“Hold still a second. Masks don’t go on by themselves.”
“I don’t like costumes. Especially this one. And I hate the mask. It itches, all of it, and I won’t wear it. None of it.”
“Honey, it’s a Halloween party, not Thanksgiving. You wear costumes at Halloween parties, duh.” L smiled and R checked for any warmth behind her smile, any warmth.
“You don’t think what you had me wear to Gracie’s at Thanksgiving was a costume? Gray slacks. Long-sleeve shirt with enough starch to—”
“You looked good, R. Would have looked better if you’d kept the shoes on, but still, good.”
“And whose fault was that? No one wears shoes in Gracie’s house. It’s a special house.”
“OK, I’ll give you that. But you have to admit her carpets”—they finished the sentence as a single, singsong voice—“still look brand new.”
“But I hate the color. Mauve? Who likes mauve?”
“It’s their choice, R.”
“You like the color? You can’t like the color.”
“What I think doesn’t matter, and I think it looks like puke.” L adjusted R’s mask. “There, you look quite dashing as whatever you’re supposed to be.”
“I can still feel the plastics seeping into my skin.” R’s mask depicted a distorted face, elongated, not unlike Munch’s The Scream, except one eye dangled out of its socket on a thin wire spring that had been stretched by one of the kids last Halloween so that the eye, which was meant to protrude just slightly out of the socket and bounce just slightly in front of the socket, now hung even with R’s chin, swaying back and forth with even the slightest movement of R’s head.
“Why can’t I just go the way I want to go? Normal clothes? Comfortable?”
“Because it’s a costume party, dear. You know that. Everybody’s got to be someone. It’s expected.” L was dressed as a princess. A Disney princess, she supposed. She wasn’t sure which one. Nor cared. Where R would fight the ridiculous, L would embrace it. “A princess,” she’d said. “How stupid is that? I love it.” She had planned to take a bowl of apples—“the poisoned ones”—as their offering to Gracie, thought better of it, and threw together a cheese plate and three tubes of crackers—saltines, Walmart’s store brand. She knew R would want to question the saltines, would want to suggest the more expensive Carr’s Variety Pack she had stashed in the back of the pantry. And she knew that R would not go past “would want to question,” that he would be pleased to find the Carr’s Variety Pack still safely ensconced in the back of the pantry when they got home.
“This is ridiculous.” As he spoke, R jerked his head away from L’s mask-adjusting hands—long fingers, slender, no nail polish, one of the first things R had noticed about L and one—ten?—of the things that most attracted him ... yes, the way she moved those hands, those fingers, through air as if she—they—were a part of that air, hand and air molecules coalescing, intertwining, singular—so that the eye, the still dangling eye, snapped up, striking R through the mask’s empty eyehole smack dab onto R’s very real and very open eye. “Holy shit, L, you’ve blinded me.”
“Oh, save the drama for the party, Igor, or whoever you’re supposed to be. You should have stayed still.”
Pause. Blink.
“I think my cornea’s detached.”
“You mean retina. And it’s not. But something’s detached all right—from reality.”
The heel of R’s left hand was attempting to rub light circles around the smitten and now very closed eye but instead found itself rubbing the plastic molding around the mask’s eyehole, causing flecks of black glitter to flee the mask’s surface, some flecks choosing to flit and dance with a spasmodic lightness in the air before descending haphazardly to a not-so-new-looking carpet while other flecks—just a few—found their way into R’s eye, which he had, most unfortunately, reopened while trying to rub light and comforting circles around it.
R’s hand ceased its light circling—“I’m blind. Are you listening to me? Blind!”—and reached for the bottom of the mask in order to rip “the fucking thing” off, but instead—his blinded eye now blinking frantically in an effort to expel the black glitter—his fingers became entangled with the dangling eyeball, causing an already stretched spring to stretch even farther before releasing and snapping upwards—almost violently—and, well, we all know what happened next.
“Oh, for the love of—now I really am blind!” The flat of R’s palm was pressed hard against the afflicted eye.
“And I’m the queen of France. Settle, R, just settle. You’ll live. Let me see.” R could see—or, more accurately, feel—L’s fingers remove the mask, pulling the bottom out, up, and then away from his face. L’s fingers gently removed R’s hand and began to trace the edges of R’s reddening eye, the tips of her fingers defining his eyebrow, his upper cheek just below the eye, the curved space where his nose began to protrude from his face, and back to his eyebrow. Slowly, twice.
R felt himself becoming aroused. He did not want to become aroused, no, not at this moment. He wanted righteous anger, irrational affirmation.
He got arousal.
L’s fingers, just the tips, the very tips, drifted down R’s cheek. “Better?”
“But—”
“Better?”
And now the fingertips were joined by another set, tracing both of R’s cheeks, still lightly, and then down, across a cursed costume that no longer seemed to itch, a spent skin that he seemed to be shedding, crinkly piece by crinkly, brightly colored piece until he found himself once again, in the next already ticking moment, with L, lying on a carpet that had clearly seen use, both laughing, both naked except for the shoes L insisted they keep on.
has won the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Contest, New Delta Review’s Matt Clark Prize, New Woman Magazine’s Grand Prize for Fiction, and Solstice’s Editors’ Award; and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work appears in over fifty journals, including Arts & Letters, Juked, The Malahat Review, Meniscus (forthcoming), Potomac Review, Prime Number, and Two Thirds North. He holds a PhD in English and is a voting rights activist and an advocator for sanity.
