Fermentation Read Online Free Page B

it,’ he'd say, taking my face between his hands, brushing my skin with his fingers. ‘Let me teach you. It's quite safe.’
    ‘Why? I don't expect you to learn to write stories.’
    ‘That's different. Fire-eating's not a job.’
    ‘It frightens me,’ I said. And I'd hold up my hands andmake as if my fingers has been burnt, putting them into my mouth to assuage the pain.
    ‘Just imagine,’ he'd say. ‘A fire-eating pregnant woman. There haven't been many of those. In fact you'd probably be the first.’
    ‘I'm feeling ill. I don't want to eat fire.’
    He shrugged his shoulders and I could see he was hardly listening. He was looking at the pregnant woman and the acts she could perform.
    ‘You'd be extraordinary,’ he said.
    ‘I'd be arrested. For roasting my child.’
    ‘We could call her Joan of Arc.’
    ‘She'd look like a pig on a spit and no man would want her,’ I replied, but Serge shook his head.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘She would have flame-red hair and her eyes would dazzle anyone who dared look at her. She would dance circles of fire around all men who desired her.’
    ‘Sounds as if you already do. Who is she?’
    Serge looked at me and then turned to leave the room.
    ‘I was teasing,’ I said quickly. ‘I love it that you want this child.’
    ‘Sure you do,’ he said.
    ‘You do want this child?’
    He stood on the far side of the room and looked at me for a time without speaking. I could rarely, if ever, tell what Serge was thinking. His eyes were dark and stared right through me. Sometimes I felt he made me disappear altogether.
    ‘How can you ask that?’
    ‘I just did.’
    ‘And I just told you,’ he said quickly.
    Serge went out most days to work and I would sit at my desk and try to write. Sometimes he would leave early in the morning before I awoke and stay out till after I had fallen asleep. We missed whole days like that. It was hard to keep track and yet it didn't seem to matter. When I awoke on the second or third day of his absence, he would be eating in the kitchen or sitting in the living-room watching TV and it was as though he had always been there. He filled the gaps of his absence perfectly. He was always with me.
    One night he came home after being away a few days. I was in bed asleep with the window open and the heat as my blanket. I felt Serge climbing into the bed and turning me over. He kissed my face and my neck and I could feel his hands brushing against my stomach and then all I could see were the child's baby-blue eyes. It was as though it were watching us, as though there was a third person present, and I pushed Serge away.
    ‘I'm sorry.’
    ‘What's the matter?’ he said and put his hand out to touch me, but I pushed it away and Serge got up from the bed and went into the living-room. When he didn't return I went to find him, but he had fallen asleep on the couch. He was too tall to lie straight. His body was curled up like a child's, his head resting on the palm of his hand.For a while I sat on the floor in the corner of the room and watched him sleeping. The lines of his face were lost in the shadows and he looked different somehow to the person I knew, a stranger in the dark of the room. At one point he opened his eyes and looked over to where I sat. He smiled at me in his sleep.
    ‘I'm sorry,’ I said but he had already closed his eyes.
    The sickness persisted. I threw up in the mornings and in the afternoons and the smell of the vomit began to mingle with the smell of the rubbish wafting up from the streets.
    ‘Try these,’ Serge said one night when he returned home. He was carrying a small bag from which he took out three lemons. ‘I've heard if you suck on a lemon when you want to be sick it stops the feeling.’ Then he stood in the kitchen and started juggling them in his hands. ‘Fresh lemonade's good too.’
    ‘Who says?’
    ‘I read it somewhere.’
    ‘Do I smell?’
    ‘A bit. After you've thrown up.’
    ‘It's not attractive, is