Patti Smith Jackson

Shoot The Swans

a short story
by
Patti Smith Jackson

Obviously, the only acceptable time to wear a penis-shaped pacifier around one's neck is during a bachelorette party. Still, Lisa wasn't feeling good about hers when a guy named Dub asked her to dance. 

"Dub. That's a strange name." She had to yell, the music was so loud.

"It's really William." He yelled back.

"Oh," she paused. "Oh, Dub, as in "double U."

"Yup."

That's when she noticed his cowboy boots and the peculiar way in which he thrust his hips. Guys who wear pointy, scaly boots should not move their pelvis that way, she thought. It made him seem oily. She felt herself go stiff and self-conscious.

"I'm thirsty," she yelled into his ear.

He rubbed that ear as they walked off the dance floor.

"Listen, you want me to stick around, or do you want to get back to your girlfriends," he shouted.

"Suit yourself." She looked around the bar before letting her eyes land on him. He had a receding hairline going on his well-proportioned head. Estimated time of baldness? Maybe five years. But he had liquid blue eyes with lashes a girl could envy. "You're cute."

"I'm twenty-eight." He fingered her penis. She found that charming.

"Oh, yeah. I would have guessed that. I'm a hundred and twenty."

He paused, but only for a moment. "So, what do you do?"

"Graphics, layouts, stupid stuff like that."

"Seriously, you want me to stick around?"

"My best friend, Dana over there, is getting married next weekend." She pointed to the dance floor at the unmistakable bride-to-be, a puffy veil perched on her head, eyes closed, arms in the air, swaying drunkenly to the music like she just found Jesus. "I'm in the wedding. I have to wear a dark-blue dress with gigantic pink roses and cap sleeves that make my arms look like sausages."

"Want a date for the wedding? I could be your date."

"Naw, that's okay. I plan to get really drunk. You want some eggs?"

They left the hazy bar, stepping out into the freshly minted cold of an early-October night. She twirled the penis pacifier around her finger as they walked.

"You can take that thing off now."

"No, I don't think I will. It helps me remember just how pathetic I am."

"You're not pathetic," he said.

"How do you know?"

He put his arm on her shoulder and they strolled like old cronies toward the cheesy light of the Denny's across the parking lot. When they got to the door, she noticed his smile had turned to a slight smirk.

"Don't worry. You don't have to buy my breakfast," she said.

Late enough to seat themselves, they slid into either side of a bright-orange booth and used mammoth menus to wall off their faces. Tiffany, the waitress, brought them water that tasted like iron, but Lisa drank it anyway. His looks made her thirsty. She suddenly wanted to give him a hickey on his flat stomach, right above his pubic hair. Tiffany came back, popped her gum and asked for their order. Lisa handed her the menu and ordered a Grand Slam.

"I met a guy," she said to her therapist, Claire, the next Thursday - two days and counting until Dana's wedding.

"Did you sleep with him?"

"No. I just met him."

"That's progress."

"If you say so."

It had been a year since Lisa first dragged herself out of bed, drove behind a haze of tears and stumbled into Claire's unadorned waiting room. She had just been dumped by a lawyer who belched his way through meals at expensive restaurants and made love like a robot. A week into their relationship, for reasons she could not explain then or now, she had convinced herself that he and his two-story brick in a gated neighborhood were her future. But he'd broken up with her on their way home from a performance of "Cats", which she pretended to like but detested, just as she had been pretending to like his Neil Diamond collection. From their first meeting on, Claire's goals seemed to be to get Lisa to a.) stop getting involved with men who repulsed her; and b.) stop sleeping with men before she had a chance to realize that they did repulse her.

"What's he like?"

Lisa thought about it. This guy named Dub wasn't like Matthew, Dana's fiance. On their first date, Matthew took Dana to the symphony. Afterward, they ordered mussels, sipped champagne, and discussed how many children they wanted. Before the night was over, he invited her to France.

"Muscular," she answered.

"Anything else?"

