I dream of the hunt. Kilimanjaro. The cloudy peaks on the horizon. The savannah yawns before us. The jeep bounces across ruts and with each slap a vibration goes through my groin, tingles in my chest. My companion and I grip our well-oiled rifles, ready at any moment to spring from the jeep and crawl through the swaying grasses for the lioness.
She is recumbent. Her haunches shine like plate gold. Her tail flicks away the tsetse. Her ribs seem to sprout wings. She licks her forepaws. Her rankness floods our nostrils and I become dizzy. Man-eater, she senses my every move, and questions nothing.
The dream goes along quietly—pleasantly—until I realize that my companion, offering me a swig from his canteen, is the awful-grinning Ricky Sharpe.
I am reckoning with this trauma.
2.
I have a cousin. Call him Peter, though you may have already guessed that Peter is not his name. Four years ago, when Peter was seventeen, he was invited by a friend to come next door and watch a pornographic tape. They were in the basement den. Peter's grinning friend felt in his pocket for the key that opened the cabinet where he locked away his most licentious tapes, those involving bestiality or excretory sex. It was the key to "the exotic erotic" Peter's friend said as he dangled the key.
3.
It was clearly Juliette. He dismissed the discovery, convincing himself for the moment that it was only someone who looked like Juliette. Someone with Juliette's hair, cut short, someone with Juliette's face, only younger. But things came into focus again as the man on the screen politely asked the woman to turn around and to get down on all fours. The large breasts which hung between her thin arms were Juliette's. The arch in her back as the man's huge penis entered her a la Negress was Juliette's. The moan she released as the man thrusted was Juliette's. Peter heard the man's thighs slap against Juliette's rump; he heard the man's hard, athletic breathing and Juliette's gentle come calls at each thrust. His skin ached; he was suddenly perspiring. Stop it he said to his friend. Stop it he said. Stop it he said. Stop it.
"I'm stopping it," said the grinning friend. "Oooh, yes, I'm stopping it."
4.
In the dream, I heard doors slamming, footsteps echoing on the wooden floors. Juliette and someone else. Juliette's clear laughter flooded the dream and was answered by the low mumbling of a man. Ricky Sharpe. The refrigerator door slammed, glasses clank, and the laughter came again. Ricky Sharpe. My eyes opened and stared. Blades of streetlight clawed the ceiling. Ricky Sharpe. I sat on the side of my bed, listening for his mumbling to articulate. Nothing. But I knew, in my bones, at the stiffening roots of my hair that Ricky Sharpe, that great white hunter, has snaked into my house. He, with my Juliette.
Their footsteps rose toward me. Juliette hushed him as they came up towards my bedroom, turned on the landing and went into hers. He laughed two syllables as if to bray my name. Pee-taw. The door shut. Pee-taw. All was still. All was still in my heart. My breath was still. The streetlight atomized in front of me.
5.
You would have done it. That is how I'll put it to you. You would have risen, like a ghost, unaware of your bare feet on the carpet. Unaware of your nakedness. Your paleness. Unaware of touching the door handle and floating down the hall and stopping just outside her door. You would have heard his puerile giggling, the insolent joy of his conquest, and Juliette's own breathy response, coy and ripe. You would have felt something when you heard the rusty squeak of the bedsprings, a twinge, a blade of heat moving up your chest to your throat and suddenly, a flash before your eyes, blindingly white. Your brain would have cooked for a moment and then, gone cold like the miraculously sudden deep-freezing of a glass of water. You would have moved away from the door, glided down the stairs, so quietly, so smoothly, neither rushed nor slow, and you would have found a knife. Not a gun--Juliette wouldn't allow so crass a weapon as a gun in the house--not a chef's or a butcher's knife, but a narrow-bladed slicer. A claw. You wouldn't think about what you would do with it. You would only know that you had to have a hold of it, that it gave a purpose to the moment. Then you would have risen up the stairs, maybe you would have risen right through the ceiling, coming up through the floor into the bedroom, your hand on the door handle, pushing the door shut behind you.
Ricky Sharpe would have turned toward you pushing himself away from Juliette, saying, "What's the matter, son? Can I help you?"
You would have moved toward them. You would have heard your Juliette say your name, the same breathy way, only now a question. Ricky Sharpe's feet would have thudded against the floor as he shot out of the bed, his penis, a stub, in front of him. "What's the matter, son?" He wouldn't have been grinning.
And the knife would have been there, a dull shimmer in the half-light, an arms-length away from you, floating between you and Ricky Sharpe. "Now take it easy son," pleading sneaking in behind the forced authority of his tone. His hands would have come up in front of him, to shun the knife from his throat and chest, but the knife would have outsmarted him, and at the last second dived toward his belly. There would have been a slight resistance as it broke through the skin and fat and rammed up against the muscle.
Now you would have felt your power, your manhood. Now your senses would have come back to you, as red as any blood. It would have been conscious, so very deliberate; you would have pushed the blade, feeling the muscle resist it, push the blade, feel the muscle tear and then pop and feel the blade slip into his softness.
He would have bent over your hand, gagging words you wouldn't hear. You have would considered pulling the blade out, when your Juliette, your beautiful lioness, would have taken hold of your wrist, "You little motherfucker!" she would have screamed.
6.
Her voice is a horn asking fearsome questions. Around her head buzzes a corona of tsetse. Her tail scours bare the earth. With her jaws, she cracks skulls.
I am reckoning with the trauma.
NOTE: This abbreviated version—shall we call it a short-short story, a hint story, or maybe a fraction of a story?—does not convey the emotional complexity of the fuller version of “Juliette and her Lover”. The fuller version has more space for the development of voice, character and action. But there is at least the essence of the situation in this piece, though I think the emotion is too heightened, maybe even forced compared to the longer version. Perhaps making it even shorter, a prose-poem, would allow the lyricalness to expand the emotion. But lyrical expression, with its use of figurative language, is inarticulate as narrative. It can be powerfully emotional—and sometimes that is enough—but unless it is an epic, it will lack narrative detail and progression.
I am all for compression—lord knows, I’ve read many a novel that has trekked off into tangents and superfluous detail so much so that 800 pages later I am as lost as a stoner in the woods—but I am not a minimalist, not a flash fiction writer (more power to you). I like to write a story that goes along the trail, with its ups and down and muddy places until it comes out on the other side.