Lindsey Moore
Short Fiction
The man who greets her at the Auto Lube Express emerges from his dim grotto of garage bays with a gaunt look about him. He arrives slowly beside her car, languid in the manner of sediment rising from a mossy lake bottom. He’s in his late fifties, she guesses, with thinning gray hair and obvious vitiligo. His shirt sleeves are rolled up to the elbow, revealing a mural of spilled ivory that gathers in scattered pools around his elbows and wrists. An almost pinkish sheen surfaces across the taught muscle of his forearm as he reaches for her car keys, reminding her of one of those hairless cats.
The man says, “Yes?”
She says, “I need an oil change.”
He says, “OK.”
The man walks her to a waiting room just off the garage, indicating a row of chairs. They make a forlorn looking lineup, like misbehaving preschoolers. She feels that she’s in a time out.
She sits on the chair second from the end, leaving empty space on either side. Her purse waddles in her lap as she crosses her legs, ever the inelegant struggle.
She’s always been tall, one of those tall girls who played volleyball in high school not out of interest but out of a sort of reluctant, social responsibility to her kind. She was an active youth but grew in the way that might suggest she spent her childhood recoiling from intrusive spaces. Turned-in knees, wide hips, a chest you could iron drapes on. Her marshmallowy thighs are always present in her mind, laden saddlebags she wants to relieve herself of at the end of a dusty trail. Her hair is dark black with a bird’s nest texture, inconsistent curls, rolling waves, and errant corkscrews. She’s never had sex but she wants to. She’s thirty-four.
Recently, she’s started to form vivid fantasies about the Brawny paper towel man. In a blur of falling sleep, she imagines the enormity of his arms folding around her, caressing her in his ambiguously warm, spongey embrace. She whispers, “You are more absorbent than the standard man.” He holds her closer, taking in her meager miseries, soaking them in like dribbled milk off the countertop, muddy foot smears, leaky trash juice trailed across hard linoleum; all of her pitiful, excreted puddles he efficiently vanishes into his manly two-ply. And as morning breaks, he slips from her bed to wring himself out over the bathtub, erasing her down the drain in long, careful strokes. Then he returns to her, standing in silhouette by the window, naked, glorious. He announces, “Fresh, and dry, and ready for more, Baby.”
Her blue eyes sparkle back at him. She imagines they would, that they would be lovely in the dawn light. But even her eyes are not safe from concern, because when she was young, she learned about light waves on a television program. She learned that the sky is blue because the color blue is the most easily scattered. She has never forgotten this.
Half an hour later, the auto mechanic returns bearing papers clipped to a wooden clipboard with a pen attached by a chain.
He says, “Sign.”
When she signs her receipt, the man does not let go of the clipboard, instead keeps hold of it, pushing upward against the weight of her signature.
From the corner of her eye, she can see something on the man’s hand: The perfect, crescent indents of a human bite mark puncturing the pouchy flesh between his thumb and forefinger. It’s such an odd formation, so unexpected and eerily uncanny. She stares for a long time without fully processing the shape.
Soon, she’s back in her car again, crawling along Wilshire Boulevard under the miasmic, Los Angeles sun. She thinks again about the man’s hand. That perfect crescent. The more she considers it, the more his bite mark starts to solidify into something more urgent, the indents sharpening into focus, surfacing, a monstrous thing with gleaming eyes ascending from the deep.
He was holding someone’s mouth, there’s no way around it. He must have grabbed someone from behind like a villain in the movies—a clueless jogger in the park, a woman asleep in her bed, a noir blonde in a dark alley robbery—and his victim lashed back, her personhood fleeing as her inner animal emerged. Was he, after all, one of those secret urban serial killers? Did she just have a close encounter?
Surely not. Surely, it couldn’t be. What would be the odds? Maybe it was something else. The bite could have been anything, from anyone. It seemed small. Maybe a woman, but maybe a child. Maybe his daughter?
She can imagine it: The man’s daughter, seven years-old and off her Ritalin, wet hair plastered to her skull after she’s erupted from her bath like a wild girl of a feral tribe, lost in another high voltage tantrum, illuminating their small house in spasms and flares, her body a maze of exposed wires, sparking, threatening every minute to send the neighborhood up in flames. And she can just imagine the man, in an act so instinctive as to almost be forgiven, he holds his hand over his daughter’s mouth, both of them struggling on the kitchen floor where she has upset her buttered pasta over the cheap laminate, smashing rotini spirals with her heels, slapping greasy streaks across the cabinets, and he holds her there, pressing down, down, to silence the noise, just for a moment, to please be silent, be silent, and, like a jaguar, she wriggles free, sinking her teeth in…
Or, maybe he did it to himself. This possibility can’t be excluded. She imagines the man living alone in an economy apartment, three units to a floor, with only a front door, no windows, his toilet three steps from the kitchen sink. He had one of those nights (she can relate, she can sympathize) under a solitary, flickering bulb, when he was washed over suddenly by an immensity of self-rage brought on by the simple act of fumbling his spaghetti bolognese into his lap. His only recourse, then, was to coil against the wall, hot muscled, vibrant with fury, and bite into himself, him the only caustic oppressor near enough to blame, his hand the only substance in this dense world vulnerable enough to yield.
But, still, she keeps coming back. She can’t help believing. He must have killed someone. A woman, probably. Someone her age except younger even. Prettier, probably, surely much prettier. Too pretty for this world, the man must have thought.
She wonders if the man had thought about killing her too, when she pulled into the garage this morning, if he had felt the urge overtaking him when he offered up her receipt, holding the clipboard just a little too tightly, staring just a little too long.
She wonders if he only kills pretty women, if he is exclusive in that way.
She checks her rearview mirror several times on the way home, not expecting him to be there, but thinking if he was, he might be following from a distance in something old and understated, a hatchback jeep with a busted fender, maybe.
Of course, he isn’t there. She doesn’t want him to be there, of course she doesn’t, following her home, pursuing her, of course she doesn’t. But, still, every time she checks, she has this smallest feeling, the gentlest, lingering ache, of disappointment.
Lindsey Moore holds a Master of Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford and has been published by Parhelion Literary Magazine, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, and Howl Podcast. She currently lives in Austin, TX where she works as a manager for the independent bookstore, BookPeople.
Photo Credit: Begonya Plaza (pen name: Bee-P. Rosenbluth) has a background in professional television, theatre and film as actor and filmmaker. She is a published and produced playwright, and her poetry is published in various magazines. Bee-P. does volunteer work, practices yoga, and relishes in the company of family, friends, and nature when not writing or reading. www.begonyaplaza.com facebook/begonyaplaza instagram/begobud.
L'Esprit Literary Review 