Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,66

to your imagination, if that’s okay by you.

Afterward, Zelda lay next to me with her eyes closed. “I’ve missed this,” she said. “And I didn’t even know it. Fancy that.” She slid her head up into the curve of my neck. I remember thinking how amazing it was, all the million ways that human bodies fit together. “Nathaniel and I stopped sleeping together when he turned fifty. It was his decision. He said it felt wrong to be like that with me. For a while after that, he treated me like a daughter. Then, as his health began to fail, I started treating him like a son. It’s all very strange.” I laughed. That was the understatement of the fucking century. “Anyway, it’s all in the past now. There’s no need to discuss it. Really, we should be napping. You haven’t learned this yet, but the afterglow is the absolute best time for napping.”

I lay there watching her, as her breath deepened and her face relaxed. There’s a word in Portuguese that my dad wrote about in one of his books: saudade. It’s the sadness you feel for something that isn’t gone yet, but will be. The sadness of lost causes. The sadness of being alive.

I intertwined my legs with Zelda’s legs, my arms with her arms, as if I could hold on to her just by holding on to her. We fell asleep wrapped up in each other like a couple of tangled cables, the kind that are so knotted up in so many places that the only way you could separate them would be with a pair of scissors. And that would ruin one of them for good. Maybe even both of them.

I woke up an hour later, with the sun framed perfectly in the window, a yellow corona of light suspended in the white fog like an egg yolk.

I grabbed my journal off the side table and sat up in bed.

Zelda mumbled some gibberish in her sleep, or maybe something in a foreign tongue. I started to write.

STORY #3: BRAVERY

AFTER THE BATTLE OF CROSSED eyes, the greatest warriors of the tribe were brought before King Uthor to receive prizes for their valor. First came Christos, also called the Limb Collector, because he kept a collection of his enemies’ severed arms and legs in a pile outside his hut. His prize was a fine ax of wrought gold. Next came Boris, also called Ironskin, who was seven feet tall and the same around, who wore no armor because his body was his armor, who had been wounded so many times that any new injury he sustained was likely just the opening of an old scar. His gift was a fine black stallion, as he’d broken the back of his previous mount when attempting to leap onto it during the battle. Finally the greatest warrior of the tribe was brought forward. His name was Klaus, though most everyone called him the Dragon’s Head because, like the fearsome fire-breathing head of a dragon, he led every charge.

King Uthor was effusive in his praise, as everyone in the tribe knew that the day would’ve been lost if not for Klaus. The queen could only blush when the great warrior knelt at her feet and kissed her hand (in truth, she had always carried a flame for Klaus, who risked his brawny, beautiful body day after day, while her husband, though a good king, had grown soft and flabby over the years). For his bravery, Klaus was granted an enormous bronze bathing tub, built to be heated over a flame like a cooking pot, along with the usual spoils of a war well-waged: gold and gems, slaves and such.

Now it came to pass that around this time, a mystic was said to be wandering the outskirts of the tribe’s territories. Reports of her physical aspect varied. Some said she was a wizened crone, hunched over like the top of a shepherd’s crook, leading an equally wizened donkey behind her. Others said she was a young woman of uncommon beauty, raven-haired but for a single streak of silver that fell across her forehead like a lightning bolt, and riding a fine white horse. It was in this latter guise that she was discovered a few days later by two of the tribe’s scouts. She had just been attacked by bandits, and surely would’ve been killed had the scouts not come to her aid.

In gratitude, she told them to send a message to their