"He drives a pickup and asked me to go turkey scouting with him on Sunday."

"Sounds promising," Claire said, beaming.

"Yeah, whatever."

"You're doing it again, aren't you?"

"What, biting my nails? Eating Doritos and bean dip at two a.m.? Drinking jugs of wine alone? I guess I'm busted."

"No," Claire said, drawing out the word for emphasis. "Comparing your insides to Dana's outsides. Remember what we've talked about."

Lisa threw her head back and looked up at the dropped ceiling tiles of Claire's office. She hated those tiles. A coffee-colored stain spread like gloom above their heads. Lisa also made a sport out of spotting cobwebs in the corners of the office. Yep, there's one, and oops, two more in the far corners. She wished Claire would spring for a maid service.

"Lisa, stay with me, here. You know that you can't feel good about yourself until you stop comparing yourself to Dana, or anyone else for that matter."

Lisa let out a long, lung-deflating sigh. She knew it was her worst habit, the one most ingrained in the fiber of her being.  She and Dana had been friends since the first tennis team practice of their ninth-grade year at John Burroughs High School. Dana went to the private prep school because her parents could afford to send her there. Lisa went there only because what John Burroughs wanted more than anything was a state championship in girl's tennis. While Lisa's family was securely middle class, there was no way her father would have popped for the hefty tuition of this exclusive school. As a public defender, he prided himself on his no-frills values. It was her mother who insisted that Lisa's innate ability to hit winners on the tennis court take her places. And the first place it took her was the tony campus of John Burroughs. What her mother didn't grasp, what she couldn't grasp, was that, like her, Lisa carried the loneliness and isolation gene. She often felt like one of those kids who had to wear a little medical bracelet that announced to the world that they were allergic to penicillin, only hers read "I'm allergic to you. Stand back." Being awarded a scholarship to this exclusive school, where some of the students drove cars more expensive than the house her family lived in, only reinforced Lisa's belief that no one would ever understand her.

But, from the moment they first stepped onto the tennis court together, Dana seemed to "get her." They shared an instant intimacy that their coach nurtured by pairing them up in every doubles match of their four-year run as, first, strong contenders, then state champs. They were a perfect match. Dana, long and lean, delivered a scorching serve to which few in their league could reply. If they did, Lisa's quickness made cutting off the ball with a stinging poach look easy. But even more than their harmony on the tennis court, it was that, during their high-school years, Dana's parents had been in the throes of splitting up, getting back together, then splitting up again, permanently. The instability served to shake Dana's reality enough that she looked for a boost Lisa's devotion could provide. Whatever it was, Lisa had found a connection with this tall, beautiful girl that she would want to hold on to no matter what it took. It was Claire's theory that over the years, Lisa had given up huge pieces of herself to keep Dana's acceptance alive.

"Not that it's Dana's fault," Claire would never fail to emphasize. "But subconsciously, you and Dana have built a little system where she's always right and you're always a step behind. What we need to do is retrain your mind to believe in yourself enough to step out of that shadow."

She woke up on Sunday morning with a pounding headache, a mouth full of cement, and Dana's father sleeping in her bed. She tapped her forehead with the heel of her hand. I doubt this is what Claire meant, she thought.

Dana's father had always won the sexiest dad contest of tennis team sleepovers. "That's gross you guys, cut it out," Lisa could hear Dana say. She shuddered to think what Dana would say now.

Flashes from the night before blinked in her head like little bomb blasts. Dana's wedding reception, staged at the winery where they'd all worked as waitresses right after graduating from college. The utility closet. Her standing next to it with an open bottle of . something . Merlot, judging by the taste in her mouth now. "I'm a closet drinker," she quipped, when Dana's dad sidled by - tall, lean, built like a quick tight end, with a head of thick, wavy hair graying artfully at the temples. All day she'd marveled at how wonderful he looked in his tux and how, if she'd been Dana's mother, she would have never have left him for that shrimpy bald urologist. She opened the door to the closet, and they stumbled into it laughing. They shared swigs from the bottle of wine -- its dry oak taste still blanketed her mouth. When he kissed her, she leaned way back invitingly. They laughed and panted through their first lovemaking performed on a linoleum countertop next to an old utility sink. He fell asleep in the middle of their second time, in her bed, after a swerving ride home.

