Kiss Me, Stranger. Ron Tanner

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      Thirteen, to be exact.

      Some nights I dream that I cut off my left arm for the children’s dinner and roast it for hours like a succulent leg of lamb, basting it with a thick gravy of my own blood, the house humid with the heady sweetness of its baking. I’m not usually inclined to melodramatic thoughts, but our war is a melodrama and all of us feel the strain.

      The bullies of the Presidential Militia drafted my husband a year ago. I haven’t seen him since. Our eldest son, Lon, only fifteen, joined shortly thereafter because, I fear, he liked the look of the uniforms. Families, I’ve heard, have resorted to eating their house pets, something we don’t have, fortunately, and a number of children have run away because, apparently, they felt they’d find better elsewhere.

      Had you asked me, when I was a teenager, what would become of my life, I would have told you any number of fantasies, none of which have come true. I was good at math and assumed that I would be a scientist. I met Marcel (pronounced MAR-cel because he thought Mar-CEL too effeminate) at the two-year Poly-tech, where those of us without money went. He was by no means the handsomest or the smartest. To be honest: I was the smartest in our class of six hundred.

      When I found Marcel following me after class one day, I turned abruptly and asked him what he was doing. “Following my heart!” he answered, his voice breaking. He was, is, a small man with close-set hazel eyes, large, capable hands, and a beautiful smile. The kind of smile you’d expect from a kindergarten teacher, which was his secret aspiration. I had dated at least twenty boys by that time. The uncertainty the others cultivated, their callous disregard of my feelings, their adolescent self-absorption, made for an edgy excitement that I found almost addictive. I thought Marcel’s lack of guile an act, the way he’d blink at me, smile that beautiful smile, then say, “Don’t you look lovely today!” His kindness wore me down. Maybe I got tired of playing games. Marcel never lied. It was a novelty being with someone like that, and soon I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.

      Love sneaked up on me, it threw a hood over my head and kidnapped me. I found myself doing things I never imagined I would do. I opened a small computer-repair business with Marcel instead of going on for a degree in advanced mathematics. I agreed to live in a city row-house instead of a country home where I might have awakened every morning to birdsong instead of bus bleats. And then I let him have his dream, fourteen children instead of my suggested two. I feel selfish and embarrassed sometimes for having brought fourteen into the world. It’s a luxury Marcel and I clearly could not, cannot, afford. Strangers stare at us and shake their heads in dismay and disbelief. СКАЧАТЬ