—After Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2*

It helped little to see so clearly what she should have done. She should have bristled at his look. But she had followed him instead. A moment working on her, like fascination when bark is peeled and wet scent perfumes the air. That first allure that lets the mind slip into what it doesn’t fully want to know.

:::

Fast enough and nothing will see, the hunter imagines a deer thinking, in its deer way. But in a watched tree line’s stillness, motion will be the first hint. The flicker of an ear.

Days pass without result, and he drops equipment to ground from the stilt blind. Loads it in his truck. A kind of leafing through, the hunter thinks. Days and nights.

:::

She looks out her second-floor window at more suburbs unfolding into an infinite regress. Pale forests of timbers where new houses are being built. Green lawns rolled down.

His hands are rough on her skin, and his hair still smells of wood smoke. Drink of water, she whispers later, so he will not fully wake. And without pausing to put on a robe she’s down the stairs, again. Out the kitchen door and across to the garage. She finds the hidden key. Drives naked with the windows down, to a wood she knows, by a river. There she makes a fast push through understory brush. Smelling the moon’s metal on gliding water.

:::

He’s up before dawn, on the early phase of his swing shift. She sits across from him at the breakfast table in her gray robe. His face is glum above coffee, and he glances up at her. “You have a scratch on your cheek,” he says. “So do you,” she notes. He smiles faintly and rises to leave, his uniform tight. Black leather-cased gear squeaking at his belt.

:::

Upstairs she opens her robe before a tall mirror. Red forest. Memory always teeming; how is it not too full to admit more? she wonders. But, then, why should one of its whippings ever be imagined the last? She thinks it might be nice to live in a desert. Thorn of prickly pear and ocotillo. Sword and teeth of agave.

 

 

* Publisher’s Note:

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (oil painting on canvas, 1912) by French Cubist painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) is held by Philadelphia Museum of Art; link retrieved on 23 August 2023:
https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/51449

Daryl Scroggins

has taught creative writing and literature at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of North Texas, and the Writer’s Garret, in Dallas. He now lives in Marfa, Texas. He is the author of This Is Not the Way We Came In, a collection of flash fiction and a flash novel (Ravenna Press), Winter Investments: Stories (Trilobite Press), and Prairie Shapes: A Flash Novel (winner of the 2004 Robert J. DeMott Prose Contest). His poems, short stories, and creative nonfictions have appeared in magazines and anthologies across the country, including Blink Ink, Cutbank, Eastern Iowa Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Star 82 Review, and Third Wednesday, among others.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Suitcase Full of Clay: An Ekphrastic e-Collection in MacQueen’s Quinterly, aka MacQ (Issue 18, April 2023)

⚡ Roadshow, microfiction by Daryl Scroggins in MacQ (Issue 15, September 2022); one of three pieces by Scroggins selected as Finalists in “The Question of Questions” Ekphrastic Writing Challenge

⚡ Spring, microfiction by Scroggins in MacQ (Issue 12, March 2022)

⚡ Writer Boy, microfiction in MacQ (Issue 4, July 2020); nominated by MacQ for Best Microfiction 2021

⚡ Field Trips, flash fiction by Scroggins in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019)

⚡ New to School, microfiction in Eclectica (Jan/Feb 2018)

⚡ Two Fictions: “Almost Baptized” and “Against the Current” in New Flash Fiction Review (Issue 10, January 2018)

⚡ Eight Stories: A Mini-Chapbook by Daryl Scroggins at Web del Sol