She nudged him awake. "Hey, you gotta go."

"I'll call you," he said, rolling out of bed and gathering the pieces of his tux together, the cummerbund lying in one corner, the little black tie in the other, cufflinks dangerously splayed across the floor poised to stab tender feet.

She started feeling queasy. "Oh, Mister Davis. I don't think that's a good idea," she said.

"Please, it's Ted. You can call me Ted."

"Fine, whatever." Her head throbbed. "But you have to go. I have to scout for turkey today, and my date will be here any minute."

He looked at her for a moment as if trying to process that information behind a deeply furrowed brow, then walked out of her bedroom.

During their first telephone conversation, she had asked the guy named Dub why someone would want to go scout for turkey.

"Well, you got to find the turkey to hunt the turkey," he said in a this-is-so-obvious way.

"My daddy and me, we was out last weekend and found some tracks for him to hunt over at Crab Apple state park. But I want to find my own. Plus, it's a good excuse to go play in the woods."

Daddy and me? We was? She hadn't noticed the bad grammar before, but found it endearing at the moment, comforting even, like a good piece of sweet summer corn or a soft cotton shirt. She thought about Matthew and Dana, and what they would think, if it got that far, if she actually ever introduced the guy named Dub as her boyfriend, and he actually said something like, "Well, hey, Dana, we was just talkin' about you." She was sure that Dana's eyes would blink real fast, as if a bug had just slammed into her eyeball. Matthew would be overly, painfully, polite and offer his hand for the manliest handshake of his life. Then she'd worry that they would talk about her and Dub later. She'd worry that Matthew would strut around their living room with his thumbs under the armholes of his shirt, pretending to wear overalls. She could hear Dana saying, "Where'd she come up with that hayseed?" She decided she would have to work on the grammar. Not now, though. Later.

"So you'll pick me up at ten on Sunday?"

She inspected her closet. It was arranged by color and type. Easy enough when all that hung there were black skirts and white blouses of most styles and varieties. She always admired her coworkers for their daring wardrobes. They laughed at her. She was supposed to be a "creative type." Whoever heard of a graphic designer who only wore black skirts and white blouses? She tried to remedy the situation with shopping trips that lasted hours as she scanned racks and racks of shrub greens, Dreamsickle orange, and red the color of cranberry relish. She would always bring home some wild outfit, then on a second fitting decide it was impossibly tropical and that she looked like she should have a ticket for some tacky cruise ship in some enormous straw bag with silk Gerber daisies pasted on it, and back to the store the new outfit would go.

So it didn't surprise her that she had nothing to wear for this upcoming and probably ill-advised turkey-scouting excursion with a guy named Dub. Or could this be it? Could she be going on a first date with her future husband, the father of what she was sure would be dull, Nintendo-headed children? After his initial the day-after-meeting-you-now-I'm-calling-you-to-demonstrate-what-a-reliable-guy-I-am phone call, he called three more times, filling her in a little more on his so-far, so-good life. She had made a few notes: Computer technician????? Huh? Is that a career? Could he sell computer networks that never really worked and get big bucks on commissions? Like Matthew? No, not an engineer. NOT SMOOTH ENOUGH. He's the guy who fixes the faulty computer networks that guys like Matthew? Like a mechanic? Ask about unions. Can't be in a union!!! A hunter of all things fowl. Close to mom and dad. From a small town. Only one brother, younger. Uncomplicated. Too simple?

Will he care what she wears? After seeing Claire, Lisa had stopped by her mother's house, hoping to find something on the order of flannel from her father's closet, which she thought her mother still had not cleaned out, even though his funeral had been eight months earlier.

