Four Stories by J. Robert Lennon
Owl
HIS SON WOULDN’T TAKE the garbage out to the barn because there was a bat, the boy said, flapping around out there; so he muttered an oath, cinched the bag shut, and crunched across to the gravel driveway and through the dusk-darkened open door, only to find that the boy was right, there was something out there, not a bat, he realized as the thing swooped over his head and came to rest on the seat of a disused bicycle leaning against the rear window- not a bat but a small gray owl, its back to the gloom, batting itself futilely and halfheartedly against the still faintly lambent glass. It’s confused, he thought, confused and lost, so he set down the sack of trash and took the owl gently into his two hands, planning to release it through the open door, which he would have done immediately had the owl not dug its claws into his fingers and puffed itself up inside his cupped hands and said, in a high, strangled croak like a sick old woman’s, I’m not lost or confused and I’m not an owl, I’m the part of your son you don’t understand, and I beat myself against the glass not because I want to escape but because I want to know how it feels; and while this little speech from the owl gave him pause, he walked the rest of the way across the barn to the door and freed the thing into the night air, because he didn’t know what else to do and because it frightened him to have the creature in his hands; then he dropped the bag of trash into the garbage can as planned and went back into the house to apologize to his son.
Marriage (Sick)
SHE’S LYING ON THE SOFA. She says, I think I feel sick.
You think? he says. How can you think you feel sick? Either you feel sick or you don’t feel sick.
I don’t know if I feel sick, she says.
He says, You don’t know if you are sick. But surely you know if you feel sick.
I feel something, she says. And I don’t like it. But I don’t know what it is.
Well, again, he says. How do you know you don’t like it if you don’t know what it is?
She says, Fine. It’s a bodily unease. It’s the vaguest hint of nausea, coupled with the faintest headache, which might be the result of my posture, or not getting enough sleep. Or it could be the first sign of illness. These sensation s are unclear. They fade in and out of perception as the patterns of my thoughts and actions change. Okay?
Maybe it’s all in your head, he says.
I just told you it isn’t. I just told you it is in my body.
Well, he says, you think it’s your body. But it could be that it’s your mind planting ideas in your body.
In other words, she says, it’s my fucking body.
If you were really sick, he says, you’d know it. Believe me. There’s no mistaking it when it comes on.
I’ve been sick before, you idiot, she says.
Well, he says, remember what that was like. Are you feeling that now? I might be.
He makes a face.
You make me sick, she says.
He says, I get that as a rhetorical tactic. But in truth, it’s pretty unlikely that–
She vomits. It takes a while. A minute, at least. She makes no apparent effort to move to the toilet or to contain it to a small area.
She says, I’m sick.
You’re sick, he says. He leaves the room and comes back with a wet washcloth, a roll of paper towels, and a bottle of spray cleaner. He cleans off her face and then the furniture and floor. He leaves the room and comes back with a cup of tea and a blanket. He sets the tea on the coffee table and covers her with the blanket.
I’m sorry, he says.
She says, Are you sure? Yes.
Maybe you’re feeling something but you don’t know what it is. That’s a real phenomenon, she says, weakly. Maybe you’re saying you’re sorry because it’s socially appropriate, but you’re feeling something very different. Something you are too dense to have bothered to examine. Maybe you are feeling nothing at all.
He says nothing.
You’re sorry, she says, making quotation marks with her fingers.
After a while, he goes upstairs. After a while, she starts to cry. She doesn’t know why.
Eleven
ELEVEN: THE NUMBER of days until he’ll see her again; the number of times he says her name into his pillow every night and again when he wakes; the number of letters in her full name, spread over four syllables, one three four three; the number of steps from his bedroom to the bathroom where he balls eleven Kleenex in his fist, one by one, and sails them across the room and into the wastebasket, starting over at one if he misses, and in the morning his father asks who in the hell is using all the goddam Kleenex, and his mother says shush, don’t make him feel bad; eleven times he touches the light switch when he leaves the bathroom to return to bed, eleven seconds he counts before he can roll over in the bed, eleven scratches on his itchy ankle, eleven insert ions of his finger in each nostril when he gets the urge to pick his nose. Eleven is his age, and hers, and when she asked him, during math, what was with the tapping, because he had been making himself tap his desk eleven times on each corner with a pencil every time he imagined reaching across the space between them and stroking the dark skin of her resting hand, he said, it’s a project I’m working on; and instead of rolling her eyes and turning away as most girls would she looked straight at him and said, with the faintest hint of a smile, Well that has got to be some project; and before the teacher yelled at the two of them to stop talking–the two of them, reprimanded together!–he thought, Oh, God, why tomorrow, why does winter break begin tomorrow , because when they returned in January she would be twelve and the one thing that connected them, the one thing that was real to him, would be gone, and she would never speak to or smile at him again; she would be part of a new world, the world of twelve, which at this moment as he lay in bed on the first dreadful night of Christmas vacation , seemed as distant to him, as cold and imaginary, as the North Pole.
Marriage (Love)
SHE SAYS, DO YOU LOVE ME?
He appears to consider the question.
Well? she says.
I’m thinking about it, he says.
She says, We’re married! What the fuck is there to think about?
You’re rather difficult, he says.
So what! So are you!
He appears surprised. I’m difficult? In what way?
Are you kidding? she says. Your passivity. Your stubbornness. The way you pretend that things are simple when they’re not. Like right now. You’re acting like I just asked you a simple question. You’re sitting there trying to actually answer it!
But you’re the one who wants it to be simple, he says. You just want me to say yes. I’m acknowledging the complexity of the issue.
She says, No, see, that’s the simpleton’s idea of complexity. It’s actually not complexity, it’s oversimplification. If you were smart, you would have answered the question as though complexity wasn’t even a thing, and kept your idiot notions to yourself.
So, he says, when you say you love me, you’re lying?
No, you moron. I do love you, but I’m privately acknowledging, to myself, that love is not simple. Then I am vaulting over that layer of complexity and giving the rhetorically appropriate reply, because I am a higher fucking mammal capable of complex fucking reasoning.
Hmm, he says.
Okay, she says, how about this. Do you think I’m fat?
No, he says.
All right then.
I mean, he says, you’re fatter than when we–
No, no, no, she says.
But I like a woman who–
No! No. You haven’t heard a thing I said.
I can only be myself, he says.
False, she says.
I don’t see what other choices I have.
False.
I love you, he says.
I hate you, she says.
He strokes his chin for a little while. What layer is that? he says, finally.
I’m not at liberty to say.
I was right about your being difficult, he says. Admit that.
Saying that I am difficult is an insidious form of flattery to yourself, she says. By saying that I am difficult, you are saying that you are man enough to handle me. When in fact you are a fucking pussy.
He says, By saying that you hate me, you are flattering yourself You are saying that you are woman enough to be married to someone you hate. Who is a fucking pussy.
Touche, she says, four days later.
