Eric Puchner - Model Home

“Can’t you see it?” Biesty said, shaking him by the shoulders. His eyes behind his glasses were red as a rooster’s.

“What?”

“The writing on the wall!”

Ordinarily Dustin would have laughed, but he kept thinking about Kira’s sister. Somehow she’d made everything he did seem like a joke. It wasn’t only the smirk: just the thought of that witchy streak in her hair, dangling stupidly into her eyes, was enough to make him feel like a fraud. Dustin drank one of the Budweisers he’d bought while Biesty worked on a hash-inspired rendering of a Keebler elf. The girl named Suzie was passed out against the wall, in the same position as before. On the wire sticking from her mouth, threaded like beads, were several olives. Looking at her, Dustin felt sad. There was some elemental contradiction in his dream of himself. He wanted to live in a world where people did drugs all day and said what they were thinking and took off each other’s braces if they felt like it, but where doing these things never seemed bleak or depressing. He could have his beach and his fucked-up parties, too.

Breakfast came in the back door, grabbing a beer from the fridge. He failed to offer Dustin any money. “You better tend to your girlfriend.”

“What?”

“Taz le Raz.”

“She’s my girlfriend’s sister.”

Breakfast shrugged. “Whatever. She’s out there entertaining the guests.”

Dustin went out to the back deck, where Taz was standing near a potted cactus, several people watching her with the same guilty enthrallment he’d seen on the faces cheering the lobster inside. The only one not watching was the guy in the top hat, who sprayed some PAM into a plastic bag and then stuffed it up to his face. He blinked his eyes wide when he was finished, like something hatching from an egg.

“You’re fucking AWOL,” the beautiful girl in the cowboy hat said to Taz. The girl turned to Dustin, laughing. “Tell her it’s not funny.”

“What?”

“She’s got some glass in her mouth. She’s going to swallow it.”

“It’s her meager power,” the guy with the top hat said.

Taz grinned at Dustin and stuck out her tongue. Sure enough, there was a shard of glass on it, green and hooked like a claw. Part of a beer bottle. The word EXTRA was written across it in white letters. Dustin tried to grab Taz’s arm, but she flinched and backed away, clenching her teeth.

“I’m a witch,” Taz said. Her voice was strange, lispy and garbled. “It won’t hurt me.”

“She’s already eaten a little piece,” the girl said.

“An appetizer,” the guy with the top hat said. “As it, ahem, turns out.”

“You’ll slice up your throat,” Dustin said, stepping closer.

Taz looked at him through her creepy forelock. “What are you going to do about it?”

He had no idea. Frankly, he was beginning to understand why they historically burned witches at the stake. Taz flipped the forelock out of her face, like a dare. Without thinking, he snagged the sleeve of her T-shirt and she sprang toward him suddenly and mashed her face into his own, trying to force his mouth open with her lips, not a kiss so much as a retaliation, a physical attack, Dustin opening his lips until he could feel the glass at the end of her tongue, the cool claw of it, smooth and warped and razory, and then she was pushing it into his mouth, transferring it like a harmless bit of candy. They pulled away. Dustin plucked the shard from his mouth with two fingers, as if it were alive. His hand was trembling. He could taste some blood on his tongue. Taz smirked at him triumphantly, ignoring the other people on the deck. Only then, seeing that she was trembling as well, did it occur to him she wasn’t as crazy as she seemed: she’d been planning her attack, waiting for him to come and find her.

“Who is this guy?” someone asked. “You know each other?”

“My future brother-in-law,” Taz said.

At Nordstrom, Camille wandered the aisles with the vague feeling of oppression that always accompanied her visits to the pleasantly air-conditioned department store. The handbags were particularly oppressive. Something about their sleek leather forms, displayed like jewels in their little glass cubbies, made her feel lost and frumpy and unloved. The man playing the piano nearby seemed to understand this, tinkling out “The Lady Is a Tramp” to the arriving shoppers. Even the salesclerks, who smiled dutifully at Camille but failed to approach her in any way, seemed to wonder why she was here.

She wondered this herself. She was supposed to be at the post office, sending in her check to Oxfam International. There was a famine in Ethiopia; close to a million people had died. Instead she was wandering around a store selling $400 purses, drawn here mysteriously after dropping Lyle off at work.

She was preparing to leave, heading through Coats toward Beauty and Fragrance, when she saw it. The shawl. It was black and elegant and exotically Western-looking, fringed with little tassels. Even the mannequin it was draped over seemed more glamorous than the rest, one hand raised in the air as if hailing a cab. Camille touched the lovely black fabric, soft as down, hanging from the mannequin’s arm. Before that moment, the word “shawl” had been a powerless clump of letters. She checked the price tag dangling from its shoulder: $295.

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” one of the saleswomen asked. She was smiling politely, though her eyes simmered with boredom. “Would you like to try it on?”

“It’s awfully expensive.”

“Well, it’s cashmere. From Italy. That’s actually a fairly good price.”

Camille stared at the tassels. “It’s not the sort of thing I usually wear.”

The saleswoman glanced at her mint green shirt, embroidered at the hem with tiny pink and blue flowers. Camille recalled that the precise color was “seedling.” Turning to a rack near the mannequin, the saleswoman removed an identical shawl from its hanger and held it out to Camille. Camille shook her head and fled the store. When she got to the Volvo, taking refuge in its leathery heat, she found she was actually trembling.

She took the pack of Camel Lights from her purse and lit up a cigarette. She hadn’t known what kind to buy at the Shell Station, so she’d asked for the brand she’d once found shoved in the back of Lyle’s underwear drawer. The first puffs put a stitch in her throat, the tremor of a cough, but soon enough the stitch seemed to loosen and the smoke filled her lungs as naturally as breath. She blew a cirrus stream of it out the window. She’d smoked three cigarettes from the pack already. She blamed the family planning clinic for her nerves: if they’d fit her in earlier today, instead of asking her to wait until four, she wouldn’t be in such a state. She’d know one way or another. Instead she’d had to pee in a jar first thing this morning, as per their advice, and then hide the still-warm sample at the back of the fridge.

If she were actually pregnant, the cigarettes would be unforgivable.

A jet climbed the sky like a rocket, spinning a long thread of smoke that feathered in the sun. She thought of Bobby Wurzweiler and his callused hands, touching her in his boathouse. All week, she hadn’t been able to see a plane without thinking of his face.

When she’d smoked the cigarette to a nub, Camille slipped the Volvo into drive and headed by the post office, wondering what Warren would say if she came home in a glamorous shawl. She wondered if he was really at the office, as he claimed, or tangled in the sheets of some hourly motel, his lover’s bra hanging from the doorknob. She felt sick inside, an actual blow. She pulled over on the side of the road to catch her breath. Cars whooshed by her window. She stayed there for a long time, staring at the trash-strewn ice plant lining the shoulder. How surprised her family would be to see her like this. She thought of a painting she’d seen once in a book, by that Mexican artist with the eyebrow: two duplicate women with their veins exposed, one slowly bleeding to death while the other looked on.