the shower he wondered what she meant. Clicks his teeth. Were they clicking against something? Like the spoon? Or did she mean clicking them together, teeth on teeth, as he chewed? For days afterwards it was a strain for him to eat. He’d hold the spoon in his hand like a parent waiting to feed a child. With the spoon finally in, he was aware of every muscle conforming to its shape. He tried to slide the food off without letting his teeth touch it. And chewing, forget it. Most of the time he just swallowed like he was downing prescription pills.
He found another woman to chat. The most anonymous he could find. No birth date and no interests other than “yes.” Hair: yes. Eyes: yes. Interests: yes. Sex: yes. The picture was a placeholder icon of one of the Powerpuff girls, a red-head. There was no video, no audio. So he typed, “Are you a man or a woman?”
“Yes.”
“What a relief.”
“Yes.”
“I found a pair of overalls that turns me invisible.”
The Powerpuff girl gave him the boot.
Fred nosed his Taurus onto Jefferson Street and parked beside the house. Time to work. Nothing like rejection to solidify his resolve. He was Invisiman. Invisiman got out of the car. Invisiman walked through the berm of snow at the curb and up his unshoveled sidewalk. Invisiman unlocked the bulkhead doors. Invisiman went to work in his basement. After just a few minutes, he almost didn’t react anymore when a four-foot length of copper pipe levitated into the air. What started as a kind of ethereal spectacle became routine. He sanded and burnished the ends with what looked like a floating emery cloth and the flux seemed to glide itself onto the fittings. The torch hovered at the coupling until the flux bubbled out, then the solder sucked in on its own. It was like watching an instructional video for plumbing. You could see every detail so clearly. But the best was his torch. The Bernzomatic. Flame on, flame off. Invisiman contemplated torching the place. No. He wanted a witness this time, someone who would see that this was the work of Invisiman. He set the torch down and pulled out his phone.
Donna hadn’t yet changed her number, though she’d threatened to if he didn’t stop. After a while she simply didn’t answer, and didn’t return his messages. He hoped now that it would be long enough. He dialed the number and counted the rings. No answer. He called again, this time waiting for the beep, her voice mail. “Donna, it’s me. I know you don’t want me to call. I’m at the new house. In the basement. The pipes are frozen and I think I might set the house on fire. This isn’t a threat—don’t think of this as a threat. I’m just tired and it’s freezing cold down here and I don’t have anyone—” Another beep sounded and Fred held the phone away from his face, a metal and plastic slab levitating in front of him.
To talk to. He stopped short of saying the words. He sat down on the cement, still damp from when he put out the fire yesterday. The cold and wet seeped into the overalls, through the boxers to his skin, or whatever it was he had now. He could stay here, how long? A week before anyone would notice? At work they’d think he was finally out with clients, showing homes like his license said he should. He had friends, sure, but they were mostly couples and it was awkward with them now. They were standoffish, as if his marital troubles were contagious. His only obligation was an eye exam on the 28th, and that was in a few weeks. A few weeks of lying here in the dark, absorbing moisture and cold, his body temperature plummeting, and then he’d be a frozen fixture of the place. Maybe that’s what happened to the previous owner: he went into the crawl space, lay down and decomposed into the ground. Just the overalls left. But an ending shouldn’t be so pathetic. Not for Inivisiman. He got up and walked outside.
The wet spots felt like ice through the overalls. He wasn’t going to last long out here, not at night with the wet and the chill. But he wanted to see if Donna would come. He had left messages before, pleas for afternoon walks or movie nights, but usually to stave off boredom—never with that degree of desperation. He hoped she picked up on it. He replayed the words in his mind and tried to imagine how it would sound. The reception would be poor in the basement, but even through that she would hear the resignation in his voice. She would come, drive up into the yard, not stopping until she’d taken him from the basement. Talked some sense into him. Invisiman huddled in the bushes in his overalls and the branches speared his arms. At least he could still feel that. The numbness hadn’t reached through his core yet. He had twenty minutes, he figured, before he’d have to trek back inside. Would she come? He folded his invisible arms then lifted one of his hands up to press it to his cold ear. Just the tips were tingling now. She would come. She had to.
Invisiman started to shake. His jaw was sore like he’d been grinding his teeth all night. He wondered if he could measure the cold by the regularity of his convulsions. Cars winked past, their headlamps illuminating the bushes and leaving the fading red glow of their taillights. He would look like just a pair of stiff overalls hung on some branches but refusing to move with the wind. The shaking began to subside and an oddly warm numbness started in his fingers and worked its way slowly up his arms and to his body.
He had the urge to run.
He rolled himself out of the bushes and then he was down the steps to the icy sidewalk. He crunched through the snow and managed a kind of dull shuffle, kicking up little chunks of ice that had frozen around old footprints. It couldn’t be too late yet, maybe seven or eight, but how long he was in the bushes he couldn’t be sure. Up ahead the road curved next to a ravine and he could make out a figure on the sidewalk coming toward him, the curves of a woman wrapped in fleece. Donna, it would be Donna. Please let it be Donna. Closer he could see a hat and gloves and reflective tape that shone bright slashes of yellow whenever a car passed. His skin was stiff as cardboard, a jumble of invisible bones and connective tissue under age-old overalls. But there was something off in the woman’s gait; she was pigeon-toed in a way that was unfamiliar and she bounced too much on the balls of her feet. This was not Donna. Just another woman out for a night jog. Still he approached, slowing now, only wanting to lie down. The woman sped up as she rounded the corner. She had seen him maybe, done the same kind of guessing about the figure moving closer in the night, starting to emerge like a photograph in a developing tray, the lines and contours finally gaining clarity. Her bouncy strides slowed and then stopped. Invisiman shuffled through the snow. He could see her eyes. Crow’s feet dimpled her skin as she squinted, then her eyes opened full so he could see the whites. Hello, he said, but his mouth was frozen, a tin man’s jaw rusted shut. It came out garbled, like his tongue had been cut out. She came closer, her head shifted, looking at him up and down but never at his face. She was close enough that he could smell her sweaty woolen hat. He reached, his invisible cudgel arms trying to find another body, and his wrists hit her shoulders. If he could just hold her for a while. Something warm. He tried to pull her in but she pivoted in his arms and tried to run. She slipped, and when he dove and caught her ankles her body landed on the snow like a felled tree. She called out, kicked at his invisible face. Hold on, he said. Please. Just give me some time to explain.
Lone Wolf
It is inconvenient being a wolf. Imagine this: spring, sitting in a desk when the stamens and petals of daffodils or day lilies or lilacs bloom, and the heady scent of pollen comes to you so strongly that your nose is full of it. You feel like you’ve shoved spray foam up your nostrils and your head is expanding like a pollen balloon. You can smell the pistils and the thin stalks of grasses and the small clovers like they were part of a spring cornucopia lining your desk. It’s stronger than you know how to say, because all the comparisons are human, and yet your wolf olfactory senses haven’t gone, nor have the field lice or the burrs that ended up in your hair. And, there’s this: you’re hungry.
“You haven’t answered me, Jason.”
You lift your head and drool connects you to your desk in thin strands like milk whites from a
