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Martin Rock
They’ll Be Contacting Me
One of the
managers asked me
what I
would do after I died, and then
they
stared at me, two hard-boiled eggs
in little
collared green shirts and soft
mouths
that sucked the air like
goldfish
on ceramic tile.
I imagined
cutting them
both in
half just to see the yellow-gray
moons of
their yolk.
The second
manager was three sizes too large
and fired
his phlegm-hums
at point
blank range. I told them
I would
rot or burn, maybe leak out a pungent
aroma,
maybe grin, like this,
but the
egg on the right cut me short.
“No,” he
said, “would you remain loyal
to our
company?” And it was
the way he
said loyal that annoyed me,
it took on
shape, rising in the center.
it made
him sound
important
even though
he was
only the left half of a sweaty omelet.
“I’d be
dead, I said quickly, “which is
a bit like
loyal,” and they both nodded
quietly
and looked at each other,
as though
this was the one answer
they had
been expecting.
We sat
there for a run of the mill eternity
and
sniffed each other’s dread.
Then they
both shot their damp
hands out
at me and each cocked up
one
eyebrow.
“Thank
you,” said the first.
Baby’s Buyback and the Cowboy-Man
A man
walks into a small town tavern. He’s wearing a ten-gallon hat.
He
feels like
it is only two quarts.
There’s a
woman there, sitting on the short end of the L shaped bar, as if
to say
that she’s already gnawed herself down to the short end of Love.
She grips
her drink like it keeps her from falling off the edge.
Every so
often, one of her eyelids slumps over in the man’s direction like
a
bubble-gum waitress named Glenda. She’s been watching the Sumo
Wrestling
that’s playing on TV, but now she just wants the cowboy man
to buy her
a drink, which is exactly what he does.
Cowboy-man
lights a cigarette and offers one to the woman. I just quit,
she says,
and watches smoke curl around his finger like a transparent gray
wedding
ring. He grins, and with a voice like a pepper grinder says, Me
too.
They talk.
He looks down at her feet and sees that she has blunt
rectangular toes stuffed into her sandals like too many groceries
in a brown
paper sack. She frowns. Those toes have cost her
so many
husbands.
He nods up
towards the TV screen where one of wrestlers’ loincloths just
fell off
revealing his testicles; blurred yellow eggs. Then he points to
the jar
of pickled
eggs on the counter. Wonder what those are, he says.
She
squeals
like a baby pig.
He places
his hand on her thigh. Her skin is rough, thick, tanned. He
squeezes.
She winks at him again, then feels self-conscious when
the eyelid
lingers for just a second too long before being sucked back
into place
by her brow. It makes her look mechanical. The man orders
another
round.
They both drink quickly, silently. He glances at her breasts.
She
pretends to be looking at her drink, but she leans forward and arches
her back
just enough.
The man
reminds her of a boy she knew in high school. She asks what he
does for a living.
While he
explains to her why he is in between jobs, she thinks about the
boy.
She wants to take this man to a barn loft and let him hump her with
her
clothes on. She wants to slide her hand underneath his shirt and
brush
against
his nipples. She wants to feel his tongue on the nape of her neck,
and smell
his breath fall on her like a heavy tobacco fog.
He asks if
she would still work for a man who did that, even though he
can tell
she stopped paying attention before she learned what “that” was.
Hell no,
she says, I’d rather sleep in a damn barn.
When he
grins, his tongue pokes through the place where his front right
tooth
should be like a moist pink worm. He tells her that when he got
divorced,
his wife took everything, even his front tooth. He takes out his
wallet and
shows her a picture of his son, who is missing the same tooth.
He’s
got his daddy’s smile, she says. She starts to smile too, but
the
picture
makes her think about her own son. She doesn’t have any pictures
of him. He
didn’t live to see his own crib next to her bed. He didn’t live
long
enough for her to sing him even one note. She almost tells the
man,
but he is
ordering another round so instead she decides again to finally
throw away
the tiny quilt in her attic.
Martin
Rock lives in Japan where he teaches English. He is a graduate
of the creative writing program at Florida State University. | 