Cityality Stories

By Bruce James Wilkinson

Short stories, for when your attention span is limited but fiction is what you want.

 

• An executive breaks free of the cloud of locusts that threatens to eat him, and the best waitress in town glimpses a path out of her cul-de-sac.
• A mother connects with her daughter during a triumphant women's night out, and a man gazes into the fountain of youth through his boarder's eyes.
• Marty blows into town in a red convertible Caddy and a whirlwind of hope, and a bored banker flies into a dizzying opportunity.
• A man reaches the age when every change is assumed to be a dire symptom of something; Ingrid shoves her husband into the wrong trench on the battlefield between the sexes, and a woman struggles with dread when she is drawn back to the scene of a past life.

These nine, and thirteen more Cityality Stories that explore the salts and peppers that season life: Hope and disappointment, youth and old age, good faith and betrayal; enemies, allies, strangers, and a red convertible Cadillac with white leather seats.

Experience multiple characters in snapshots of their varied lives through short fiction. If you love the form, or if you haven't tried it for a while, buy the book, read it, and feel the joy of brevity and variety wrapped up in one eclectic volume!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce James Wilkinson
• Release date: Sep 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9789942384867

Bruce James Wilkinson

Bruce James Wilkinson was born in the State of Washington in 1949. He studied creative writing at Washington State University. He has lived and written in the U.K. and Spain, on the east and west coasts of the United States, in Montana and, since 2012, among the Andes mountains in the Republic of Ecuador. His recent work includes two short story collections and a novel published under the imprint of Pork Pie Publishing in Cuenca, Ecuador. Happily retired from gainful employment, he reads and writes under the influence of coffee every day, and tries to remember to wash the dishes, do the laundry, fertilize Bernie the Lime Tree and refill the bird bath. You can find him at brucejameswilkinson.com and follow him on Facebook @brucejameswilkinson.  

Book preview

An Urgency of Unknown Things

This happens every time Bogle smokes pot.

Moments of urgent restlessness about something he can’t identify. He feels he is behind schedule on a plan he has not yet made; champing to do something he has not chosen to do; looking for things he won’t recognize even if he can find them.

Surely, it is chemical. Biological, hormonal, cellular: the effects of a drug and its delivery all wrapped into one thing. Still, chemical effect or not, it exists, doesn’t it? The pot may be the wrapper but the content comes from Bogle himself. How does he know? Because when his girlfriend smokes pot—the woman he lives with who is half his age—different things happen to her. Same pot, but other sensations and other urgencies; hers more based in current reality than his. Hers more in tune with her life.

That’s how he knows it is not only chemical, but personal too. Half his age, a bit more, but catching up faster than he is going ahead. If they stay together twenty years more, she will be three-fifths his age and gaining, but that’s the pot talking, because Bogle can’t assume he has twenty more years. If he does, she will not have twenty more years for him. Long before that she will fall upon, stumble over, or elements she can no longer abide and will cease to abide him.

It will not be his age; she calculated all that from the start. Something else. He carries a menu of something elses from which all women choose their poison earlier or later, just before they leave. Always with some regret; always wishing to maintain something with him based on his redeeming qualities, but from a distance, as if Bogle is a very nice guy with with a communicable case of leprosy.

He stands, walks around, guides himself along a path through his restlessness like a service dog.

Adia? he says.

She looks up from a magazine. Her ankles are crossed under knees relaxed together to one side, a silky, dark Princess Grace with far too much class for him. No one reads magazines anymore, not like that, for one thing.

Adia.

What? She smiles, her page at midturn. She holds it suspended as if she might go either forward or back—she has not decided—nor will she now that she is listening to her lover. She will put off that page, next or previous, for him.

Do you want things without knowing what they are?

Her eyes flicker. No. I know what I want.

Bogle stands in a puddle of unpleasant self-awareness. He wants something to do, to eat, to drink, to absorb or to absorb him. He is aware of her, too, open like her magazine, the most elegant person he has ever met, with disheveled him by accident. In her, the gods have given him something that will leave him empty when they withdraw it.

It’s only the smoke, Louis, she says. There is nothing you want. Only the sense of something.

He watches the magazine page standing vertical halfway between her past and her future. Even this, she has given up for him: a sentence half-read, its beginning behind and its end forsaken for his sake. Even so suspended, its slenderness held between the tips of her miraculous fingers with their knuckles not yet wrinkled by use, the page is still. Held in a bubble of her calm, it waits patiently. The page, thin and slick, submits to her quiet, unshakable elegance.

