Her father was an artist, and they had sat together on her
bed’s edge flipping through an old book of his. His art was
mostly sculptures, these macabre human heads screaming out with
their teeth shattered. Chuck had loved it. Her skirt was
pompom-blue, high and slim, her limbs and neck white.
Chuck had done what men do when they are pondering an attack on
a bed’s edge: When she would flip to a new page, a new
screaming head, he would look up softly at her neck and stay there
for a moment, in case she would do the same, the uncomfortable
catching of eyes that would yield her to his attack, being his
logic. There would be that awkward moment when the book would be
crushed between them, folding and flapping, careening and then
hitting the ground beside the bed on its corner loudly; that sound
would be like the cracking of a bottle on a ship’s hull,
starting the journey.
But Chuck was distracted and flustered, because her
father’s art was actually entertaining him, and when he
looked away from her neck and back down to the book in her little
arms, he felt that she had in fact looked up to meet his eyes, and
was greeted by his neck instead. They did this for a few minutes
until her mother shouted from the other room, “Sylvia,
dinner’s ready; you and Chad come in here and eat.”
Burnham is a fourth-year English student. He is a fiction
editor at the Westwind.