Miss Elva by Stephens Gerard Malone

growing up in the house on Breton Street, had regaled Elva with mechanical details. Never pretty; dirty, sweaty, hardly romantic. Then there was Rilla and Amos during their Saturday-night ritual, Elva not quite sure if their noisy coupling was giving them pleasure or pain. But this, what happened before her now, this was something else. Not the fumbling of a teenage boy and his girl. Not a friendship blossoming into more. How could Elva have missed noticing two natures whose essential elements required the other until, simply, this fusion?
    Elva lay under a flutter of rhododendron blossoms like one starved, feasting upon someone else being loved, certain that she was somehow sinning in thewatching, not them in the doing, and unable, unwilling to turn away. No longer enough, wanting to be Jane.
    Elva awoke with a start.
    What about the white rain and running her fingers over the tidal ridges of beach sand as he held her? No, that was his chest against her face. Someone had carried her. He carried her.
His hands, hard, they were hot.
Elva remembered asking, What about Jane? And he said, What about you, my little marionette? I came to get you. Don’t you love me?
Yes!
Like a blanket he covered her, a snail traversing her neck, leaving sticky brands that tingled in the cool, sweet air of morning. She breathed his breath.
He rushed into me!
Then he looked sad and asked, Why did you have to be ugly?
    “What’s the matter with you? You sick?” Jane said, hastily scrubbing her face with water from the pitcher on their bedside bureau, shuddering from the coldness of it.
    No, the same.
Elva shook her head. Only a dream and they have a way of becoming nightmares by day.
    “You’d better hurry. Rilla’s ready for church.”
    Lingering in bed, Elva tried to clear the still powerful images from her head, voices that whispered from across the night.
    But Jane?
    And he’d said, not to worry, she’s coming. Go to sleep. It’s better if you sleep, before she gets back. Say nothing. Say nothing, Miss Elva.
    There was an anxiousness in her abdomen she had never known before. Confusion. She sat up. That face in the mirror on the bureau grinning back at her, but not happy, wobbling, saying, See, I
am
a goblin.
    “Did you sleep in your dress?”
    Elva looked. She had, and stiffly got out of bed.
    “Jesus!” Jane had her hand over her mouth. “Look, you’re a woman now!”
    Oh!
And Elva noticed the blood too.
    Jane was laughing, Rilla! Rilla! Leaving Elva to mark her womanhood by hiding her shoes, with their saltwater stains, under the bed.

O AK’D BEEN PROPPED UP by his window watching Elva hunched over on a log by the end of the driveway, drawing.
    “Hey! Gil says you painted these pictures up here. That fisherman and the sleigh and those cows in the field, I pretend they’re pieces of a story. I really like the black-and-white cat with the red smile. Helps me pass the time.”
    Elva ignored him, expecting ridicule to follow.
    “I like them!”
    “Hey, back,” she’d said, looking up.
    The bruising had set in. Oak sounded awful.
    “Thanks for last night, you know, getting me back with the others.”
    Elva asked how he was feeling. He was sure he’d broken a few ribs, but all things considered, he’d be okay.
    “You some kind of a doctor?”
    No, he replied, but he’d had broken ribs before and knew what to expect. Oak didn’t elaborate.
    “Whatcha doing?”
    She could have said, Trying to keep my head from spinning off or worms eating through my heart or my skin from moulting. And she was angry to boot! Boy, was she angry, with a whole new sympathy for poor ol’ Eve of Eden, who just happened to be fodder for Father Cértain’s Sunday sermon that morning. But the priest had it wrong. You didn’t choose to eat from no damned apple tree, it just happened. Then God made you pay for not having any choice at all! Like Elva’s trip to the Abbey, which was still a muddle of half-truths and what-was-real and why did Gil