Yes, of course, Bogle says. "Only the feeling of something. Like when you’re a kid standing in an open refrigerator wanting your whole life to unfold; wanting everything and hoping it can be found in milk or a stalk of celery like the Cracker Jack prize."

Adia can’t identify with that child, that refrigerator or Cracker Jacks. Bogle regrets having said it. She can’t identify with anything about his childhood. Maybe this will be why she leaves: that her old lover is no more than a listless child letting the refrigerator get warm while he dawdles with dissatisfaction when, by any reasonable human standard, he has everything.

Why do you stay with me? he says. He moves a foot a few inches but he has nowhere to go and he slides it back.

Because I love you.

I love you, too. I interrupted your reading for nothing. I’m sorry.

She lays the page down. Backward or forward? He missed it. Did he murder half of a sentence forever? Cause her to lose a paragraph?

She smiles. Her teeth are as white and strong as midday sun in the desert. She has not yet put on lipstick because it is just the two of them. She prefers the beauty of nature to that of artifice when they’re alone, but she knows what she can do with cosmetics. She is skilled in both: the beauty that is hers to begin with and the very different but no more beautiful beauty she can apply with practiced patience.

That is what I think you don’t know about love, Louis. I read when we are not talking. People are in danger of forgetting that, with their noisy, nagging little machines. You cannot interrupt reading. It waits for you. You speak to me and I speak back. For something or nothing, it matters more than the reading, because it comes and then is gone if we neglect it. The reading stays.

Maybe that is why she will leave him: that he doesn’t understand the simplest human things. That he makes love something more complicated than it is: people who respect each other’s thoughts enough to hear them, who like each other’s bodies enough to touch them.

Why do you ever wear makeup, he says, rooted to the spot by a sudden weight of affection, when nature has made you perfect.

That’s sweet, Adia says, but you know the answer. She points at the painting on the wall to her right, her arm so slender it seems to extend between wrist and shoulder, capable of endless length to do her bidding, a beautiful snake over which she exerts flawless control.

The lily pads were given their beauty by the mother of nature. The painter worships it in his own way. What you see in me is what I was given by my mother, through my belly button. I don’t try to improve upon it any more than the painter. When I paint myself, I do as he does. I choose this feature or that and I present it more openly. I choose it by how I feel about it at that moment. I paint it as I please.

I worship it.

I know, she says. She’s laughing at him, but fondly. It stretches her throat and bares it to him. Bogle can see the sharp V of her jaw and the dark, silken softness stretched taut over it. More so I think, my love, when you are high.

Perhaps she will leave him because she is always her, but her lover only sees it clearly when he is oversensitive, restless and reaching. Perhaps she will begin to feel like an open refrigerator in which he stands, searching not for what is inside, but for something that is not and never can be.

Find something to do, Adia says. It will pass in a few minutes.

She is right, of course. It will pass. What Bogle finds to do is another toke, because with all its drawbacks—restlessness and yearning and false hunger and eyes that are already too dry with years—to feel this love is important, while it lasts.

*

Ethiopia, Bogle says. Adia is not from Africa any more than you are from Europe. You are from Germany and she is from Ethiopia. She should not be lumped into an entire continent and neither should you.

No offense, Lou. I didn’t know what country. Now I do. She seems royal, doesn’t she? You know her best. Does she seem royal to you?

She is, Bogle says. Ethiopian royalty that goes back as far as Egypt. As far as history and before. Ancient blood of queens.

Cleopatra, the German says. I wonder.

The party has just begun. Already, Bogle can feel himself fading from it, an old Polaroid snapshot pushed prematurely into bright sun, never to find clarity. He watches Adia, standing only a few feet from the German whose lust has a presence strong enough to stand between them and look from one to the other. Both she and Bogle are accustomed to it. They never talk about it, but lust in one form or another—to have her, look like her, or be her—is the deepest essence of her career.

She is talking with the woman who reminds Bogle of a pigeon too often chased by dogs or stepped upon by careless pedestrians. She always shows up at Bogle’s parties. They share a building. She seldom goes out that he knows of. Her head jerks nervously forward, back, her nose left and then right, alert and frightened. Bogle wants something he cannot identify. The pigeon woman fears something she cannot discover or overcome.

Adia stands more than a head taller. Taller than almost anyone in the room. The pigeon woman’s head darts and jerks until Adia, saying something that makes her smile, reaches out and lays three fingertips light as petals on the woman’s forearm and the woman’s head becomes still, as if with her weightless fingers Adia can find in her arm the point that relieves the woman’s nervous palsy after years of struggle. It is a remarkable thing to watch, the sudden comfort of stillness.

Your neighbor just fell in love with your girlfriend, the German says.