But she was wrong. Her mother had cleaned out her father's closet. In fact, she was in the process of throwing its contents out into the backyard -- piling shirts, sweaters, trousers, shoes, socks, hats, gloves, ties, underwear, flannel pajamas, slippers, even aftershave, razors, his entire collection of Golf magazines, golf clubs, everything into a lumpy mound the size of a Volkswagen. When she pulled her car around to the end of the driveway, her mother was just coming outside, her petite frame - protected from the cold wind by a neat red, boiled wool jacket -- hidden behind another load.

"What do you think?" her mother asked.

"Uh, I think you've lost your mind. What are you doing?"

"Why, darling, I'm going to set it on fire. I'm glad you're here. You can help. Do me a favor. Run inside and get the shoebox sitting on the kitchen table. Bring it out here." 

As her mother started throwing what smelled like kerosene on the mountain of John P. Vance's possessions, Lisa did as she was told. She waited until she was standing next to her mother to open the lid of the shoebox she had just retrieved and peer inside.

She stared at dozens of lavender-colored and perfumed envelopes with her dad's name and office address, written in a loopy feminine script.

"What's all this?"

"They're love letters from Nancy Hayes to your father," her mother said, a little too matter-of-factly.

"What?"

"They are love letters from Nancy Hayes," her mother said, slower and louder that time.

"I heard you, Mother. But what are you really saying, that Daddy had an affair?"

"Yes, Pumpkin. Several, on and off for years. Before Nancy, it was Dixie Shea. Before that, Marge Stummer. Here, hand it to me."

Dazed, she thought of the last time she saw her mom and dad together. It was three days before he died. Her mother had just cleaned his sheets and helped him back in bed and was spoon-feeding him tomato soup. The hospice nurse had left a fresh bag of morphine that hung on a pole by the bed. The narcotic dripped into his veins through tubes and needles. It took care of the pain and the anguish. But nothing took care of the colon cancer that invaded every cell of his body, shutting down important functions one at a time. Lisa always felt shaky and inadequate around sick people, not wanting to touch them or even breathe, afraid she'd grab too much oxygen. Once in the sixth grade, she fainted at the sight of a kid throwing up in the cafeteria. So she stood in the doorway of her parent's library-turned-hospital-room, just observing what she thought was a devoted couple who were putting that "in sickness and in health" thing through its paces. Now, she realized, he hadn't lived up to his end of the bargain and deserved none of her mother's time or compassion.

"But, Mom, you just spent the last two years of your life taking care of this man."

"Yes, dear. I'm aware. Do you want to help?" Her mother put the box on the ground and, one-by-one started throwing the letters onto the mound.  Lisa took one, ripped it into confetti, and threw it on the pile, like she was throwing rice at a wedding. Her mother laughed and did the same. When they were done, the mound looked as if it had been covered with a light purple snow. They stood back and admired their work.

"I think it's ready," her mother said.

"Yep. I think so, too," she said.

Her mother dug into her pants pocket and came up with two matchboxes. They both started striking matches and throwing them onto the now-smoldering pile. Soon something inside the mound ignited and flames began to shoot up. Arm-in-arm, they watched as fire consumed the worldly goods of John P. Vance, attorney-at-law, righter of wrongs, fighter of just causes and, it turned out, just one more son of a bitch.

She sighed and pulled out a blue denim work shirt she wore when she painted. It would have to do. But maybe, she thought, she could spruce it up with a bandana. Yes, an orange and blue bandana around her head, no her neck. That would brighten things up. As soon as she saw Dub walking up to her door, she regretted the bandana decision. He looked so very unadorned in his dull woodsy clothes.

She opened the door. He came in and kissed her harder than she was ready for.

"So, you're ready to go," she said, pulling away from his embrace.

He laughed and fingered the bandana. "How was the wedding?"

"It was fine, you know, uneventful."

"Except for the marriage part, I bet." He laughed again, took her hand and led her toward his cherry-colored pickup truck.

"Yeah, except for that," she said. "Hey, maybe we could get some lunch later."

