quarterly journal of poetic and visual art
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Mannequin Envy quarterly journal of poetic and visual art home - submissions - contact |
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Fall 2007
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David Jordan Fall 2007 Real It's been a month since she dumped me and I'm still sleeping on my brother's couch. (I just don't like spending nights alone, you know?) It's Sunday -- Monday morning, really, 1 a.m. -- when she knocks. I pull on jeans, stumble to the door. There she stands, blonde and blue-eyed, lovely as the night she told me she was checking into a coast motel with the guy from the next desk. "I spent the weekend at his place," she says, "and I needed to see you. When I'm with him, I sometimes feel like I'm not real." I yank a shirt on and we drive across town to my apartment, where we split the last Budweiser as she tells me he listens to stereo "Rigoletto," he bought her a biography of William O. Douglas, he talks constantly of climbing their shared corporation. He has two kids. His ex-wife kept the girl, who is five. The boy is seven. He went to the coast with them. (Did the boy sleep in the next bed while they made love? Or do you rent a separate motel room for a seven-year-old so you can have privacy for sex? She didn't say.) He grew up in Yakima. He's thirty-one, had a vasectomy, wears a lapel pin advertising it. Sometimes she doesn't know what to say to him, so she just stares out the window. "Could we go to bed?" she asks. "Could we go to bed and you just hold me?" We go to bed. I hold her. After a while, she sleeps. She awakes at five-thirty, goes home to shower for work. She says she'll call. She doesn't. I guess she got real.
Bio: David Jordan, who lives in Bend, OR, is a former newspaperman and college teacher turned fictionwriter/poet. He has published stories and poems in more than eighty literary journals, including Nimrod, Rattle, Comstock Review, Thema, Main Street Rag and Ballyhoo Stories. |
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