Bogle watches the two women and nods. I saw.

Cleopatra.

*

They are cleaning up the morning after the party. Adia sings softly while she flows like pure water from table to dishwasher, retrieving bottles, glasses, tidying as she passes, happy, apparently. Bogle can remember when guests helped before they left. They didn’t ask but assumed. A time would come when everyone knew it was late, when the hands of the clock began to creep, and then they would begin, slyly at first, to pick things up, first their own and then anyone’s, until everything practical was done, not to be faced by the hosts in the morning.

You seem happy, Bogle says.

I am happy. Aren’t you?

I should probably go back to work. He dreads leaving her to return to his gallery that fell out of love with him years ago but that he won’t allow to leave him.

Is something wrong?

Bogle shrugs. Something is always wrong whether he can put his finger on it or not.

Sasha does all right. Things have slowed down, though. I should spend more time there.

Of course. It is your heart that drives it, not Sasha’s. She is sweet and sincere. She represents you well, I think, but she is not the heart.

Beautifully put, but false. She believes it, of course. She never says what she does not believe. If pressed by circumstances, she withdraws into silence. Her silence in the face of something that would be easy to say, but that she does not believe, can be like a third, strong person added to a conversation, who quiets anyone not certain what they believe or not confident in saying.

She cannot know the gallery has fallen out of love with him; that it no longer responds to his touch because they are bored with each other. No one can know that but Bogle and his gallery, although he fears some of his better clients, both buyers and sellers, have begun to sense the cooling.

I hate to leave you alone.

My hiatus has less than a week, she says. I don’t mind being alone while you’re working. Soon, I’ll wish for it, when I go back to the hurry.

I hate to leave you at all.

She brushes past him, the necks of wine bottles bristling from between her fingers like glass ornaments or bits of weaponry. On her way by she tilts her head so it grazes his shoulder but stops halfway across that narrow span and allows him the briefest sense of its weight and comfort, a strand of strong hair that tickles his neck and ear.

That’s better, she says, already gone.

*

Adia is not of regal blood in the biological sense.her sense is not the same as the biological sense. She is of the royal blood of generations of women, she would say, who hold nature in their hands and wombs. Royalty is not of blood, she would say, but of spirit and strength. She would point at dynasties lost, their blood spilled on the ground or dissipated by lack of spirit and strength. She takes many things seriously, but not some magical element of blood. Not of royal blood, noble blood, privileged blood, anything other than human blood. Her royalty came from poverty, in fact, and hardship that trained and focused but never overcame her ambition.

She visited her mother several weeks after she moved in with Bogle. She was gone for a month, leaving him missing her terribly, as if when she walked out for her taxi, she blew out his one remaining candle and left him cold in the dark.

When she returned, she was sad for many days. He asked, was it because her mother was in bad straits? Was she ill? Did she want for anything? They could help her, easily. What they could well-afford without the least sacrifice or even notice, would keep her in health and comfort.

It took time. It was early for them, then. She trusted easily, but not entirely, for those first months. One evening, when he raised her mother through her sadness and almost insisted on sending her money, she allowed him in. He had never seen her cry. Tears, yes. Eyes crying, certainly. But all of Adia crying? That, he had never seen and until he did, had never imagined the effect of it on him.

She hardly recognized me, she said. She looked at me like a stranger. Everyone else in the village, even too young to remember me, laughed and cried and hugged, but my mother looked at me like a stranger.

I imagine you’ve changed. How long has it been?

Seven years. Not so long my mother can’t know me.

Surely she did. First awkward moments between loved ones who are separated.

I don’t mean she didn’t know me. How can I explain my mother and her mother to you? She knew the body and face of her daughter. She did not know my spirit anymore. She knows who I was to her but not who I am to her.

Does she disapprove of where you are and the wonderful things you’ve done?

She was angry, finally.

She can know nothing of any of that, Louis. Still, you don’t understand that. My mother has never been more than sixty kilometers from where she was born and she bore me. She has never seen anything on television but football and commercials for things she doesn’t understand or want, and only that for a few seconds when she passes a bar where men get drunk and dangerous. In my mother’s heart—where she lives, where I live while you and your people live in your heads—she has no idea where I am when I am not with her. She only knows that I am gone, that I may or may not return, that when I do, she cannot know me or understand where I’ve been.

She left the room to cry and be homesick on her own. Perhaps—it was not the first or even the fiftieth time he had tried to imagine and predict—she would leave him because he could not begin to understand who she was. He tried to imagine her in threadbare clothing sold from bales in the market. Sports logos and knockoff designer labels, hand-me-downs from Europe and North America, someone’s cast-offs hard-bargained for.

