Free Open by Lisa Moore

sunburned, peeling nose, her fiercely blue eyes, a moist film of perspiration near her temple. He felt a physical ache in his chest because she was so unspeakably beautiful to him. Then he couldn’t remember what he had been reading, the argument fell apart. When he glanced back at the book the letters were fuzzy. It was too dark to continue reading. This was why he hadn’t wanted kids. They were a constant interruption. The field of loose ice sank away, nothing remaining but a phrase, the abandonment of being , which might have been Sanskrit. Where had Anna been that day? She was pregnant with Pete. Lyle had watched the pale arm of the flashlight riffling through the trees.
    Anna said, Lyle, are you getting the bottle? Because I’m waiting here.
    He was a man dreaming he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man. The winter night asserted itself. Snow pinging the glass. He could hear music, from downtown. The red S of the Scotiabank was in the top right corner of Alex’s window, it had a chef’s hat of snow glowing pinkly.
    When Lyle was eighteen he’d slept with a girl named Rachel he’d met in first year university. Rachel was seventeen and he slept with her maybe half a dozen times. The first time, they’d met in the Breezeway, a raucous university bar with roving coloured spotlights.
    They had never made an effort to get together after that; they’d just happen upon each other. The last time they met like this was in the wind tunnel between the library and the chemistry building. She was wearing a long candy-cane stripedscarf. It stood out in front of her, rippling. The wind was blowing her across a skim of ice and she was squealing and she slid into his arms. Their chests smacked, and when he bent his nose into the icy fox-fur trim he could smell her lipgloss.
    It was four-thirty in the afternoon, already dark. His wrists stuck out of the leather gloves his mother had insisted he wear and he remembered that his wristbones felt like glass, that a sharp bang might have cleanly snapped off his hands. It was below zero. They’d gotten a bus to her parents’ house. The windows of the bus were grey with salt and a man sat beside him with crutches that cuffed his forearms and his legs were twisted and stiff like pipe cleaners.
    Rachel told Lyle he should stop reading philosophy. She said, Literature is such a kick. You’ve got to read that. And she looked out the window over her shoulder as if one of the stout, soft-covered Penguins she had jammed in her knapsack — Middlemarch, Anna Karenina , or Crime and Punishment — was unfolding on the street. He told her his wrists were cold and she took the glove off his right hand and put her searing mouth over his wristbone so it bristled with needles like a startled porcupine.
    When they arrived at her parents’ house, somewhere in Mount Pearl, she lifted a curled real estate guide from the mailbox, a hardened baton sheathed in ice. She poked his stomach with it, and when he looked down she slapped his cheek. The ice on the guide smashed to pieces that skittered across the concrete step. The slap left a sting.
    That was for nothing, she said, don’t try anything. Sheturned her back on him and unlocked the door and he followed her inside.
    They smoked some pot in the bathroom, a white gauzy curtain gone yellow with age flying out the open window against the night sky. That evening of lovemaking has come over him lots of times since; often when he’s tired or drunk, it overtakes him, haunts him, so he can almost smell the crackling hope of the new subdivision, the whiff of cedar and camphor in the pink bedspread ruffles that had been unexpectedly rough against his cheek, the stinky dope meeting the stormy wind. There had been a marmalade cat with a fluffy tail drawing up the gold and rust shag carpet with her nails, very near his ear, on the living-room floor.
    Pot exacted from him a languid thoroughness while making love. Every touch lost its path, outlived its life