Free The Lime Twig by John Hawkes Page A

mend the curtain, but her knees were in the way of the needle. Something was coming toward the window and it made her lonely. She went to the closet and from behind the duster and pail took down Banks’ bottle of spirits and drank a very small glass of it. The missing of Michael came over her, the loneliness, the small grief, and she was drifting quickly down the day and time itself was wandering.
    “Here puss, here puss. …”
    Limping, bristling its hairs, the cat appeared near the pantry door. It ate quickly, choked on every mouthful, the head jerked up and down. The silver of the fish and speckles of the cat’s eye caught the light. Now and then the dish scraped a little on the floor. Her back to the window, kneeling, Margaret watched the animal eat. And the cat, creature that claws tweed, sits high in the hallway, remains incorrigible upon the death of its mistress, beds itself in the linen or thrusts its enormous head into an alley, now sucked and gagged on the fish as if drawing a peculiar sweetness from the end of a thin bone.
    But there was nothing sweet for her. She had dropped crumbs for the birds, she had leaned from the window, she had given the cat its dish. In the window—it looked out on the laundry court, was hard to raise—she had smelled the cool drifting air of spring and glanced at wireless antennas pulled taut across the sky. Annie must have heard the frame crash up, or must have caught the sound of her humming. Because Annie had come to theadjoining window, thrust out her blonde head, at twenty past two had jammed her sharp red elbows on the sill and talked for a while.
    “Rotten day,” Annie had said to her.
    “Michael mentioned it would be clear.”
    “It’s a rotten day. How’s his horse?”
    “Oh, he’s a fine horse. A lovely horse. …”
    “I don’t know who Mike thinks he is, to go off and get himself a horse. But I’ve always wanted to kiss a jockey.”
    And Annie had taken up a little purse and counted her change in the window. Together they had heard a tram eating away its tracks, heard the hammer and hawking of the world on the other side of the building. It was spring in the sunlight and they leaned toward each other, and the smell of cooking mutton had come into the courtyard.
    Now, between three and six, there was nothing sweet for her. Even her friend Annie had left the flat next door, and Michael was gone.
    “I’m dead to the world,” she said aloud.
    Behind cataracts of pale eyes the cat looked across at her, cat with a black and yellow head which a good milliner, in years past, might have sewn to the front of a woman’s high-crowned feathered hat. Margaret scratched on the floor, for a moment smiled. Her cat circled round the dish. It was so dark now that she could not see into the kitchen. From somewhere a draft began blowing the bottom of her skirt and she wondered what a fortuneteller—one of those old ladies with red hair and a birthmark—wouldmake of her at this moment. There was the beef broth, water to be drawn and boiled, the sinister lamp to light, a tom photograph of children by the sea. Cold laurels in this empty room.
    “He has only gone to look at the horse in Highland Green,” she said. “It isn’t far.”
    Once the madame of a frock shop had tried to dress her in pink. And even she, Margaret, had at the last minute before the gown was packed, denied the outrageous combination of herself and the color. Once an Italian barber had tried to kiss her and she had escaped the kiss. Once Michael had given her an orchid preserved in a glass ball, and now she could not find it. How horrible she felt in pink; how horrible the touch of the barber’s lips; how heavy was the glassed orchid on her breast.
    Feeling lucky?
Soon Michael would ask her that, after the sink was empty and her apron off. It was never luck she felt but she would smile.
    In the darkness the cat swallowed the last flake of herring—Michael usually fed it, Michael understood how it