NE W S HORT F I CTI ON

Ripening-time

byOlivia McCannon

“AREyou hungry?” She thought about it. There was a right answer. She could say yes, or no. One would open a door, the other would close it. She gave both possibilities the same persuasive weight, until they cancelled each other out, leaving her with a blank. He was waiting, a smile appearing. It was unbearable. She gave up. Easier this time just to want what he did. “Perhaps. You?” He surprised her with one of his laughs, raucous and overwhelming. As if he was sharing a joke with someone who wasn’t there, someone she didn’t know. She flinched. He saw, and stopped, looking at her thoughtfully. The silence shuffled down again. The darkness pressed its face against the windows of his car. Outside were dense black forms that span round as they passed, and a vast indigo sky pricked with stars. She was in the passenger seat, he was the pilot, and they were going wherever he was taking her. It was a magnificent seat, the best: the view was blowing her mind. But also precarious. She might be ejected at any moment, without even a suit or breathing equipment for survival outside. They came to a straight stretch of road. He shifted down in his seat, gripped the steering wheel with his knees, and began to roll a delicately thin cigarette, taking a rusty yellow tin of tobacco from the pocket in the driver’s door. Everything he did was both nonchalant and deliberate; rehearsed just enough to make it confident but still spontaneous. He wound down the window and dark air swept in, as if it had been waiting for hours for that moment, had been desperate just to

rush in and ruffle the hair on the back of his neck. He lit up and the air, summoned for that purpose, carried the smoke outside and was instantly left behind them. “On va voir s’il y a des cerises”. His intonation rose at the end of the phrase, leaving it open. He was going to eat cherries, she could too if she wanted. She wondered at her closeness to him in the language, encircled by ‘on’. There they both were, locked into one entity and absent in their individual parts. There was nothing reassuring about it. ‘On’ was a black hole of his creation; she was a star that had run out of fuel, crossing his horizon. No way of knowing where they were going, it was all winding black lanes without signs or white markings. Ask. The hard voice at her core said. Don’t. The fluctuating cloud of soft atoms around it lurched towards and then away from the man sitting next to her. She looked at him sideways on. Her eyes slid over each contour of his face, doing the work of her hands, sensing the rough grey stubble on his chin, the smooth bridge of his nose. Every muscle in her arm poised to lift and take over. Her fingers tingled with nerves anticipating the charge of his touched flesh. The hard voice said. No. Don’t let him know. He glanced over, as if he had overheard, and smiled, showing his teeth. She flushed, annoyed. He always had to enjoy everything so much. Including, maybe even especially, her discomfort. Now he was looking at her in the rear-view mirror. He’d been watching her all along. She met his eyes for a second, brown and wide-set, with cowled lids and laughter-crinkled corners, then turned her face away to avoid returning his smile.

WEAK WITH WINE

We woke, weak with wine from the party, barley able to get up and walk to the meadow wafting its spices – the scents of cassia and cloves:

and the sun had embroidered its surface with blossoms and across it spread a deep blue robe.

Moshe Ibn Ezra (c.1055–after 1138) trans. Peter Cole

His teeth were all she could see of him in the dark hallway when he opened the door, the shadows of his body suspended from their luminance. She stood there surprised, as if she were someone else he’d been expecting. Her voice wouldn’t work, it kept coming out as if it was being stuffed back down her throat at the same time, the string-of-hankies trick in reverse. He poured her out a glass of fig wine in a stained Arab tea glass with coloured swirls, and took her on a tour of the house, which was really an apartment, all on the same floor. Above was an attic, where he stacked logs. Below was a space where the animals would have been kept. In his music room, surrounded by santours and sitars, wooden stands, boxes of scores, they sat on upright wooden chairs facing each other.

32 | The Liberal | Autumn 2007