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by
Mary Parker Winning story of the 2004 Nick Adams Short Story Contest |
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Return to: ... Nick Adams Contest ... Winning stories and authors ... ACM home page Note: This story is reprinted with permission. Copying this story without the express, written permission of the author is prohibited. |
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You roll over to find her up already, doing her yoga as usual. The curtains are flung open, and the jaundiced light from the large window that's the apartment's best feature gilds her. At moments like this you understand why her parents named her after a mythological princess. She's naked and unashamed as if she's never heard of Eden. It's not an uncommon state for her morning practice. She's gained a neighborhood-wide reputation; you'd protest if you didn't like watching her so much yourself. She arches her back and reaches behind her, and you watch the livid stripes of stretch marks score the sides of her breasts as the skin tightens. When you told her you loved the pearly puckers, she laughed at you and hid her face in the pillow. Now she stands and stretches and you see a swelling you don't recognize from your repeated inventory of her body, just a little bump to disturb the line of her breast. You frown and let your head drop back to the pillow. It doesn't fade into her body as the angle changes. Parallax -- the distortion caused by the discrepancy in light as the angle of viewing changes. It doesn't vanish when you blink either. Your fingers on the covers tremble. Since your aunt died of cancer you're paranoid, but it can't be anything or she would have told you. Truth and beauty are what she lives by, as you survive on Einstein's special theory of relativity. You reassure yourself you must have imagined it and dress for your run. "Are you going out? Sure you don't want to try this?" she asks, contorting her body into something that looks not only unnatural, but incredibly painful. Still she smiles up from the floor. "That's all right. I could never learn the names of the whatevers." "Asanas." "I think you're enough of a spectacle. I'll be back in a little while." You touch her hair and leave. She tries incessantly to convert you to yoga, but it seems so pointless and low impact next to the knee jarring reality of running. You like breathing hard, picturing the metabolic changes as you pant, doubled over. There are no mantras for running. You like to sweat. Catcalls you can deal with, but not New Agers. Yoga has been cheapened in your eyes, robbed of any spiritual value it might have had by the over-eager public. Asanas have gone the way of tarot cards and Buddha statues. You're sure you'll see a Dummies book any day. Running is an industry, but you haven't bought into the merchandise, just the culture. It's a hard sport, like your hard sciences. Ariadne - Ari, you call her sometimes instead of Ria, or on occasion Fairy - seems all softness and it frightens you even as you find yourself sinking into her life. Even her name is tender and romantic, the confined princess with her magic string. So you run every morning, keeping your tryst with the pavement as faithfully as a postal worker. But you stay with her too. Today you push yourself harder than normal, trying to convince yourself you imagined the flaw in the curve of her. Your mind begins to wander over the subject of her, wondering why she's even with you, different as you are. Chemistry and physics: that's mostly what you bring to this relationship. Hard science for you, and hers the study of soft things. She's the charmed quark to your strange quark, with a dizzy spin that would drive a quantum physicist mad. The first time you saw her, you didn't think that she was beautiful; you longed for a photometer to measure her output of candela. From your little table in the corner, you studied her. Never imagining yourself poetic, you saw her as a photon instead of a butterfly. Ariadne, they called her, and you listened too. Not until you found out that her father taught mythology and her mother was a minor starlet did you understand. She was raised on yoga and golden apples, and wore rhinestone sunglasses with her wax wings. But she's in no danger of falling from the sky, and it's your own pinions dripping into puddles on the floor around your feet. It's her proximity that liberates you, and the exuberance that could be quantified in calories. You've studied quantum physics and know you don't need wings to fly anyway. Once you shared this thought with her and came home to find her curled up with A Brief History of Time, scribbling new annotations next to yours with a red ballpoint. Always she writes in red, preferring paint pens with thick ink the colour of a strontium flare that never quite coagulates properly on the paper. Your hands are forever printed with ghosts of her words. She writes notes and leaves them everywhere for you to find. Mostly they're not romantic; quite a few have quotes from books she's borrowed from your special shelf. Beckett. Hawking. Eiseley. On her shelf are Ensler, Winterson, Tolkein, things you've read, but only at her request. There isn't much in them for you, but