He tried to imagine her barefoot until she went to school; going to school, catching her dream as if it were a disease, not even recognizing it as a dream, but instead a path that she would follow. Not knowing her own ambition because ambition was not a concept. Food was a concept. Children, a concept; death, a passage and the only one.

Bogle could not imagine any of it, any more than Adia’s mother could imagine the life she lived now. Then, finally, he got it. In his inability to imagine he saw her mother’s same inability, and the gulf that divided his lover’s pure soul, and how stupid he was. He wanted to comfort her and tell her he understood at last; tell her he couldn’t imagine how hard it was that your beloved, trusted, tough mother could know only two things of you: either that you were with her, or that you were invisible.

He went into the bedroom. She had stopped crying but remained folded into a child’s crying posture, curled, arms crossed as if hugging her of their own accord, one leg comforting the other. He could not bear to speak. She smiled at him. She didn’t bother to wipe away tears, as if they had earned their place and she had no right to interfere with their lives.

I’m okay.

Not for the first time, Bogle knew she would leave and for the first time in his life almost twice her years, this woman leaving would break him like no other had. In the end, one way or another, it would come because she—a deep, eternal, salty sea—would discover that he was no more than a shallow, evaporating pond in which she could see nothing more than her own reflection.

Dance with the Devil

Lucy came over in the middle of the night and she was a mess. Men forever break her heart and Lucy enjoys her emotions fully even when they’re about something she can hardly stand to live through. If you know her—and probably if not—you can see her fractured heart from a distance because she doesn’t hide anything from anyone. That has something to do with why men leave her, but those of us who know her, in other ways and for a long time, know those guys made a bunch of mistakes in a row.

The thing about Lucy is that she doesn’t have one cautious, go halfway cell in her body. She’s as all or nothing as a piece of paper that’s white on one side and red on the other. We’re her friends so we’re biased, as we should be, but what we know that her men don’t is that Lucy means it.

They think she can’t be real like that. They think nobody can go that hot and cold or run that pure. They’re strangers. They don’t know her. When they get scared of her intensity and leave, we who know her best feel terrible for her, because Lucy suffers deep down, but we feel sorrier for the men we liked because they’ll never know what they’re missing.

*

It’s 3:10 A.M. Ingrid is in the kitchen opening a bottle of wine she’s been saving for a special occasion, and it should have been me opening wine because now I’m alone with Lucy in the living room. At times like this, I feel like the enemy. Enemies don’t belong in the living room. That’s where the good guys should be while the bad guys go to the kitchen to stay the hell out of the way and do something useful like opening wine and taking glasses of it to the good guys.

Do you want me to do that?

I’m yelling in our apartment, checking the fly on my flannel pants every couple of seconds because they’re meant for sleeping and I can’t trust them in public. It’s 3:15 in the morning and I’m the enemy and for this first few minutes, when it must be obvious to everyone that I represent exactly the wrong sex for this situation, I don’t get why I’m here.

I got it.

Ingrid comes around the corner to say it so she doesn’t have to be as loud as I was. I don’t think she did it on purpose but it makes me more of an asshole. A man—the male sex that fucked everything up in the first place and is still doing it—and a noisy son of a bitch at that.

While I can still see her, Ing makes a face and jerks her head to her left. Women do these things. I know they do them. That doesn’t mean I get the point every time. I think the last time I got the point was when I was ten and my mother made that same face and did that same head jerk when I forgot to say please or thank you to someone. I knew

I know what she means, this time; I just don’t want to. What she means is—let me see if I can include everything, because there’s a lot in that expression and jerk—: Go comfort the woman physically. Can’t you see she’s falling apart and she needs you?

Here’s what a man thinks: A man thinks that every battle has two armies. You’re either a soldier for one or the other. You try not to do any harm to the guys on your side and you try to kill the guys on the other side before they kill you. When you’ve just suffered a severe wound, a soldier from the other army does not come to sit by you on the couch and hug you. Which is exactly what Ing wants me to do and it doesn’t make a stick of sense to me.

What I’m missing is that women don’t fight blindly like that unless they are literally at war. Women fight hand-to-hand and they don’t choose their friends and enemies based on the color of their uniforms. I’m thinking I’m in the wrong army at bird-chirp early o’clock, being dense, and Ingrid gets it and so does Lucy, so Lucy gets up and comes to stand in front of me. I’m dense until she says, Will you dance with me?

Her face looks like something out of a low-budget horror film. with eyeliner and some kind of mineral base that half dissolves in salt and water, but she wants to dance with me, the enemy.

