Free Into the Great Wide Open by Kevin Canty

model come in and we all took pictures, she was sort of draped up there on this stand.”
    “That must be a strange feeling.”
    “I don’t know,” she said, shuffling to the next. “She was an old friend of Lee’s, it must have been the hundredth time she’d done it. Really she was beautiful, just big.”
    “You never see her face?”
    “That was one of the rules—no faces.” She laughed, a little nervous. “I don’t know if it was a jealous husband or what. Maybe it’s just, you wouldn’t want to walk into a coffee shop and see yourself buck naked on the wall.”
    “Buck Naked,” Kenny said. “Sounds like a bass player in a punk band. Maybe I’ll change my name.”
    “One of the things my mother says,” Junie said, shuffling over to another sex-proof green pepper. “She started out in Wyoming, riding horses and everything. She says
crick
instead of
creek
. If she could go out every morning and chop her firewood with a hatchet, she’d be happier.”
    “Right,” Kenny said.
    “I’m not kidding,” she said, leafing forward. “She’s just not urban. I mean, she’s not anything—she left Wyoming behind a long time ago, too. She talks about it. Oh, shit.”
    “What was that?”
    “Nothing,” she said.
    “Let me see,” Kenny said. A picture had come out of the pile but it was different; just a glance, a glimpse before she shuffled it back into the pile. What? The shape of a long, tall body, it had to be Junie. Something with the face, and a dark tangle of hair. “What was that?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “An experiment.”
    “Let me see,” Kenny said.
    A standoff. She wouldn’t look at him. He saw the flush across her cheeks, the pink coloring her white lifeless skin. Restored to life, he thought. She turned and inspected his face, and when she spoke she was apologizing, pleading. “I didn’t know these were in here,” she said. “I didn’t, I don’t know. I didn’t make these for other people.”
    “I can keep a secret,” Kenny said. As he had been wanting to, he put his hand on her shoulder. She flinched away, then came to a tentative rest; a truce; OK for now, I guess, I suppose. She was wearing a black blouse of t-shirt material that was cut low in a kind of scoop, off her shoulders and across her chest, so that his hand rested half on cloth, half on skin. The architecture of bones and tendons at the base of her neck, a little hollow, shelter. You be whatever you turn out to be, he thought. I’ll just fixate on your body.
    “I’d rather not,” she said.
    “I’d like to see.”
    She turned toward his face, resentful now: she didn’t want to show him, didn’t have the will to refuse him. Turned her face away, and turned up the next picture, the next, the next, fanning them out like a fortune-teller’s deck.
    The pictures had all been taken at the same time, the sameplace, a room with bare white walls and dark carpet. In the background, on the right, was a hallway that led to a bathroom, or so he guessed—it was dark and hard to see. In the left side of the picture stood Junie, naked. Naked as opposed to nude; nobody would look at these pictures and mistake them for art, he thought. No green peppers here. The strange thing about the face, the thing he had glimpsed in passing, turned out to be a sleeper’s eyeshade, the kind you find in drugstores; a black, blind version of the Lone Ranger’s mask, tied on with black strings that dangled. The light was hard black-and-white. Her hair was longer, shoulder-length as he remembered it, with too-short little-girl bangs. His eyes kept going back to the mask on her face, that and the tangle of her pubic hair, which was black and very thick. It spread in tendrils up her belly, down her thighs, unsuspected by Kenny. It was almost masculine, it had weight and presence. Kenny couldn’t keep his eyes away, that and the mask, balancing off against each other. There was a black cord snaking out from under her foot.