Manger sur le pouce

Margot dreams of the sea.

It’s a warm sea, the south of France or Spain, framed by dark cliffs and set shining by mid-morning sun. The day is perfect. She wears a white linen sun dress and a round straw hat, and when a breeze comes up to lazily push around the salt smell of the water it ruffles her, flapping the white skirt and trailing dark curls. The sun on her skin feels right. As a child she feared a tan and becoming darker than she already was. But how good sunlight feels on her! How complimentary to the warm brown of her skin.

There is an orange in her hand. With neatly trimmed nails she begins to peel it. She starts from the center and makes an unbroken coil of the peel, a spiral, and smiles to see it like she did when she first learned how as a girl of seven.

“Woman!” Felix yells from the bluffs.

She starts walking. Her pace is unhurried. Her feet are bare and the sand sinks and slides under her, but it’s fine. He’s not close yet. She pulls free a section of orange and puts it in her mouth. The flavor explodes on her tongue as she bites down. The tang of the acid, the sweetness of the natural sugars, the quality she can’t name of the fruit that makes it feel fuller in her mouth, like a wine with good body.

She savors it because the sun doesn’t feel as warm as she walks. The wind comes up and takes her hat.

Felix hisses at her from only a meter behind now. “Margot!”

Margot begins to run. Sand flies up under her heels. Her bare feet find broken shells and come away bloody. The sand and the salt the sea left behind on the shore burn. She loses hold of the spiraling orange peel. She risks a glance back over her shoulder. Felix bends to pick it up and wastes precious seconds to destroy her frivolity. The peel breaks into ragged pieces between fingers shaking with rage. She expands her lead.

The sun sinks. The beach grows colder. Felix is gone but the cliffs are closer now. Years of waves have beat them into strange shapes, hanging outcroppings and secretive folds descending into black caves. Margot eats another segment of orange. It is sour now, as if ripening in reverse.

A high-pitched wail splits the air. She stops, sinking a little in the sand, and turns to the cliffs. The yawning mouth of a cave opens before her. It is perfectly dark. A breeze comes from within, like living breath, but it is colder than the air on the beach and it smells of trees. She walks towards the cave. One step. Two. She knows she should go in. There is a quality to screams that communicate degrees of suffering. The wail is the final call. It is pitched with the imminence of death.

She sets the remaining segments of orange where the sand has blown away to reveal a flat rock at the cave’s entrance, and walks away

Margot looks further down the beach. In the distance she can see the blonde figure of Felix waiting for her. She cannot hear him, but she knows he is bellowing. He is furious. He is always so furious. And past him again is an outcropping of cliffs like the one she stands in shadow of now. The cave will be there, too. Beyond that, she knows, will be another Felix. And so on, forever.

She turns left and walks towards the sea.

The sun flees her, dashing down behind the horizon so the only trace of it is a seam of red, dividing the sky from the water. The rest is velvet shades of darkness, navy blue and indigo and charcoal gray. She winces as she steps from dry sand to wet. It’s cold at first, but her body adjusts. The first lapping of waves at her toes is the same. By the time the water hits her hips she can’t conceive of it as cold. It is just the same temperature as her body. Logically, she knows it’s not that the water is getting warmer. She doesn’t stop.

The red in the sky is gone by the time the water is over her breasts. So too the different hues of night. It is all black now, punctuated only by the light of stars without a moon. Pieces of light trail like tinsel on the glassy surface of the waves.

“Woman!” Felix yells from somewhere far away. Another wail comes from the cave.

Margot ducks her head under the water. All sound stops. Her toes can barely find the sand and her body is weightless. This is a sandbar. One more step forward, she knows, and it will drop away. She will have to swim. Eventually, she will not be able to continue. Then she will drown.

Long fingers wind around her waist. She kicks off from the sandbar into their grasp, and sinks.

The bed is empty when she wakes, but the window is open to admit a warm, salty San Francisco breeze. Perhaps what seeded the nightmare. Outside the city is already moving. She can hear yelling, and tires on asphalt, and the tread of countless hard-soled shoes. She rolls over into the cool impression in the sheets next to the warm one her body made. She inhales. Castille soap, Wildroot hair cream, masculine sweat, blood, damp earth.

