Degrees of Nakedness by Lisa Moore Page B

lamb and fresh mint. Marika’s knife is whining back and forth on the dinner plate.
    “Could you stop that noise?”
    Marika’s body jerks, as if she didn’t realize he was sitting beside her.
    “I was lost in thought. Thinking of crabs.”
    A tear is running down her cheek.
    “In Guatemala,” she says, “there’s a species of crab that burrows into the ground and brings up in its claws shards of ancient pottery.”
    She lays down her knife and wipes a tear off her cheek with the back of her hand.
    “The crabs descend beneath layer after layer to different cities that have been piled on top of each other, over time. Each city is hundreds of years younger than the one below it. The crabs mix the pottery shards together, all these ancient layers mixed together in the light of day. You really know very little about me. You know nothing about science.”
    Julian notices that both Marika’s eyes are watering now and realizes she’s crying.
    In his dreams the stories Marika tells him are fables. He dreams about a crab that presents him with a jacket of glass shards that came from a wine bottle he once threw at Olivia. Olivia wears a cloak of stars. She opens her arms and the cloak is wrenched away from her, leaving her naked. She becomes two women, a blurred image, Marika and Olivia both.
    That night Julian leaves the house at midnight and walks for hours. Outside the Royal Ontario Museum the moonlit gargoyles are covered with burlap bags, and look like robbers with nylon stockings over their faces. A group of five people dressed in cartoon costumes emerges from a church basement. They skip across the empty street and get into an idling mini-van. A man in a Pink Panther costume trails behind. He has removed the head of the costume and carries it under his arm. The man’s own head looks abnormally small against the giant pink neck of the costume. Julian takes a picture of him.
    Lately, Julian thinks about a memory lit with a big number one candle, a wax monkey wrapped around it. Julian carried the cake. He could feel the yellow of the flame under his chin, like the shadow of a buttercup. He could see his daughter’s face buried in Olivia’s blouse, both their party hats sticking off the sides of their heads. There was a blizzard outside and Julian felt like they were wrapped in white tissue paper. He left a few days after that. He hasn’t spoken to either of them since.
    Julian remembers things he didn’t notice when they happened. He remembers a party in the country. Someone had shoved a hotdog wiener through a hole in a screen door, and every time the door slammed the hotdog wagged obscenely. It was the night he met Olivia. At midnight everyone went skinny dipping, the sound of diving bodies swallowed by the dark water. He was drunk and naked. When it came time to get out of the water he suddenly felt embarrassed. He asked Olivia to givehim a hand, so he could hold a towel in front of himself. When she did haul him out he managed to drop the towel and got caught in the skittering path of a flashlight.
    When Julian gets home from his walk he finds Marika asleep on the couch, a bowl of chips resting on her knee. She has fallen asleep in the middle of the night with her wrist hanging over the rim of the chrome chip bowl. The phone is ringing. Julian nearly trips over one of the cats in his rush to get it. It’s ringing near Marika’s ear. She doesn’t stir.

    Olivia’s heels click down the hall through the loose pools of fluorescent light. It’s Monday and the Topsail Cinemas mall is mostly deserted, except for the games arcade which shoots out synchronized pings and buzzes. Most of the stores have been in various stages of renovation all winter. Someone has been going at a cement wall with a jackhammer. Chunks of cement have fallen away and rusted bars stick out.
    When Olivia turns the corner she sees the exhibit by a taxidermist from British Columbia named Harold. He’s standing next to a chair, one hand on