He looked at her and smiled. "Oh, you bet."

They drove and drove. She wondered if his shocks were shot or if all pickups rode that way. She couldn't believe how straight she had to sit in the bench seat. She squirmed. She fiddled with the radio dial. Dub kept his eyes on the road, a look of contentment on his face.  She remembered that Matthew drove a white Acura with tan leather seats. She hated Dana for insisting that she and Matthew were "minimalists." Just because your china pattern is uncomplicated doesn't mean you are, she thought. She suddenly felt bitter. Just as suddenly, they turned off onto a gravel road. She reached for the dashboard and leaned away from the turn.

"Much further?" Her voice rattled when she spoke. She wondered if Dub would mind being called Will. Will would be much more dignified. "Hello this is my boyfriend, Will. Hello, this is my boyfriend, Dub." See? Dub is a ridiculous nickname. It's the name of a guy who lives in a trailer, a double-wide with stained ruffled curtains from Walmart hanging from windows the wind whistles through. She couldn't date a guy named Dub.

What was she doing here?

"We're here." He pulled the truck over on the side of a lonely road.

"Where is here, exactly?"

"You'll see. God's country." He smiled broadly and patted her knee.

"Tell me something. Do we have to scale that ditch and climb up the side of that bluff to get to where we're going?"

"It won't be that bad. We want to get to that ridge." He pointed skyward.

"Oh."

She fell three times on the wet leaves. Each time, he helped her up with a chuckle telling her to watch her footing and brushing her off, ever so gently. The word pleasant kept forming in her brain. This guy was pleasant. This guy lived an uncomplicated, pleasant, life. Could she live an uncomplicated life? Finally, they made it to the top of the ridge.

"It's just that I like for my feet to be able to stay under me when I walk."

"Shhhhh." He grabbed her. They both crouched down.

"What?" She whispered.

He put a finger to his lips, then pointed. "Tur-key," he mouthed.

"Where?" she mouthed back.

He pointed to the claw marks in the dirt and started making turkey calls. This alarmed her even more than the thought of Walmart curtains. She thought of Matthew and Dana and the fact that they had enrolled in a French conversation class together. Then, for some reason, her mind went to the frothy little cappuccinos she liked. If she stayed with this guy named Dub, she'd have to give them up, she just knew it. She didn't know much, but she did know that this guy, even if he did change his name to Will, would never agree to a four-dollar cup of coffee. She fought back tears.

When he was done gobbling, he stood up, took her hand, and they tiptoed on, trying to walk without breaking a stick, crunching a leaf or cracking an acorn under their feet. The effort of holding her weight up off each step softened her mind. She let him take her hand and lead her deeper into a forest of giant oaks and elms and delicate dogwoods that had voluntarily sprouted under the protective shade. They came to a casually running stream. They stopped there. She turned to him. He folded her in his arms and kissed her neck, romantically, she had to admit. In response, she slowly undid his zipper and slid her hand down his pants. Promising, she had to admit again. He did the same for her. Even more promising. Then they held each other and did not speak, did not move, just listened to the flowing water. Matthew and Dana were on their way to Greece. She was feeling up a guy named Dub in the woods. Turkeys were probably watching them, their beady little eyes all a-blink.

On their way out of the woods, he started talking. He told her about his hometown, DuQuoin, where there's a real state fair, with prizes for the fattest hog, the biggest pickle, and the most colorful quilt. In those parts, he and his daddy and his brother Dale can hunt ducks in the fall and geese in the winter.

"You'll have to meet my dog, Duffy. He's a good little pointer pup."

Dub, the duck hunter from DuQuoin with a brother named Dale and a dog named Duffy. She felt dizzy.

"What do you do with them?"

"With what?"

"With the ducks you kill."

"Oh, my mama cooks them up. She's got a goose to cook every Christmas, too."

"How . um . nice."

