The Ammonite Violin & Others Read Online Free Page A

wanting someone to cut away. And then something grew from the pool, from the sweat that spoiled in an instant, going to tar or India-ink tendrils that slithered greedily around your ankles and up your long pale legs and twined themselves about you until there was no more of you left to see.
    “Why so green and lonely?” she asks.
    “Will she even remember me?” I ask back.
    “It would have been easier for both of you,” the woman says and shrugs, and then spreads her wings. It makes me think of some great lazy animal stretching itself after a nap, and the light shines through the webbing between the supporting struts of those fingers grown so impossibly long and thin. I can see veins and capillaries like a satellite photograph of rivers from outer space, Mother Ganges, the Mekong Delta, the mighty, muddy Mississippi from five hundred miles up.
    That ’s you in there, I think and begin retracing the protective, delusory circumference of my circle. Those are rivers of you, stolen rivers winding through her flesh.
    “I’d hold you under and drown you like a sack of kittens,” you laughed as I slid out of you, trying to ignore the way my balls had begun to ache. You licked me from your fingers. You bent down and sucked my cock, taking back any stray bit of you I might have scrubbed loose. I shat my eyes and tried to lie still as your sharp, sharp teeth drew a few more drops.
    “She’ll know how now,” the woman says, turning away from me, turning to see your cocoon, your black chrysalis glistening wetly beneath the two twenty-five watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling. “How to drown you, I mean,” she adds, though I’d understood the first time.
    I’m a small thing dropped overboard and lost at the bottom of the sea. I’m a man slit open, stem to stern, and there are bricks and lead and ballast stones where my guts should be.
    I sit within the confines of my circle and wonder how long it would take me to cross the concrete room to the foot of the stairs leading back up to the subbasement and the basement and abandoned warehouse and the city and the surface of the sea. I try to remember how many steps I counted on the way down, because twice that number might tell me how many there were altogether, and I pretend that I could ever have the courage to leave whatever you’ve become. I tell myself I’ll go. I tell myself that I could find the way back alone and you wouldn’t try to follow me. I pretend I wouldn’t see you every time I shut my eyes.
    The chrysalis ripples and begins to split apart.
    You licked roughly at the tip of my penis and told me to open my eyes and stop being such a baby. “I haven’t bitten it off yet,” you said.
    “Kiss me,” the demon sighs and folds its wings away.
    And I’m only a stone or a penny or an empty, discarded bottle.
    And I have no light of my own.

Bridle
    It’s not a wild place—not some bottomless, peat-stained loch hidden away between high granite cliffs, and not a secret, deep spring bubbling up crystal clear from the heart of a Welsh or Irish forest where the Unseelie host is said to hold the trees always at the dry and brittle end of autumn, always on the cusp of a killing winter that will never come. It’s only a shallow, kidney-shaped pool in a small, neglected city park. No deeper than a tall man’s knees, water the color of chocolate milk in a pool bordered by crumbling mortar and mica-flecked blocks of quarried stone. There are fountains that seem to run both night and day, two of them, and I suppose one might well imagine this to be some sort of enchantment, twin rainstorms falling always and only across the surface directly above submerged, disgorging mechanisms planted decently or deceitfully out of sight. In daylight, the water rises from the cloudy pool and is transformed, going suddenly clean and translucent, a fleeting purity before tyrant gravity reasserts itself and the spray falls inevitably back into the brown pool, becoming once again only