Josh Bell
SOME OF US ARE STILL SLEEPING WITH CENTAURS
1.
I step into the kitchen, its one grimy window, lacy yellow curtain on it like an adult superstore outfit. I’m saying to Jobby, “I’m not a side salad, I’m the whole meal.”
2.
For it has occurred to me that I’m not the only one in this apartment who has been pay-fucking Dave the centaur.
I say to Jobby, “To hell with Dave the centaur.”
Jobby: she’s pregnant as the globe is. She sits at the table looking at some book on ancient metals. If she owned a watch she might look at that watch instead of look at me.
3.
Jobby: she won’t listen when she is pregnant, or at least not to me.
It wasn’t Dave the centaur’s baby Jobby was pregnant with?
Or so Jobby said a million times it wasn’t, but I had a husband’s concerns.
For through the vents hadn’t I heard the two of them—one of them my wife, one of them Dave the centaur—talking superstore words together, hair and mane?
Or heard the hooves of Dave, clip-clop, on the fire escape?
It’s hard for a centaur to climb a fire escape. They spook to see empty space through grating. It meant Dave the centaur wanted Jobby’s love bad enough to climb for it, tamp down his own superstitions, risk limb and hoof.
4.
Had Dave the centaur ever climbed for me? I tried to think. I only remembered ever opening doors for him.
5.
I knew it wasn’t my baby in Jobby. Or, to be precise, I knew it wasn’t a human baby. You could tell by the bulge, a little more geometry than human, a little more drift to it. Jobby: she didn’t mind what shape the bulge was. It was her bulge and she was happy with it.
6.
“Or you might just be Dave’s little snack pack,” Jobby says to me, in the kitchen, meaning Dave. “Little snack pack for Dave, just like the rest of us,” she says, picking at her teeth with a plastic fork.
“I’m no snack pack,” I say to Jobby, “I’m a human being.”
7.
I just let the ramen water burn out there on the stove, noodles I’d been cooking for Jobby, like I didn’t care, the words “human” and “being” hanging stupid in the kitchen between us like bats. Let Jobby fend for herself and her own noodles. Let her baby be a centaur’s baby. It is time to leave this perverse kitchen.
8.
If it wasn’t Dave’s baby it was just another centaur’s baby, run of the mill. There were too many centaurs, in and out of our lives. It was that kind of city, that kind of epoch, full of sunshine and of money.
9.
So I left Jobby in the kitchen and went to my room, dealt myself a hand of solitaire, tried not to masturbate while thinking about that adult superstore lace curtain in the kitchen’s one window, not about Dave either, nor Jobby and Dave, the sad words between them, an orchestra, these were all the things I didn’t masturbate to.
10.
I had slept with Dave myself, obviously, so didn’t have much fight in me.
In fact this sleeping with Dave: I had started it.
I could hear Jobby, out in the kitchen, scraping ramen from the pot.
I didn’t know who I needed to be in love with, woman or beast.
11.
The ace of diamonds wasn’t showing its face and I was about to cheat, but Dave, of course it was Dave, now he was calling me up on the cell.
So I answered and I said, “Solitaire is the game of kings.”
He said to me, “I’ve got fifty dollars with your name on it.”
His voice was oil and a different oil. I said to Dave the centaur, “Nice try.” I said, “I’m not sleeping with Dave the centaur anymore.”
12.
And I said it in my room, aloud, so anyone could hear, “I’m not sleeping with Dave the centaur anymore.”
13.
And I said it out loud again in case Jobby hadn’t heard it. And I thought how I could probably love Jobby’s baby if I had to. People had done worse.
14.
And I say to Jobby how I will not sleep with Dave the centaur.
“As if,” Jobby says.
“As if what?” I say.
“As if ‘sleep,’” Jobby says, “as if ‘will,’ as if ‘not.’”
15.
I said what I said and I put on my best centaur-fucking outfit, said it to Jobby in the perverted kitchen as I left our apartment, said it on the train heading downtown to Dave’s place.
16.
“I’m not sleeping with Dave the centaur anymore,” I said to Dave.
He sidled, lifted one hoof and then another, looked at me with giant eyes.
The thing with Dave is that Dave is too wide across the shoulders. He ripples in the moonlight. I cannot blame Jobby. A candy wrapper blowing in the wind can set Dave off. Beautiful, really. His hands couldn’t reach his cock and he always needed help. This was how it went with the species.
“The thing I like about you,” Dave said, “is how, no matter how hard I try, I can’t get you pregnant.”
17.
Sure, I had been with other centaurs. A palomino broke my collarbone on the Staten Island Ferry, kicking out a window, my baseball hat flying out into that dark.
A smallish ponygirl went sideways on me in a restroom stall in a club in Dumbo. I still have her hoofprints on my back.
You couldn’t pay me enough, or too little, not in those days.
In Central Park: a roan stallion with one grey eye and a degree from Columbia—journalism, of all things—called me Clarice, split me into two unequal halves. My name was not Clarice. It still isn’t. The roan’s genitalia could have had a mail box and an address on it.
18.
The thing with Dave is that you could close your eyes, feel almost like it was human, like it was human but with slightly more complicated ideas. Plus he had this way of talking to you, Dave did, talking to one sad part of your brain that was ready to do sentimental things behind the rest of your brain’s back. He liked a boy and he liked a girl, Dave the centaur did, though rarely in the same room, his voice like oil and a different kind of oil. And now in his apartment I say to Dave, “I’m not sleeping with Dave the centaur anymore,” but of course I am already kneeling, Dave coming on like the flood in a myth, and I can feel the phone in my pocket, vibrating, and I know it’s Jobby, probably calling to say how she felt the baby kick, saying it’s okay to sleep with centaurs and how I will be the one she’s in love with, forever, which for all I know is the truth.