They made it back to the truck. He opened the door for her. As she climbed in, he patted her ass. But, not in a lecherous or tacky way, more in an I'm-comfortable-enough-with-you-that-I-can-pat-your-ass kind of way. In spite of herself, she liked it, and kissed him through the open window after he shut the door. She noticed that his cheeks were rosy from the fresh air. It made him look like a little boy waiting for the school bus.

"You hungry?" he asked.

"Starved. What's around here?" She was thinking of maybe a quaint little diner with a home-style menu. But she didn't say it. She wanted him to come up with the idea. Then she could tell Dana how he knew of this little place where charming locals served them green beans cooked in bacon grease and blackberry pie. It would be a quaint little story that would make Dana understand why Lisa had slept with this guy named Dub on the first date.

"Oh, I know just the place."

 He got in behind the wheel, powered up the pickup, started driving and continued talking about things that mattered to him. The city, he said, was nice and exciting and all that. "But I don't know how people can live on top of each other their whole life. I got to have some room around me. Living in a house with another house just ten feet away ain't my idea of livin'" He talked of how he loved his parents' place for its wide open feel, how you have to use binoculars to see the end of the property, and how there is always something surprising in your line of vision - a twelve-point buck, a family of foxes, or the raccoon you thought you chased away months before. He talked of how distant neighbors were never really strangers because there was an unspoken understanding among them. Together, they all knew they were on borrowed time and that eventually their acreage would be developed into something suburban and lifeless.

"There's talk of a highway going through about 200 yards from my mama and daddy's back door."

After letting that image dissipate and dissolve from the cab of the truck, she said:

"You know what you should shoot?"

"Pardon?"

"You know what you should shoot? You should shoot swans."

"Swans? There ain't any swans around here."

"I know. They're all in the Chesapeake Bay. You should go there and shoot them."

"Oh really, now why's that."

Lisa told him how muted swans - the lovely, graceful creatures people think of when they think of swans -- were wreaking havoc on the ecosystem of the Chesapeake Bay. The story goes that, sometime around 1963, four of these swans got loose from someone's cage, never to be recaptured. Giddy with freedom, they started reproducing. Pretty soon, there were eight swans, then sixty-four.

"Now, because they aren't, you know, native, and there are no predators around to keep them humble, there are thousands of muted swans kicking up their heels in the bay. They eat like ten pounds of grass a day. And, to make matters worse, they aren't nice to the other waterfowl. They treat regular ducks like shit. They really do. So, even though they're beautiful, I think they should die, but that's just me."

"You don't say." Dub grinned, flashing a deep dimple in his right cheek.  "Where'd you hear this?"

"NPR. National Public Radio."

"Aha, I see," he said, patting her left knee and holding his hand there as they rode in silence. She was about to ask him if he'd ever listened to National Public Radio when he suddenly let out a "Yeeee-haw. 

She jumped. "What?"

He turned the truck into an Amoco. Not a regular gas station but the kind of place where you can buy motor oil and stock up on overpriced groceries. "Lunch."

"Excuse me?"

He jumped out of the truck. "This Amoco has the best chicken livers in the world," he said through the driver's side window. "I had them before, and they was good. I tell you what."

Lisa's eyes glazed over the way they did when some ignorant know-nothing client with bad taste in clothes and a beer belly nitpicked at her design for his dumb brochure. At those times, she would lose eye contact and throw a fuzzy focus onto something over the client's shoulder, like a flaw in the room's drywall or the chipped gold gild of a picture frame, anything to escape an unwanted scene. At this moment, she dwelled on the spastically lit sign that announced to travelers of Highway K that Amoco had 20 oz. Cokes on sale.

"Well?"

"Well, what?"

"Do you want some?"

"Oh, God no." 

He shrugged. "Okay, but you said you was hungry."

"That's okay, really. Hunger, you know. It comes. It goes."

He hit the side of the truck twice and jogged off. In a few minutes, he presented her with a wax-paper container of chicken livers soaked in ketchup.

"Sure you don't want some? They'se so good."

"They are so good."

"What?"

"I said, they are so good."

