Victor Lodato - Mathilda Savitch

Anyway, Anna was in the pool. She had on a yellow bathing suit. She was treading water and talking to another girl. I think it was Cheryl List but the other girl isn’t important. The two of them are whispering and laughing. Their hair is perfectly dry.

Standing at the side of the pool there’s a group of boys, also whispering. There’s a lot of intrigue at the pool club if you’re into that sort of thing.

This was the first time I noticed Anna’s eyes. They were like something you wanted to steal.

Suddenly one of the boys, Michael “Bigtooth” Flatmore, jumps in the water. His jump splashes Anna and so she splashes him back. Then Michael moves toward Anna and he dunks her. He lets her up for air and then he dunks her again. He has complete control over her, it’s disgusting. For sure, Michael is in love with Anna but all he can think to do is push her underwater. That’s how boys are. Probably he’s sexually frustrated.

Anna is gulping for air. Cheryl List doesn’t even help. When I jump in the water, Michael Flatmore turns and I pull him away from Anna. I call him a fucking idiot, even though that’s not an expression in my vocabulary. It just comes out of me. By accident I scratch his face. Anna is coughing and I lead her over to the edge. I was suddenly madder than I’d ever been in my whole life.

“Fucking idiot,” I scream back to Michael. The fat lifeguard finally wakes up and blows his silver whistle. “Keep it down,” he says.

I help Anna out of the pool. I ask if she’s okay, and she nods. But I can tell she’s suspicious of me. Why am I helping her? She can’t figure it out.

Michael Flatmore is out of the pool now. He walks past us. He’s completely humiliated. There’s even a little bit of blood on his face.

Anna and I stand there dripping for a long time.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” she finally says. “At the snack bar?”

In The Straw Hotel , Beatrice, the woman with amnesia, will only eat fruit.

“Let’s have smoothies,” I say.

“I’ll be right back,” Anna says. She goes into the bathroom and I wonder if she’s really going to come back out again. I can see Cheryl List on the other side of the pool talking to Michael Flatmore. Unbelievable. I’m still dripping and it almost looks like I’m peeing. Suddenly I think maybe someone is playing a trick on me. I start to feel sick. This still wasn’t the best time for me, as you can imagine.

But Anna did come out of the bathroom. Her wet hair was parted and combed. She even smiled at me. When I think of that day it was like Anna just appeared. Someone had to, and it was her.

When I sleep at Anna’s I always sleep in her bed. It’s huge. The sheets smell like milk. Hours after the bumblebee that’s where we were again, talking with the lights out. I noticed there was a lot of moonlight coming in the window, there was a nice patch of it on the carpet. We were talking about fall projects at school but neither of us were coming up with any brilliant ideas. I suggested we take off our clothes and lie in the moonlight.

“For fall projects?” Anna said. She gets confused if you change the subject too quickly.

“No,” I said, “just for tonight.”

“Why?” she said.

But I didn’t really have a reason.

“I’m not stripping,” she said. But she laughed.

“Nymphs do it,” I said.

“Do what?” she said.

“Bathe in the moonlight,” I said.

Anna’s eyes were glowing in the dark. “I don’t even know what nymphs are,” she said.

I told her that nymphs were beautiful young girls that live in the woods. “Spirits,” I said.

She said she didn’t want to be a ghost and I told her they weren’t ghosts exactly. I mentioned how they were related to the Greek gods.

“Are they immortal?” she said. Boy, did she know how to irritate me.

“Sometimes,” I said, “not always.”

“Most of them live for a long time,” I explained, “unless they have an argument with one of the gods. And they never lose their beauty or grow old,” I told her.

I also said that a woman’s breasts were born to live in the moonlight. I was really hamming it up until I had Anna blushing and laughing. I knew she wanted to do it.

“Just for a minute,” she said.

So we did it. We took off our tops and settled down on the floor, on our backs. We made ourselves cozy in the little box of moonlight.

“I don’t think the door’s locked,” Anna said. She started to get up but I grabbed her hand.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “no one can get in. And if they do,” I said, “they’ll be punished for looking at us.”

“Only the animals can look at us,” I said. And in fact Anna’s cat was doing just that. Staring at us from the bed.

The moonlight was coming in the window and it was almost like something definite. It wasn’t just empty air, it had fingers, it attached itself to our bodies. I noticed how Anna’s skin was a lot whiter than mine but I tried not to look because I didn’t want to make her nervous.

I told her how one day it wasn’t going to be just moonlight all over us.

“I know,” she said. “I think about it sometimes.”

“I think about it almost as if they were already on top of me,” she said.

Once I tried to get Luke to lie on my stomach to see what it would feel like. I don’t mean sex. I wasn’t naked or anything. I just wanted to understand the weight of another person. But it didn’t work. Luke just put his head on my stomach and then I petted him until we fell asleep.

“It’s going to hurt,” Anna said.

“Probably,” I said.

All of a sudden we burst out laughing. Then it was quiet for a while, except for my heart which was going about a mile a minute.

“What do you think of Kevin Ryder?” I said.

“Guukh,” Anna said. “Horrible.”

“Why?” I said.

She looked at me like I was off my rocker. “The clothes,” she said. “The hair.”

“Who does he think he is?” she said. “The devil?”

“He’s pretty nice,” I said.

Anna just shrugged and yawned. She was getting pretty comfortable on the floor, and so I peeked at her belly again. Boy, I couldn’t get over the whiteness of it. It looked like it was dusted with powder. It really did.

The heat was blasting in the house but I could feel the chill of moonlight on my skin like the invisible fingers of aliens. Plus other things, also invisible, passed between Anna’s body and mine. I bet I could have become pregnant with something that came off of her, some of that white powder. The alien fingers were moving it back and forth between us like bees.

If I could only put the white belly and the blue hair together, I’d have the most beautiful monster in the world.

Suddenly I noticed Anna was crying. It wasn’t sobbing, it was just quiet lines down her face. I looked at her and she looked at me.

This is happening, I think. Anna is crying. For some reason it made me happy.

“I don’t know,” Anna says to herself.

“I’m bleeding,” she says.

I don’t understand, and then she touches her stomach. “It started this morning.”

I ask her if it’s her first time and she says, “yes.”

She wipes her eyes.

“Maybe we should do some homework,” she says. “I don’t feel like sleeping yet.”

She stands up and puts her shirt back on. She gets her books and brings them to the moonlight. It’s the same world we’ve been living in, but different now. Everything starts to glow. The cat sees it. He sees the miracle. He comes over and rubs himself against Anna’s leg. Anna opens a book and inside is a picture of a bird, as well as the bones of a bird.

Awful, I say to myself. Lufwa.