Coe Review

was some sort of foul religious slump she was going through, an appetite of
demonic proportions, demanding truffles. Truffles and milk.
Several months later, while driving on a deserted stretch of road on the
outskirts of town, she saw the sign: Marble & Fritz. Below the names, on
soggy cardboard, it said, Free Kittens! Dark pulled over to the side of the
road, backed up and drove beneath draping pine boughs down a long gravelly
driveway to a house that was sloping a bit to the right.
She honked twice and was beginning to back out when a man the size of
a fridge—a fridge in overalls—stepped out onto the porch and squinted at
her. Was this Fritz? She yelled through her open car window that she came
for the kittens. He nodded, stepped down from the porch and motioned her
around back where she imagined him bludgeoning her to death with the
handle-end of an axe and feeding her body to the pigs. He led her to a large
wooden crate sitting in the shadow side of a broken barn. At the bottom of
the crate were the kittens.
Can I? she said, looking at Fritz.
Help yourself, he said.
She saw then that she had been wrong about the pigs. He was working a
toothpick with vigor into his bottom front teeth as if he had killed the first
woman visitor, the kitten lover, and ate her himself.
Dark picked up the most mild-mannered kitten. Something seemed
wrong with the kitten's eyes. One eye fixed onto her as it should, but the other
drifted over her shoulder, disappearing back there, into the woods.
Fritz said, That's from my wife dropping her. He knuckled the kitten's
skull. But see? Didn't hurt her melon none.
At this, the kitten let out a tiny bark though perhaps it was only Fritz
farting.
Speeding home, she held the kitten out to Edwin sitting on the front
porch with a beer bottle. He hadn't known what to say afterwards, after it all
happened, after their baby came and went, but what exactly had she expected
him to say? Say sorry, say I'll get us another one, drop your drawers, say
oops? No. Just that he had been wrong. There had been something to worry
about after all. And if only they had worried earlier, but he didn't want to be
one of those couples, the over-protecting couples in matching Disney rugby
shirts who became for the doctors and their staff a laughing stock, running
in whenever their Steven or Jonathan or Margaret or Mary had a simple little
cough. A little cough or a little sniffle.
He had been holding a magazine. He had been reading a magazine in
the waiting room when they both stood up to hear the news that he told her
emphatically, again and again—while waiting, while flipping pages of his
S. Asher Sund 79