Free The Wilds by Julia Elliott Page B

air-conditioning, set low, smelled moldy.
    Dr. Vilkas tore a chicken wing apart and gnawed gristle from bones. The way he hunched over his food reminded me of a praying mantis, his face an uncanny blend of ugly and beautiful. He had long eyelashes and greenish temple veins. Soft lips and sunken cheeks. And then there were his eyes—one a crisp arctic blue, the other a woodsy green—burning above his receding chin.
    “It could be a reaction to the overwhelming flurry of pheromones the dogs put out. Have you always been this sensitive?”
    “Sort of, but this is different—like something in my brain’s opened up.”
    “Is there any chance you’re pregnant?”
    For some reason, in this red-lit, windowless room, with Dr. Vilkas’s head hovering two feet from mine, the word pregnant , applied to my own body, evokingmy invisible husband, uttered with a guttural dip toward the word’s heavy, eggy letter g , brought a hectic flush to my face.
    I wondered if Dr. Vilkas would’ve asked this question in the businesslike bustle of a coffee shop, or at school, in the fluorescent brightness of my portable.
    “No,” I mumbled. “I mean, probably not. I seriously doubt it. Though I guess it’s not impossible.”
    My cheeks felt hot. I vaguely remembered having sex with my husband once in the last month, late one night on the couch, struggling to concentrate, fidgeting to achieve a comfortable position, the television buzzing on mute.
    “I don’t mean to pry into your private life, but pregnancy would explain an intensification of olfactory perception.”
    Dr. Vilkas smirked again. He smiled at the oddest times, undercutting the professionalism of his words.
    I imagined him scrawny and naked, moving toward me with the purple heat of his erection, his chest narrow, hairless except for a few wisps around his nipples, his thighs shaggy, his fingers splayed to clamp my shoulders, to hold me steady for a proper mount. I saw myself drawing my knees up. I could smell the bleach in the motel sheet. And there would be other smells, intimate and bodily, pumped from his glands and blending with odors of feral dog.His breath would also have an odor, a mix of food and toothpaste and the health of his mouth, bacterial colonies, his tongue and gums seething with organisms, infinitesimal animals bursting with the drive to swarm. The room would reek of his equipment, plus the ghostly effluvia of inhabitants past—layers of eagerness and disappointment, ecstasy, bitterness, rage—feebly radiant but there, almost pulsing.
    His wallet on the nightstand. His underwear on the floor.
    “I’ve got to go,” I said, pulling cash from my purse, stacking it in front of me, wrinkled and grubby with the sweat of a million human hands.

    “What?” said my husband, for I had kissed him on the mouth; I had probed with my tongue until tasting the animal depths of him, hoping to pull this part of him out into the waning day. But he fiddled with his electric fence, which had a short, and I was tipsy, my heart getting ahead of itself, red leaves fluttering down from the maple trees.
    “You’ve been drinking,” he said.
    “Just a cocktail,” I said, “with a few of the teachers, after the workshop. But look at me now: I’m home.”
    I was pacing in little circles around him.
    “And we should do something,” I said. “Go somewhere, maybe?”
    “Where?”
    “I don’t know. A walk?”
    “What about the dogs?”
    “Take your stun gun. That would be fun.”
    “I don’t feel like it,” he said. “I’m kind of involved with this. And it’s about to get dark.” He turned back to the manual that had come with his electric-fence system.
    “Well, I’m going,” I said, taking big strides away from him. I was crossing the street now, dipping into the gulch where the mini-McMansion had sprouted up overnight. I looked back, half expecting to see my husband scrambling after me, but apparently the idea of wild dogs tearing me to pieces didn’t