon a skeleton head, all that remained of a milk cow, and chance brought another thought. And at this Claudia laughed, finding at last that property which gave her a uniqueness, a singleness, a direct and indisputable difference that proved once and for all that she was alive and dying.
Yes, yes and yes, she thought gleefully, gingerly making tiny slashes all over herself, choosing finally to be totally alive. They can’t touch me now. I bleed! I bleed!
Bio: Barry Jay Kaplan’s stories have appeared in Descant, Bryant Literary Review, Storyglossia, Brink, Perigee, Amarillo Bay, Eclectica, Journal of Truth & Consequences, Nth Position, LitnImage, tobybashi, Prick of the Spindle, Twist of Noir, 971 Menu, Oxford Magazine, Apple Valley Review (Pushcart Prize nominee). "His Wife" is part of Best of the Net Anthology 2008.