Free Knife Fight and Other Struggles by David Nickle Page B

grew from the far bank. It was as though she lived on the edge of a deep forest.
    “You like?” she asked from behind me. I said that I did. She reached around and took my hand—and truly, I was not surprised when she placed it on her naked hip. I turned and saw that her dress was abandoned, sloughed off like a skin, on the floor behind her.
    “You are very beautiful,” I said as she withdrew, and she laughed—softly now—and for an instant turned away.
    “You don’t believe me?” I said, and she answered, “No. But you’re a pretty liar,” and the instant passed, and she kissed me once more.
    “Oh God, forgive me,” she said as she reached down and fumbled with my belt buckle. I reached to help her, but she batted my hand away and finished the work, bent down and yanked my trousers to my knees. I stumbled a bit, and at that she laughed, and pushed, and I fell back, landing hard on my behind just short of the sofa.
    Cheryl did not ask for my forgiveness. She laughed, fell to her hands, crawled forward so her face hung over mine, grinning like a mountain cat’s. She moaned low. I kicked off my shoes, my trousers. She descended upon me. And in this way we copulated, swaying and growling as if to the rhythms of the old chants, on the thin carpet over her apartment’s hard concrete floor.

    I wrote down the number of my mobile before I left Cheryl’s apartment that afternoon, but she told me not to expect a call.
    “You got to go,” she said, her voice flat, when she finally came out of the washroom. She had clothed herself in light blue track pants and a sweater. Her feet, still bare, never lifted far off the floor as she led me to the door. I didn’t hear her crying, not once that day, but her eyes were red and wet. Perhaps I should have apologized, although for what I could not fathom. So I said all I could think of—
    “You are beautiful.”
    —which only enraged her. She shouted at me to get out, called me names, waved her fists, but I put my hands up in surrender and told her I would leave if that was what she wished. This placated her, and Cheryl stood, huffing and swallowing and glaring, as I gathered myself and hurried into the dim corridor.

    I ate lunch with Ruman on Monday but we did not talk about very much. He did thank me for joining him at the congregation, or more properly, for the ride there, but he said he wouldn’t need another; he’d made an arrangement with Rose. He didn’t, thankfully, ask me if I’d enjoyed myself at the service or afterwards, and I didn’t ask him. I made one feeble joke—biting into my apple, peering at the pulp I announced, “No face today.” Ruman just shook his head and waved the little blasphemy away with the flat of his hand.
    On Tuesday, Ruman brought a Bible with him and made it clear he preferred its company to mine. So I ate quietly, this one last time, at the same table as he, dipping his bread in soup as he thumbed the pages of his book. Did he smile as he read, or was I tricked by the way the overhead fluorescents cast shadows across his lips? I did not stay long enough, or look hard enough, to be sure. On Wednesday, I ate alone.
    By Friday, the supervisors had responded to my request to join the evening shift.

    In the beginning, the sun set an hour after I started work, and as the nights lengthened, darkness encompassed all my days.
    Viktor was glad to see me.
    “We should work the night all the time!” he said. “It’s cool in the summer, and just as warm as day in the winter. And leaving that aside—it suits us, yes?—this peaceful time.”
    Viktor was right. There was work to be done, and we saw to it; but the urgency of the place . . . it was muted. When the trucks had pulled away, and one was moving the merchandise to and from its places . . . one might take a moment, listen to the sound of one’s footsteps, and stop beneath high lights that only, at best, kept the shadows at bay. One might feel enveloped. Protected.
    At