Kirstin Allio: Clothed, Female Figure: Stories

Margaret merely nodded.

“To top it off.” He drank. “Sunstroke.”

Aunt Margaret lifted her glass. “Well here’s to sunstroke.” She drank. “And a night off for Diana.”

Jonathan leans forward. “You asked me what I write.”

She nods, she’s soberly drunk, drunkenly sober, omniscient as God, vague as God also. She feels as if she’s been crying for hours. At this moment all she sort of needs is for him to like her. Squishy, egoless little life forms become mouths and sharp elbows. Self-sabotaging, hard-drinking Marguerite: no wonder her mother left her.

She places her fingertips on her shoulders, an inane and invented gesture that will never be repeated. She can tell he likes it.

He leans back a little. Now Marguerite crosses her legs under the table and tries crossing her fingers on command: she can still do it, but any inkling of where she left her car is eclipsed by vodka.

A small flock of girls in saggy jeans, down vests, and lumpy backpacks circles the table next to theirs, which all this time has been empty. The backpacks seem to tumble off the girls’ shoulders of their own accord, as if this is the very thing that backpacks are made for. A girl with an emaciated white ponytail and white lashes locks her mittened hands on their extra chair. “May I?”

Her mittens are the red of Christmas. Her white eyebrows take over the world, Jonathan and Marguerite are completely wiped out. Then she settles into her group and her voice is common, indistinguishable.

Jonathan digs his elbows into the table and Marguerite leans in to close out the intruders. She concentrates on keeping her face open. He moves in too, and his intent makes him startlingly handsome.

“So,” she says. “You didn’t really end up in the same apartment as your mother.”

“The O. Henry?” says Jonathan. Before she knows it they’re both laughing. He takes his glasses off and wipes his eyes. The unexpected irreverence of it! She gulps and almost chokes with laughter, which sets him laughing all over again. Finally he pushes his drink away and the glass skates a little on some liquid. Have they been spilling their drinks all evening?

They float from the room. The security guard is reading a cheap paperback, a cover like black nail polish. Marguerite could easily forget how to exit this tower.

She follows Jonathan down a dim hallway that becomes another dim hallway. They come to a fire door with a low red light and Jonathan pushes it open. Time is so screwy she’s half expecting daylight. She imagines herself craning around, looking for that star of sunshine.

They’re outside, and it’s dark. They’re outside, but they’re not out of the Grad Towers. They’re on a high bridge somewhere in the middle of all that Godforsaken architecture and it’s cold and the giant concrete pillars are radiating an even more intense coldness. There are three-foot-high planters with dried-up boxwoods a corpse shade of yellow and flurries of frozen cigarette butts. It’s like being inside a concrete basket. The light comes from a buzzing streetlight and Marguerite realizes she has no idea which street they’re facing. Benevolent, Thayer, Charlesfield?

“I can’t believe I found you,” she hears Jonathan saying.

For a moment it makes sense, and then it doesn’t. He paws one foot up on the edge of a planter.

One dinosaur, thinks Marguerite, represented many. One set of bones came from many skeletons. As if a thousand Quetzalcoatluses contributed. Their taut-skinned wings reconstituted in the imaginations of a thousand scientists: maybe they looked like enormous egrets.

Suddenly Jonathan loses his balance and his foot skids off the edge of the planter. He wobbles, puts his arm around her waist for stabilization. His coat is open and she slides her hand around his waist underneath it.

With great thanks to the folks at Dzanc.

I’ve been lucky to have crossed paths with fine editors at intrepid literary magazines that continue to publish unusual work — thanks especially to Ronald Spatz, Carolyn Kuebler, Lynne Nugent, Laura Furman, Rebekah Hall, Minna Proctor, and the poet Sarah Gambito, who’s been there since the beginning of writing time.

And in memory of Hedy Dowd Suraski, 1975–2012.

Stephanie Alvarez Ewens

KIRSTIN ALLIO’s novel, Garner , was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, a PEN/O. Henry prize, and other honors for her short stories and essays. She’s currently a Howard Foundation Fellow at Brown University, and she lives in Providence, RI with her husband and sons.