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The first thing they do is embrace. Fat smiles stay on their faces all the way to the restaurant.
He eats ribs with sticky, podgy fingers. She bites chicken wings with shiny lips. They have a pudding each and share another.
In the car, she tells him about a girl she saw, with a short, spotted skirt that flapped around one long limb.
‘There wasn’t even a stump to satisfy me, just a space where the leg should’ve been’. ‘Was she very pretty?’
‘Yes she was.’ They stop talking and at traffic lights he strokes her thigh, instead of saying
how sad her story sounds. Quietly, he resents the one-legged girl for changing the mood between them, resents his wife for telling him the tale at all.
Making love to her later, it’s a pretty teenager sitting astride his wide belly. One leg tucked behind, leaving the torso, smooth and deformed, moving over him.
Every time I sit and piss in your bathroom I don’t stare at my toes or pale hairs on my thigh, I stare at the shelf above the radiator. Cacharel perfume, Clinique toner No.1, a glass jar of cotton wool pads, razors, dust. Wrapped soaps from hotels, Clarins freebies, a deep jar of moisturiser, that I opened once, saw the fossilized swipes of her fingers.
Eventually, I ask if we can move it all. You are frowning, quizzical. I pull on your arm, lead you upstairs to look at the shelf where we realise her belongings have morphed into mine. Untouched for so long they were invisible, now a woman breathes again in this house and you thought I had placed my things there, that I had unpacked them, that I was staying.
My trowel spoons out marbles, three muddy eyeballs, each with its curve of yellow iris. I wipe them clean, let them clink in my palm,
imagine my house with children in - the marbles’ journey from bedroom, to pocket, to garden, to ground. I push them back into the wet dark,
dud bulbs for worms to pull blindly into sockets of soil, their squirming lengths expecting them to rot or take root.
I know he sweats in his bed about me. Nights before races are longest, as he dreams of the money my feathers can make him, sees my eager beak pointing
towards home. Nights like this are hard for me too, caging us together, my love and I, leaving me to nudge her plumy neck, peck that secret part beneath her wing.
He relies on widowhood to get me back, simple but it works. Passion, sex, comfort being parted from all that, makes me fly faster, guarantees I’m a winner. When that businessman
in Taiwan, bet $50,000, did he know he wagered on mourning and love? At six days old, they punched a ring on my leg, the number defining my lot, who I belonged to and he does care for me -
pets me with chubby, tender hands but she’s the one who increases my rapidity, her softness accelerates swiftness, lift up your wing, high so I can see, I’m coming home.
‘Widowhood’
- term used to describe the period racing pigeons spend apart
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