Run, Rabbit, Run
Greyhound Steve, I call him inside my head. This is the man I meet the summer I turn nineteen, the summer I finally get out of the hospital. Steve is unemployed and likes to watch the dog races on TV. Once he tells me proudly that he has never placed a bet, although whenever I go over to his place that’s how I find him: plopped in front of the television. Sometimes he leaves the races on when we lie down to have sex and I look over his shoulder at the screen behind him while he hovers above me. Steve, putting his hands on my waist. Steve, clutching my hipbones and pumping inside me. Steve, panting in my ear as his excitement mounts, saying, Oh baby. Oh baby.
(Not that I tell him, but I hate it when he calls me that.)
(Not that he asks.)
The greyhounds wear muzzles and they chase a lure that looks like a rabbit. It isn’t a rabbit though; it’s just a thing they chase, a fruitless thing. Here they come now: down the straight, round the last bend. The commentator’s voice grows frantic and now Steve, too, grows frantic inside me, faster and faster, oh baby oh baby—
Oh—
Baby.
When the race ends he collapses on top of me and we are fused together just for a moment, the moment I am here for (the moment I believe will make me better), Steve’s sweat, my sweat, the commentator’s voice cooling, our sweat cooling. And then it’s time to start over, a new race, the dogs in their starting traps, muzzled and lunging. Nothing but chasing, that’s all they know. I tell myself then that I don’t understand, all that fruitless chasing. And—
Baby, Steve murmurs as I reach for him again.
Me, Looking at You, Looking at Me
The photographer tells me she’s going through a film camera phase and she wants to capture the autumn colours up in the hills, which she’s heard are very beautiful. And so for our first date (at least, I think it’s a date) she picks me up in her old station wagon and we drive eastwards through the city, up into the foothills, where there are groves of maple trees and ginkgo trees, red and green and gold. I stop to lean against a fence by the side of the road and she puts her camera to her eye, looks at me through the viewfinder, and says, Look at me, girlfriend, which is what she calls me, her nickname for me. So I look at her as she adjusts the lens and the aperture and says, I like that, and presses the shutter down; and I want to say the same thing back, or almost the same thing, that I like looking at her, everything about her (her cropped, bleached-blonde hair, and the gold stud that glints in her nose, and her small, flat, high breasts). But I don’t, because it’s only our first date, after all, and it’s only me who’s calling it that. Afterwards, as she hangs the camera around her neck and walks back to me, I can’t decide whether she photographed me just for practice, as a photographer, or because she wanted to, because she wanted a picture of me; and this is a question that bothers me, not just then but for the whole of the following week, which is when I see her next, once she’s had the film developed, all her shots of red and green and gold. We go to a coffee shop to look at them together, our second date, and when we reach the picture of me, she says it again, what she said before, or something similar: I like this one of you (as if she has other photographs of me, as if this is just one of many). In the photograph, anyway, the collar of my coat is turned up and my cheeks are flushed from the cold and the wind is blowing my hair away from my face, and I look happy, I think, the me in the picture, looking back at her. Or if not happy then hopeful—
Which is close.