There are things men and women are never going to get about each other. You would think it would have been solved centuries ago but it wasn’t. From my perspective, there are still the armies and they don’t dance with each other. In Ingrid’s view, and Lucy’s too, you dance with the devil because there’s no one else to dance with.

And then; it’s a good dance. There’s no music in the apartment. I’m not hearing any. I don’t know if Lucy is or not but it doesn’t matter. We’re dancing and it’s not elegant or skillful. It’s just two people holding on and trying to make it from three to four o’clock without giving up while a third person takes the longest time to open a bottle of wine I’ve ever heard of.

Hugging in tight circles. One of them is crying and the other one wishes he could reach into her, grab her pain by the throat and yank it out of her. The slow as hell wine-opener person? When I open my eyes, she’s standing at the corner between the kitchen and living room holding three glasses between her hands and tears are dripping off her chin because she can’t swipe at them without spilling red wine on the new carpet.

Ingrid might be crying for her friend. She might be crying about her meeting at eight-thirty sharp that has worried the shit out of her because it’s her big chance in a world of small chances. I don’t know why she’s crying but she’s giving another signal and it’s one the soldiers in my army almost always get and almost never understand what they did to deserve it. It’s the signal that says, oh, buddy, are you ever going to get laid first chance I get.

Apparently, it’s because I’m dancing with her best friend as if we’re new lovers. In her army, that can go either way. I’m never going to understand.

By five-thirty, everyone has danced like that with everyone. There’s been no logic, nothing to say so nothing said. While Ing and I are dancing I feel like I’m getting laid right there. We haven’t danced like that in seven or eight years. If I had thought about it at all, I would have thought we couldn’t anymore.

At one point I’m in danger of thinking about it and I look over at Lucy, afraid this is just making her feel left out and lonelier than she was before. She’s watching every move with her legs folded under her. Her mouth is open and her wine glass is suspended above her knee motionless as a boulder. Just before Ing reaches up and puts a soft hand on my cheek to turn me back to her, I get it. With all our faults and fragilities, Ingrid and I are Lucy’s glimmer of hope, and my wife knows that. She arranged all this by the seat of her pants because what else can you do for a friend like Lucy? You can’t fix what already happened. All you can do is inflate their hopes again. How in the fuck do women do that?

*

Lucy went out the door at the same time daylight came in the window. There wasn’t room for both of them. I either managed several hours of not screwing up or I got forgiven for whatever sins I committed while Ing was healing her friend, because meeting or no meeting, oh, buddy, did I get laid.

While we’re lying there afterward, both of us probably thinking: how long has it been since we did this like that? Ing puts her lips against my ear and her hand over my heart and says, We should have a party.

That’s fine, I say. Anything would be fine at the moment. If she said we should buy the Plaza and live alone in it, I’d try to figure out a way to do that. What’s the occasion?

She yawns and I feel bad for her because it’s way too late for her to go back to sleep before she has to get up and get ready for her meeting.

This is the horse Lucy will have to have to ride until she breaks it or it stops paying attention to her. We need to get her back on it.

This is where I’m expected to perform. I’m the guy who has to do it because I’m the guy Ingrid gave up all the men friends she used to have for. Before me, she could fix Lucy up with someone carefully selected from a whole team of guys she knew, then I came along and complicated all of that. Now, it has to be about the guys I know, but where Lucy is concerned, I’m about out of guys to select from. Of the ones left, most of them are such assholes I wouldn’t fix up my worst enemy with them, leave alone Lucy. Still, it’s going to be my job to work through it best I can and for that, I’ve been paid in advance.

We, I say, meaning me. I have to find the horse, right? And he has to be worth riding. It’s my responsibility because I know a lot of men. Do I have that right?

Yes, you do. Excellent job! But you’re not in it alone so don’t whine. I’ll do all the party work. Everything. You don’t have to lift a finger except to come up with a few worthwhile guests.

We have about fifteen minutes to cuddle so close that if either of us got goose bumps both of us would feel like they were in our way. After that, Ing has to get up to go through the complex process of putting on her battle gear. When her body heat moves away, I feel like some of me stuck to it and went away with her. I’ve spent six or seven days out of town before and not missed her as much as I did for the first

There was a time during Lucy’s visit that I wanted to tell her: We are not worth this. We’re never going to be close to what you want and deserve.

It’s good I didn’t do that for several reasons. While I’m lying there refusing to move the arm Ing was just holding down like the best weight ever, I know that the main reason not to say that to Lucy is that it may not be true.

*

When I get home, Ingrid is already there, napping on the sofa. It’s rare that I get home before she does. I didn’t expect it and I couldn’t see her from the door, so