Diane Cook - Man V. Nature - Stories

He got down on a knee and tied the string from his tea bag around her finger.

“Will you marry me?” He couldn’t believe he had said it. He imagined waking on a sun-dazzled morning with her.

She jogged in place and screamed, “Yes!”

He scooped her into his arms as if she were a long, light pillow. “You’ll have to return to the Midwest,” he said, and when she looked confused, he explained, “It’s not safe for me here.”

She cupped his face. “You’re safe with me anywhere.” Her eyes were wet and searching. “Do you feel safe?”

“I do feel safe! I felt safe the very first minute,” he said, forgetting that in fact, he had felt in danger when he’d first encountered her.

He spun her in a circle. “I’ve got you and I won’t ever let go,” he cried, and she tossed her head and fluttered her legs like she was a captive in a monster movie. This time he wouldn’t have to run.

The bedroom was also bare, a mattress on the floor with a single sheet balled at the foot. The windows were shrouded in brown cloth, but a chair had been placed where someone could sit and look out a crack between the fabric panels. There was a shabby painted dresser. Our man swiped what little was on it to the floor.

He pulled her shirt over her head; her breasts, oblong and heavy, spilled from her bra with just a flick of the straps. She was plump. Her belly looked strangely swollen. All evidence to the contrary, he might have guessed she was already pregnant. But no, she had the hunger of an empty woman.

She moaned she was ready, and she was. He was about to bend her over that dresser when she said, “No,” and backed our man to the bed. He fell onto it, and she straddled him. “This way.”

The woman took him in with a long oooh . “It’s like you’re made of electricity,” she said. She began to rock slowly, smiling gravely. “I’m going to have the best kid.”

Our man concentrated on how tightly her legs locked around his hips, on how protected he felt.

“You’re going to be a great mom.” He sighed.

She began wiggling around on top of him, tossing her hair, bucking, and it felt so good. He couldn’t believe he’d been lucky enough to meet her, and at a moment when he most needed to. He watched her breasts sway, her belly heave, her mouth round into pleasure and then spread into surprise. He tucked his hands behind his head as if he were taking a nap in the park, not a care in the world, with his penis drawn inside her and about to start a family with her in just another minute or so. He was entering that buzzy state he loved, his body feeling like the glass casing of a thermometer, the liquid rising, swelling, getting dangerous — the casing could shatter! — when he thought he saw something move in the doorway; a man, a shadow, a ghost; and then it was gone.

“My kid will be the best,” she chanted as she writhed.

Our man became lost in the chant. She was coming. And then he was braying, grabbing at air, coming too.

Then she quieted and stopped moving.

His climax whimpered out, replaced by a new nervousness. He cleared his throat several times, but she stayed silent and still. “Did you like that?” It was not a question our man had ever asked.

“Sure,” she said, though she seemed displeased. Her smile had disappeared. She pressed her hands against his collarbones and said very somberly, “But it’s not why I brought you here.”

She slipped her hands around our man’s throat and tightened.

Everything in him cooled. His spent limbs went wax dead. He had never been threatened by a woman before. He didn’t know how to respond. Should he hit her? He couldn’t.

“What’s going on?” he wheezed. His rejected ejaculate gummed between them.

“Don’t hate me,” she said. “I’m doing this for my baby. I’m not a bad person.”

“Please,” our man sputtered. He struggled, but he’d been made defenseless on his back. She was strong and determined. A mother already. It all began to make sense. She was pregnant, had known exactly who he was, and was helping another man, the father of her child, conquer our man in order to rise in stature. She probably wasn’t even from the Midwest.

Our man’s sight turned to black smudges, his hearing clotted. He groped and kicked wildly, and she held tighter. He gurgled, his chest burned. He felt so stupid. He shut his eyes and couldn’t believe this was it.

How terrible life was, he marveled, but how fair. He was getting what he deserved. He thought back on how he became our man. You remember: how he’d come upon his predecessor — a man in his prime, powerful and unchallenged — copulating in the middle of Main Street, an admiring crowd gathered and traffic stopped. How our man had pummeled and bloodied him, broke his bones with his bare hands and left him to crawl a few paces away, where he died. Then how our man impregnated the woman, who was waiting and hungry, and then fourteen other women from the circle of onlookers. The crowd had never seen such a spectacle. You know the rest.

What you probably didn’t know is this: It wasn’t something our man had planned or ever thought he wanted. He had a girlfriend he enjoyed spending time with and fucking. She wanted to be a nurse. And he had always loved movies and thought it would be fun to do something with them. But when he’d come upon the scene — the man, the woman, the crowd — a raw yearning seized him. He felt an urgent desire to be more than he’d ever wanted to be. He gave in to this new vision: with blood on his hands he became our man. And he enjoyed it. He was proud of his work. That story of the bank tellers? He would want you to remember that he also took seven of the female customers waiting to withdraw money.

But now, what he would give to have taken a different route that day, so he wouldn’t have seen that man copulating, being adored, and he wouldn’t have had that feeling in his gut: That should be me.

He felt the woman’s grasp let go and thought, Okay, now I’m dead, I’m released from all of this, and maybe that’s a good thing. But then a hand pressed gently on his forehead, and a voice said, “Hello? Hello? Hello?”

He opened his eyes, and a woman stood over him, a different woman, one with yellow hair and wearing a nightgown. She smiled at him and lifted a baseball bat red with blood, and then he felt the sensation of something cold wrapped around his hips. He looked down to see the woman who’d attacked him, slouched to the side, rigid, her head a bloody nest of hair and bone.

The woman in the nightgown pushed the body over onto the floor and offered our man her hand. “Let’s get out of here before the others track you down,” she said. She pulled our man up and led him past a dead body slumped in the doorway, whose matter was sprayed along the wall. It was a man. He looked a bit like our man.

They ran through the night to another part of the city, our man barefoot and cold. Groups of young men roamed the sidewalks in search of him. They knew our man was weakened and hurt. They could smell it. They carried weapons, slapped them to their palms, jingled them if they were the jingling kind. Women lit candles in windows or on their front stoops, keeping vigil for him.

The woman was like a ghost in her nightgown, her hair blazing white under the streetlights, seemingly invisible to the others, and our man began to believe that as long as he was with her, he couldn’t be seen. They crouched behind the postal boxes on corners when they saw gangs stomping toward them. They slunk behind parked cars to avoid the windows of bars where the patrons sat listening for any sound of our man. The woman cloaked him with her body to hide his scent with her own. He was aroused by her warmth. “Later,” she said, touching his chest.