In Repetition Is the Desire to Make Something True

Vanessa Kulzer

She knew her date would mistake her breathing for the rasp of passion, and she was glad. She opened her nostrils wide, pulling at the car’s stale air. The man was oddly fervent. She let her lips be crushed back and forth. While not pleasurable for the traditional reasons, it offered some consolation. A bit. Slightly more than a grain's worth.

She imagined herself in another body, surviving on grains. An Indian ascetic, living high on a pillar, relying on the devoted: bony, and going without showers. Her eyes half-closed. What a gaze of enlightenment would brighten her leathery face! Then her mind merged her two selves and suddenly her date had his face buried in her ascetic’s dirty beard. Off the pillar and into a Honda Accord. Her mouth stiffened as she corralled it into a pucker instead of a smile.

To distract him, she arched her back in the vinyl seat. The man's eyes flickered and he redoubled his effors. His concentration was flattering. She watched him at his work. She slid up the cliff of his nose and into the valley of his tear duct. His black eyebrows were furry oars stroking the pond of his forehead. She wanted to apply herself, too. When the rhythm allowed, she readied herself with a big breath through her nose.

The interior smelled awfully like McDonald’s. “An olfactory affront," she couldn't help thinking in the voice of her father. That phrase, always the first thing out of his mouth when he came home from work. His shoulders working at the kitchen garbage bag, tying it’s white tails reproachfully, holding the bundle away as he took it outside. Her father had an unusually sensitive sense of smell.

A bead of sweat fell to her waistband, was absorbed. Another false sign of passion. Perhaps she wasn't sweating, but crying from her pores. If he tried to get under her shirt and found the wetness there, would he be repulsed? She wanted to open the window more than anything in the world.

Movement beyond the windshield caught her eye. Across the parking lot, at the edge. Where the blacktop met a row of streetlights, just at the beginning of a wooded area. There was a running dog. His delicate ballerina feet machined by thick haunches. The muscles working under his shiny coat. A greyhound. Bounding across the painted white lines, in and out of pools of light and darkness. His slender legs opened and closed like scissors.

The man separated from her. "What?" He followed her look to the trees beyond. "Is somebody out there?" "I don't know." She continued to stare at the spot where the dog had disappeared. In the center of each ring of light, the lamppost was like a single birthday candle in a row of flat, yellow cakes.

"Maybe we should go," he said, starting the engine. The car, it seemed, would move her bones, weighted like piles of wood, in the molded seat. She saw her eyes in the side mirror, the brown irises tight in their shiny whites. The tires rolled forward, crushing gravel in their familiar way.