Husband
by Philip Schultz
The Train to Ghent
by A. H. Wald
Coltrane’s
Sound
by Keith Raether
Mick
on the Make: Notes
on an Unusual Name
by Dinty W. Moore
|
The
Train to Ghent
A. H. Wald
How did you end up in Ghent?”
Monique asked.
Joseph watched her hand wave like
a handkerchief through the smoke circling around the cramped
café and then pointed to her coffee saucer. “Could
I have that sugar if you’re not going to use it?”
“You can’t tell me? What
is it, some big secret?” she said, as she pushed the
packet across the table.
Joseph smiled. He liked how curious
she was about everything: what he ate, where he slept, how
he cut his hair, how he survived the winter cold. When they
first met, he had been wary, afraid she might be mocking him
like his brothers, who had harassed him for his toys and laughed
at his odd piggish face and told him he was too ugly to come
from their tribe. Their questions still taunted him in his
head: “Why are you squinting at that book, Joseph?”
“What are you dreaming about now, old man?”
But Monique fascinated him too much
for him to remain self-conscious with her. In her monochrome
clothes the color of earth and stone, she was a reverse image
of the women he had grown up with. Skin as white as his was
black, so pale he could see the bluish veins crisscrossing
on her wrists; stringy hair like straw; and instead of taut
ebony skin stretched over high smooth bones, her face caved
in on itself with barely a chin or a jaw, just thin lips that
looked like rind without any juice left, and doughy cheeks
that sagged a little like dumplings. Yet even though she was
not beautiful, she was a marvel to him: the way she focused
her attention on a difficult problem, or asked the professor
a razor sharp question that no one else was smart enough to
ask. And outside of class she spoke with an awkward nervousness
he had known before only in himself.
He tore the corner off the packet
and twirled the triangle into a tight white thread. “A
train brought me.”
Continued in volume 43, issue 3, summer
2007
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