Free Sarah Court by Craig Davidson Page A

her saying: “I never worry about Fletcher
Burger’s happiness. Someone’s always watching out
for Fletcher Burger’s happiness.” Pointing a finger at
me. It did anger and disgrace me—I recall weeping
over it in a Dollar Store, the most dispiriting and
pitiful of retail outlets—that I couldn’t love my wife
in the manner that, as a husband, I likely should
have. The way she probably deserved. Weeping while
picking through 99¢ canisters of discontinued,
highly flammable silly string. Two of which I bought
as stocking stuffers.
    We’d relied on that baby to salvage whatever was
broken. Yet we knew the only way that could happen
was if our kid was born malformed, encephalitic,
with a hole in its heart. A Lorenzo’s Oil scenario to
ennoble us through shared suffering. But as Abby
was perfectly healthy and neither of us suffered
from Münchausen syndrome to make us dissolve
rat poison into her pablum, well, that infant life
preserver we’d hoped would rescue us from the
misery of one another may as well have been tossed
off the deck of the Titanic. Fuck it all, anyway. Men
and women are fundamentally different creatures.
DNA helixes, desires, plumbing, hysteria levels.
What fool stuffs a mongoose and a viper into a gunny
sack, tosses the sack in a raging river, and harbours
hope of a pleasant outcome?
    Then Abigail was born . . . staring at her bloodscummed face I knew I’d do anything for her. Never
such ache for my wife. On our marital altar all I’d
been thinking was: I will let you down . Yet I can no
longer recall Abby’s face with exactitude. They say
when a person dies you often lose the image of them;
your memories degrade at the pace of that body
interred. She isn’t dead. Still, I cannot frame her
face. Her profile made of sand, continually erased by
a steady wind gusting through my head.
    The setting sun is a swollen ball backgrounding
shore pines as I crank the wheel starboard to butt
a
dock
girded
with
hacked-apart
radial
tires.
WELCOME TO BOBCAYGEON reads a sign above
the marina fuel pumps. Summer rentals all battened
down. Locals look startled in their habitat: slugs at
the heart of a lettuce head. Catch sight of myself in a
shop window. A winnowed aspect to my face. You’d
think its angles had been scored using a dentist’s drill.
    The bar’s enclosed by a wrought-iron fence.
Girls too young to be legal sit on the patio with a
jug of radiant green cocktail resembling engine
coolant. Inside it’s quiet enough to hear the sucksuck of sorrows in their drowning. The assembled
rubbydubs’ faces look fashioned from slum-grade
tin. Pitted, discoloured, robbed of whatever dignity
flesh possesses robing men of substance. Fuck me if
I don’t fit right in. The draft beer glows unhealthily.
Quaffing the blood of an irradiated god.
    Blood. Bones. Organs.
    Imagine your breastbone cracked apart. Organs
gouged from knits of silverskin. Price tags clipped
to each. How much is a gently used gallbladder
worth? Liver and pancreas and heart and kidneys
attached to threads extending thousands of miles.
Design of those commercial airline maps tucked
into seatbacks: a fountain of red threads departing
The International Airport of You. Those threads are
mercilessly winched and your parts skip-roll-bounce
on tethers, sucked through incision lips into new
habitats, plugged into varied veinwork, pumped
with foreign bloods. Your skin and bones rolled up
like a moth-eaten carpet. Can a body shatter into
some greater good? Are some men worth more in
pieces? Again, I say: Fuck it. I’ll do as much damage
as I can. This hilarious scene in my mind: my bloodslicked organs in vats and when the faceless butchers
get to my liver—the crown jewel!—it’s naught but
a blasted wineskin riddled with ulcers and while by
rights I should be dead I rise up in a triumphant jerk
to shriek:
    “You
bought
a LEMON! Caveat
emptor,
motherfuckers!”
    Drain my