Bone Lagoon

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Amelia’s eyes are far darker than the side of the chrome hubcap which affords her a vision. She is, in fact, squatting uncovered above the mirror image. It is the smooth surface of her giblet over which she runs the middle finger. She diddles it. The patina, slick, could be Vermeer.

She thinks, This curved cap carries the phantom of my face within its chickenheart. But I cannot see the wrinkles. The wine Amelia drinks is cabernet, a California appellation.

Amelia drinks down to the ring that will adhere to the inside, nipple dried from acids used for tanning. Hides. She reaches for her panties, wipes herself on rayon, European underwear.

Rhine wines are quite often drier than most chardonnays, he partner says, lifting a glass, fitting his three fingers to it.

Cut the lights, Amelia says to the other.

Her partner comes back with champagne, swipes fizz off of the tabletop.

Off of her blindside.

Her table, chair, and back bear up the liquid.

Some day you must take me to Spain, Amelia says, to Duero. This stated while her partner speaks of Mosel, Saar, Ruwer. Germany is Eiswein in the Spring! Domesticity is where the war went in the ’50s.

Some day you must fly me to Utah.

The Great Salt Lake is twisted with brine shrimp. And an island, and that jetty, coily thing. In certain years it will allow itself to be sighted by artists who will walk in spirals on it, clacking it with their clicky walking sticks.

I have never been scared, Amelia says of helicopters.

Her partner runs this business on the side.

Amelia of late has grown a tumor of the eye. Back behind, where the vessel lets the salty impulses, light and pain, pass to her brain. She will stand in the window, blinking either lid. Her partner will catch her as she does this, her slow-fucking him, moaning sometimes like a lone bassoon. Fingering her whisper key. He will come so close to pleasing her, then go limp amidst her many curls, and their hands will clutch the sofa, as if to leave deep bruises in the stuffing.

Don’t crap out on me now! Amelia will shout.

Usually, partner limp and going it alone, her hand on his incapacity, Amelia will say to him, I want to move to Europe.

You’d leave me for a fiddler, her partner responds.

In Berlin, concertmasters soar over string orchestras, bowing high harmonics. Audiences stiffen in their seats, so many rows of Roosevelts.

Amelia’s sister Brette flew to Venice just to hear a counter-tenor. She got shitty, wrote postcards, tripped into the Grand Canal. Soon after that her husband, the X one, cut her monthly checks. He bought a Jaguar plated bronze down to the wipers, and he headed for the desert. When the X one was gaining on Las Vegas, somewhere before the break of day, he pulled onto the shoulder and he died of an infarction. The car was left idling and the gas gauge sat on E. Every car and truck in the slow lane slowed slower for a moment. Then drove on. The truckers, newlyweds and tourists marked their mileage, checked their hair.

Back in California, in a condominium, on the day she heard about the X one, Amelia’s partner died. He lay sprawled back on the mattress. He, this time, managed to stay hard.

Her partner, she believes, could have been a Vegas entertainer if he hadn’t been so brought up by the Mormons. He could have sung at the Mirage.

His dick, in fact, is bigger than most fingers, too big for her white wedding ring. It is platinum. Amelia’s breasts are tumbling tumbleweeds, large and round and roaming vagabond. She makes the proper phone calls, but first she makes haste for the finish.

After the inquest, she will sell the pickup, buy a helicopter and learn to fly it.

What she will blink at through the windscreen is pure illusion. Or it is art? A private, basalt airstrip curling into tail of suckling pig. Or is it a dark-pink, briny vein of living shrimp? The water, circus-lemonade in color, will flash out “Ah!” under a gold-tooth solstice sun. And Amelia—dazzled, rich and leisured—will go down.