Good Indian Girls: Stories Read Online Free Page B

weather-beaten blacktop. The rays of sun sliced across at a sharp angle over the Pacific and my movements soon slowed as I progressed across the sand toward the water. Wading up to my waist, I remembered myself as a child doing exactly this. Crests foamed against my shirt and I experienced the fleeting excitement of a possible life, a different life, with Double Love and Dr. Boyce, living right at the ocean’s edge. Here I could run in the mornings and swim, and in the evenings sit with Double Love while we listened to her father’s madness unfurl through the long and lonely nights.
    When I pulled the gun from my pocket, the sun glinted off the silver barrel. I flung it as far as I could, watching it arc against the sky then become lost, almost instantly, in a rising white swell. It appeared again for a moment, a crisp, black shape amid the waves, and then was gone forever. When I turned to make my passage back toward the beach, I saw that a small crowd had gathered some distance along the edge and were staring at me with suspicion and fear. Someone would no doubt call the police and with that thought I felt myself jolted back into the world—the possible life vanished as quickly as I had conjured it.
    I waded through the water and every step was a struggle. Only now did the cold hit me as I progressed back up the beach and toward the road. This time, I chose to wait for a break in the traffic. Double Love was gone from outside her house. I climbed into my car and dropped my head onto the steering wheel, exhausted and shivering.
    The sun settled below the sharp horizon and I drove several miles south along the coastal highway. The skyline was red and the clouds were streaked across the western sky.
    The night had settled in when I drove back into the city, and soon I found myself pulling up half a block from my apartment. A figure stood under the streetlamp near my building’s door. I recognized the disgraced boy’s father from the way he shifted his weight from one leg to another. All fight had fled me and I could not face the man. I doubted I would ever be able to face him again. I started the engine and the car jerked to an anxious, uncertain life and I drove away.
    At a stop sign, I reached across to the passenger seat and searched the floor until I found the scrap of paper I was looking for. It was Baggie’s address, and with it the dates and times for his evening salons.
    Before I had a chance to ring the bell, I heard Baggie’s voice emerging from an open window. I waited and listened as he recited one poem after another. Something horrid in Urdu, but instead of laughing I was filled with a pathetic gratitude. I wasn’t home, I never would be, but for a moment, I was sure, Baggie would help me pretend. I felt a surge of relief at the prospect of sitting with him, listening to his poetry and imagining myself as another man in another age, the good poet of Africa the Consul once believed I was. Wet and shivering, I pulled my jacket tight around me and climbedthe final steps to his door. Right then I recognized a line Baggie spoke and froze. Soon there was another and after that another, and I knew where I had seen those lines before. The world was funnier than I thought, and a host of new questions pestered me as I reached forward and pressed the bell.

The Discovery
    THE WOMAN’S MOUTH WAS ROUND AND SOFT, A GLAZED doughnut of a mouth smeared in scarlet frosting. I dreamed of her lips clamped to my chest—they were a suction cup, leaving only a ring of red and a vacuum to separate us. I drifted happily on the fantasy until she said something that should have disturbed me. I was only half-listening, and the jolt faded as quickly as it arrived. I never watched the tail-end news. The sportscast was over and all that was left were the human interest stories. The woman’s lips were stuck to my chest, her saliva dripped through the TV screen and found a natural home in the jungle of my nipple hairs. I only heard the