Plato's Cave During the Slicer Wars and other short stories by Terri Kouba

  1I was sixteen when I left home, the day after that first night he came to me. He was bold and brash and took me almost by force. I was sixteen; what did I know of these things? Now, almost fifty years later, he still comes to me and takes me, but I realize it’s not by force but with force. I am powerless in his grip. I have always been powerless before him.

  People ask me, “Don’t you get lonely, living by yourself?” I smile a sly, secretive smile that startles them. They take a step backwards, surprised, but I just shake my head and say, “No, I don’t get lonely.” I don’t tell them it’s because he comes to me at night. When I’m alone. And then I’m not lonely anymore.

  I keep the terrace doors open for him. I don’t worry about burglars. Firstly, because I’m on the third floor and there’s no easy access to the terrace. Secondly, he’s always there. He protects me.

  There was that one time when that wiry guy climbed up the trellis and on to the terrace. He snuck in on quiet feet and walked over to where our limbs where entwined. We woke, startled. He leapt and was on the scoundrel in a flash. He yanked the strange man by his shirt collar through the terrace doors and flung his skinny body off the balcony into the flower garden below.

  The police said the burglar must have slipped while trying to climb the trellis and broke his neck when he fell into the rose bushes. They couldn’t figure how he fell so far away, on the other side of the garden, though. I didn’t tell them any different. I certainly didn’t tell them about him. They wouldn’t have believed me if I had. They couldn’t have understood. They wouldn’t have believed that he could have carried the man, his feet dangling, not even touching the floor, across the length of my apartment. They wouldn’t have believed how the man hung in mid air off my balcony, his lips forming a circle so perfect that I couldn’t have drawn a better one with a cup. I didn’t tell the police any of that. I don’t tell anyone about him. No one would believe me.

  My apartment is small. One wall is the kitchen with the sink, stove, and refrigerator that makes so much noise I have to turn the TV up until Mr. Krenshaw below bangs on his ceiling with a broom handle. My bed is against another wall and the couch is in the middle of the room, so when I sit on it, my back is to the terrace doors.

  I don’t mind the small apartment – I didn’t get it for its size. I took the apartment because of the terrace doors. I come home in the evening and I fling the doors wide open so he can enter unrestrained except by the billowing curtains that catch the wind and fool me into thinking he has arrived. I can’t bear the idea of him entering though an open window, of him having to crouch his body, put one leg through, shift his weight, then pull the other leg through. Just thinking about it makes me cringe.

  That’s how he came to me that first night at my parent’s house, pressing his long torso to his knees, crawling through the open window. I watched him leave the same way, just before dawn. I thought about his hard, muscular torso, his sinewy legs, his bulging shoulders. I thought of his body, stretched out, pressed next to mine. And then I saw him curl up to fit through the small window and I knew. I knew I would find a place where he could come to me standing tall, in his full glory, not crouching, moving like a criminal in the night.

  I always smell him before he enters. He smells of the night. Of darkness. Of the wind that precedes him and lifts the curtains before his wide shoulders. In the spring he captures the essence of newly bloomed flowers, just before they close their petals for the night, and he brings their aroma to me as a present. In the fall he enters in a flurry of pussy willows, their soft downy center surrounded by rough, woody shells. In the winter he rides the beams of the blue moon into my darkened apartment and smells of burnt birch wood.

  He brings me the scent of lightening flashes across a wild sky, of blueberries kissed by the sun. He smells of the river, bathed in starlight and of moss, wet with evening dew. I keep the terrace doors open even when Mr. Krenshaw knocks on my door and reminds me to close them before I go to sleep. When it’s raining I put down layers and layers of soft towels to soak the water off the tiled floor and to cushion his bare feet when he finally arrives.

  One mid-winter night he came to me smelling of summer barbecue, of grilled meat dripping fat onto hot sizzling coals. One whiff of him he made me ravenous for barbecue ribs, even though I had just polished off a large bowl of fettuccini alfredo. He laughed when I told him this and his hot barbecue sauce breath encircled me. Snow hit the window like grains of sand and he smelled of barbecue sauce.

  He reached into the refrigerator and pulled out some baby-back ribs. I asked him where they had come from - I knew I hadn’t bought them - but he just smiled at me as we stuck the thick meat on metal skewers. We cooked them over the open fireplace flame. Juices dripped off the red meat, spitting and spurting as they fell against the hot, burning wood.

  Sometimes I sit and read in the evenings and can feel him outside, waiting, watching. I can smell his scent of pinewood and sap and know he spent the day in the forest. But he does not enter.

  I do not ask why he waits outside, what he is thinking of or if he is waiting for something or someone. I try not to hold my breath and I pretend not to notice he is there. I release my breath when I feel his strong fingers slide across my shoulders and down my arms. They gently close the book without marking the page and it falls to the floor, forgotten.

  Other times he sneaks around in front of me without me noticing. His soft lips move up my bare leg and around to the crook of my knee where his hot tongue pokes and prods, nudging incessantly, giving me a taste of what is to come. He turns off the light and the room is plunged into shadows.

  I cannot see his face. I have never seen his face, only his silhouette in the moonlight. In the darkness he is a shadow, made solid. I have never looked into his eyes nor seen the color of his hair. But I have felt him. I have touched every inch of his body, every crevice, every curve. As he has mine.

  I wake in the morning, when the sun beams through the east window, and I am alone. He has gone with the night, melted into the darkness from which he had sprung. But he has left me the memory of him, of his touch. And his smell. His scent grows inside of me. Sometimes it grows until it fills the room. It continues to grow, sometimes until it overpowers me and I rush home at noon to take a shower to douse it. But it continues to grow until he comes the next night. With a new smell. Honeysuckle. Five-fingered ferns. Hay. Mountain spring water. Wherever he has spent the day, he brings me that scent at night. And I carry it with me until the next night, until the next smell.

  At work people comment on my perfume, asking where they can purchase it. Or they ask if I was at the beach earlier, or if I live near a garden of sunflowers. I smile a sly, secretive smile. It startles them. They take a step back in surprise, but I just nod and say “Thank you.”

  I turn to leave. I can feel them taking a step forward to stand in the place I have just left, to smell a valley of violets or a meadow of wheat. To smell me. To smell him.

  The End

  Fahevial