She gets up to see about breakfast.

When “Felix” comes back she’s at the stove pouring a cup of coffee, hair still bound up in her silk kerchief, dressing gown hanging open over her teddy. Bread is in the oven to warm and she’s set the table with butter and the last of their strawberry preserves. The day’s meat and cheese rations are in the icebox with others from earlier in the week, in anticipation of a big breakfast on Saturday morning. She gestures to “Felix” with the pot and it nods, so she pours two cups. One black, one with cream. She hands the latter to the doppelganger, who has red hair this morning.

“Danny Byrne?” she asks with vague interest.

It nods. In its scratchy French, it says, “He was… prepared.”

Its word choice is amusing. It settled on préparé, but she heard it start with an “tr” sound before changing course mid-word. Tremper might be more accurate. She covers a yawn with a hand and checks on the bread. She let it go a little too long mulling over her dream, but it’s not burnt. She slices it and brings it to the table. As she sets down the cutting board, “Felix” lifts a paper bag onto the chair next to it. It reaches in and hands her an orange.

“These weren’t in our ration book this month,” she notes, turning it over in her hand. “Felix” stares at her until she understands and then she laughs. “You’re still hungry? Even after Byrne?”

“I do not deny you dessert,” it says.

Margot smiles. “No, you don’t.”

She drops her dressing gown and moves to sit in its lap, lower back against the edge of the table. She peels the orange from the center in one continuous, spiraling piece. She tells it about the nightmare. She doesn’t spare detail or try to impose logic. The emotions resurface. Her skin crawls. She eats a segment of orange. The images come back to her more vividly. “Felix” knows their meanings. Knowing it knows makes her throat tight. Horrible. It’s all horrible. Her life is so—

Its fingers extend to monstrous length and trace up her spine. “Felix” takes her right arm, turns it until the underside of the upper arm is exposed. It bites down next to the other bruised, angry red bite marks.

Emotion drains from her. She feels nothing but the sting in her arm. She eats another segment of orange and the flavor bursts over her waking tongue—acidic, sweet, full. “Felix” sits back to entertain a kiss. They share the taste of the orange and her blood. Then she eats the rest while it laps at her arm until the bleeding stops. A whole orange for breakfast, while the other wives of the neighborhood stretch cakes with sawdust.

“La vie est trop courte pour boire du mauvais vin,” she observes.

“Life is too short to drink bad wine,” “Felix” repeats, committing the idiom to memory.

A scream carries from down the street.

“Oh,” Margot says, pausing as she rummages in the bag for another orange. “Mrs. Byrne is awake.”

“Felix” takes the fruit from her. “She will be prepared next week.”

“And the week after we will go hunting in Dogpatch,” she decides. “Can’t have so many so close, mon ange.”

“Show me how to make the spiral?” it asks, taking her hand and angling her thumb so the nail just bites into the orange peel.

“So you can make a spiral out of Mrs. Byrne?” Margot jokes. “Felix” looks at her with Danny Byrne’s red eyebrows raised. She laughs. “Just don’t make me burn another shirt. They’re expensive. Here. Begin at the crown of the head…”

It kisses her again. She digs her thumbnail in until the juice of the orange beads along it. She peels the fruit for it, and it watches, and it takes another orange and mimics her perfectly. They feed each other the segments with sticky fingers. She unbuckles its belt. “Felix” catches one of her fingers with its sharp teeth and pretends it was an accident.

The bread is cold by the time they get to it.

In the evening “Felix” walks her to work and she types up handwritten manufacturing reports mostly with her left hand. She wears three-quarter sleeves and hums to herself, a song she learned when she was young. It’s a Spanish folk song. The beach she remembers must have been in Spain after all.

The nightmare returns to her, but “Felix” has digested the terror alongside her blood. She just remembers the warmth of the sun and the smell of the sea.

“Esta es la calle del aire… La calle del remolino… Donde se remolinea tu cariño con el mio…” she sings.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 9/11/2020 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024