"Ye-up." He put the chicken livers on the seat between them and started up the truck. She watched him as he licked his fingers after each bite. Out of curiosity more than anything, she reached for a pungent nugget, put it to her nose, then took a bite.

"Atta girl."

"Hmm. These aren't bad." 

"Toldja so." 

Before she knew it, the container of chicken livers had been consumed, and they were approaching the western edge of St. Louis.

"Do you mind if we go back to my house first. Just for a while. It's closer," he said.

She looked at him and his greasy fingers and remembered that moment in the woods when they touched.

"Got any beer?"

He lived in a ranch house with symmetrically planted bushes across the front. He parked his truck in a carport, right behind a john boat the color of slimy mud. Did Matthew have a johnboat? No. But, of course not, he sailed.

"What'd you guys do this weekend," she would ask Dana early on.

"Oh, we just went for a sail," Dana would say with all the nonchalance she could muster. Lisa would picture the two of them with cotton sweaters wrapped around their thrown-back shoulders and get depressed. She learned not to ask about Dana's weekends.

In Dub's johnboat were camouflaged life jackets and duck decoys, the kind she thought people only used as doorstops. If she understood him correctly, he was getting ready to build a duck blind on the river using limbs from trees he'd trimmed and hauled out of his backyard. They were now lying inside the boat, too. Using anchors, he would build a shelter that he could pull the boat up under. From there, he would wait for the decoys he set out to attract unknowing mallards, passing through on their way south. You can't shoot them out of the air, he had told her. They must first land near you. Then, when they resume their journey, you can blast them as they take flight. This activity usually began around four o'clock in the morning. She shivered as she followed him past the boat to his back door, thinking of the cold, wet, bloody messiness of it all.

"Here we are."

"Where's your dog?" she asked, expecting a large Labrador to paw her.

"Oh she lives down home. I ain't here enough. Plus, Daddy takes her to field training."

She looked at him like she knew what he was talking about. Field training. Boot camp for dogs? She didn't want to ask.

A setting sun provided dim-orange light to the living room. She sat down on a nubby green couch. Everything in the room was green, and an obvious hand-me-down. It made her sad. Three months after they had met, Matthew and Dana moved into a condo he just bought and filled it with furniture from the House of Denmark. "So minimal," Dana had remarked. The day they moved in, Dana had reported, they cracked open a vintage bottle of wine they'd bought in Paris.

"I felt so bad," Dana had giggled. "That bottle was four hundred dollars, and there are starving people in the world."

"Did you toast them?" Lisa had asked.

Dub grabbed two Pabst Blue Ribbons and came into the room, handed one to her and turned on the television. The National League playoffs were in full swing. She loved baseball, found it comforting.

"I hate baseball."  He flipped the channel and settled on "This Old House" before walking down the hall, toward what she assumed were bedrooms. She took a seat, sipped her beer and watched Norm discuss the wiring of a home entertainment system with one of his subcontractors. She thought that the last time she was at Matthew and Dana's, she noticed you could hear Enya from every room. For some reason, hearing Enya from every room really pissed her off. She looked up and watched Dub walk into the room, carrying a long rifle.

"If you're going to shoot me, don't aim for my face. I want to look pretty in my casket." 

He laughed. "Mind if I clean this?"

She frowned. "Is it loaded?"

He laughed again. "You make the funniest faces. Of course, it's not loaded. You don't clean a loaded gun."

She watched him take the gun apart and wipe it with a cloth that smelled like pine trees. It occurred to her that she was sitting next to a guy named Dub, who she barely knew, who used bad grammar, had bad taste in food, and was cleaning a gun. He could kill her with that thing, she thought. At least it would be quick. Badly conjugated verbs and greasy food would be a slow, more torturous death. She lay down with her head on the opposite arm of the couch and stretched her legs, kicking him gently. He lifted the gun part he was polishing. She slid her legs onto his lap crossing them at the ankles.

"You look like a girl who knows what she wants."

"Yeah, that's me." She smiled and closed her eyes.