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Toward DesireEffie Swears she could love you like a young girl, giddy and gawky, her smile as simple and guileless as a nun. She could show you adolescent adoration shot through with yearning so transparent you could see her heart as clearly as the yellow finch scuttling leaves in the sweet gum out back. She could peel desire from you as awkwardly as the first time stripping a peach of its fuzz. But she is forty full and well into fidelity that rides her shoulder like a pet monkey chained daintily to her wrist, so that when she shakes your hand or reaches for your undoing, her monkey coos into her ear, sweeps his tail across her spine provoking goosebumps as blind to age as she could make you. She could. Gustav’s Ammo Sit on my lap, here, he directed me and I would sit down up on his knees. He threw bread to the squirrels, nickels to the young Albanese boys who crowded around our porch like a pack of terriers starving for everything. He told us stories the war denied him about cousins, brothers, of their wives, children, successes, all fictional, all lies, all of them dead as charity by the end of the war, the one from which he escaped to grow fat in America. He shingled and tarred roofs, tin flashing neatly pinned to eaves and overhangs bright as medals on the breasts of houses, as nickels tossed to the boys, as bullets Gustav carried in his pocket like change. |