it's easier to understand her mythology with a few fables filed away in your mind. You miss your books while she takes her time poring over them, but you can hardly begrudge her the days it takes her to read each one through. Going back to the prodigal volumes, you find new phrases starred and underlined, and an excess of question marks and exclamation points. Once she stuck together all the pages of her copy of The Hobbit. After that you bought the ballpoints and hid her pens, at least while she was around the bookshelf. Somehow lately the shelves have been getting disorganized. You plan to put them back in order, but your days are filled with studying, and your evenings with her. And now this new thing to occupy your mind, this lump. You don't forget about it, but you don't ask her either. This time you want what you see to be an illusion -- if it hasn't been proven to be there, it isn''t there -- but you can't let it go. She tries telling you her breasts are sore, but you knew she's in the middle of her cycle. You promise to be gentle, and she relents. And there, as you run your fingers over her skin, there -- a nodule of tissue firmer than the rest. You close your eyes and kiss her, pretending not to notice, and phone the doctor as soon as you leave the house, borrowing her cell phone. The receptionist hangs up on you when you try to inquire if Ariadne Phillips has been in lately. The orderly orbitals of your mind have switched theories from physics to biology. At the library, you have to inquire for books, and the librarian casts sideways eyes at you; you've never asked before for help navigating the long bays. When you get home you open your mouth to confront her and close it again. She looks at you curiously. "Anything wrong?" "Just a long day. I missed you." She needs to tell you if something's wrong without your having to ask, your pride asserts. So you go to kiss her and circumvent the subject, approaching it tangentially. You find one of those self-exam reminder tags and hang it in the shower. You even start flossing in the bathroom just in case she says anything. She teases you that she feels like one of your projects, but nothing more. Your fear for her and anger at her collide and amplify. You run longer routes now and tuck her notes in the pockets. All your clothes take on a pinkish tinges from the ink stains going through the wash. Sometimes you take her shirts from the laundry to wear, putting your nose to your shoulder to smell her. Watching her, you attend her funeral, deliver a lengthy eulogy, and visit her grave once a week carrying all the dandelions you can find. She always liked them, saying they were neglected. She notices your distance and carries a crease between her eyebrows like a graph of absolute value: pointed. You tell her you have a lot on your mind and she crosses her arms and purses her lips. You wonder what her headstone will say and decide she's the type of person to choose cremation. And so it goes for two weeks or so, until her mother calls you from the hospital. In chemistry, Hund's Rule states that electrons will fill all available suborbitals, always wanting to remain single in their orbit. You used to live by that until she appeared, a model of wave-particle duality and sinusoidal curves. Hydrogen, light and unpredictable with you her single circling electron. You still wonder quite how she came into your life, a whole new uncertainty principle. You'd seen her around at the few parties you'd been coerced into attending. Maybe she knew a few of your friends. At any rate, you watched her circulate, colliding with people and rebounding with no momentum lost. You wondered how she managed to make such perfectly elastic collisions when you always lost energy having to deal with people. It never seemed important enough to talk to her about, just something to ponder for the requisite time you had to stay before it was polite to leave. Then you passed her one night, saw her dancing in a small group. She was radiant with noise and energy, but when you touched her shoulder, she turned to face you and stilled. For lack of anything else to say, you asked her to go to the bookshop. After two hours of browsing the science journals while she flipped through entertainment magazines and read bits from a collection of Aristophenes, you walked back with her to get her things and gave her a ride home. She wrote her number on the inside of your forearm with her red paint pen and vanished. You sped off, but even with all the windows rolled down, you could still smell the honeysuckle of her shampoo. The digits stayed on your arm for a week. After five days you capitulated and called. She told you to come over for dinner and you spent the evening eating pasta and grapes and watching reruns of The X-Files while you pointed out the scientific inaccuracies. She laughed and said it was only television. You went home feeling effervescent. Something was bubbling out of you and dissipating into the night haze. Now you feel fear seeping in. |
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Note: This story is reprinted with permission. Copying this story without the express, written permission of the author is prohibited. |
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