Free Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories by Lucia Perillo

hair drop.
    The girl figured he wouldn’t have started if this were not a moment that he took some relish in arriving at with women, this cathartic moment of his getting the story out. Turned out it was a former girlfriend, with a subplot involving her waving around a kitchen knife. Of course, aggravated assault was just the plea deal he agreed to, and she didn’t need him to explain what aggravated assault turned into when you decoded it backward through the courts. She didn’t say the word, but she did ask why he pled guilty.
    “She was the one who’d come over, drunk out of her skull. She was the one who sucked my dick, but how do you prove that?”
    The girl didn’t know what to say after this; to suggest another game of backgammon seemed like a backward step. More wine appeared to be the only option, more dope to unravel the seam that he’d just stitched. They slept for a while, and when they woke the rain had slacked. So they stumbled down the trail to the beach, just because the beach was there and they were paying for it to be there and had not felt it underfoot.
    Way down below, a small cove scalloped into the woods, hemmed by a mound of driftwood that the ocean had tossed up. There were only a few houses whose windows glinted atop the bluff, so they took off their jeans and waded in until their legs began to buckle from the cold. Then the man staggered off to sit with his back against a rock, and with his legs outstretched and his jeans hanging like a stole around his neck he hollered for her to come get on top. When she did, she could hear the crunch of shells beneath him, and their sharp edges egged her on — she wanted the shells to make little cuts on the backs of his legs, so he would see them in the mirror tomorrow and know for sure that they were real. That she was real. She did not want to be a ghost.
    “I thought so,” he said when they were finished, him sitting there in the lee of the rock looking humpbacked and old, his underwear snagged around one knee.
    “You thought what?”
    “What I told you. It did turn you on.”
    The girl thought about saying no, then she thought about saying yes, before striking what she thought would be an enigmatic pose. But the spell she was attempting to cast was undermined by a strong scent, which these two in their theatrics had not noticed. On the other side of the rock they found a dead dolphin, its black and white markings too stark to be real, its eyehole full of flies.
    By the time they limped back up the trail, sand spackling the wet between the girl’s legs, the owner of the bed-and-breakfast was waiting for them at the cabin. Checkout time was an hour ago, she said in her tight-lipped Anglo-Canadian brogue. Quickly they cleaned the room as best they could, stuffing the broken chair and torn sheets and bottles and greasy bones under the bed, before stopping at the main house to settle up. The man paid with a credit card that was in his brother-in-law’s name, and when the girl asked about this as they sped back toward the ferry, he said that his brother-in-law was just doing him a favor because he’d been bankrupt and couldn’t get his own credit.
    Then he laughed at the wrinkled expression on the girl’s face, told her not to get her panties in a knot. Bankruptcy was just another rite of passage, like getting married and divorced. “And I bet you haven’t experienced those yet either,” he said. “Just wait a few years. Your disaster machinery’s barely had the chance to get itself warmed up.”

    STANFORD STRICKLAND , that was his name, a name with the ring of a movie star from the forties. Or a famous highbrow murderer who has all but been forgotten. I could tell my mother was reading it off a small scribbled sheet when she phoned the other day to say that a man with this name was trying to get in touch with me.
    “I know it’s none of my business, but he sounded. . I don’t know. . kind of funny.”
    “Funny” is my mother’s word for