Sarah Court by Craig Davidson

watering from the punch—could’ve looked I
was crying. Off me and Matty ran. They’re yelling
kidnapper and what-have-you. I need a drink.”
    James and I slouch down the alcoholic’s ladder.
James shows me Matilda’s trick: he balances a peanut
on her snout and at his command—“Giddyup!”—she
pops the nut up to snatch it out of midair.
    We roll out of the bar into a star-cooled night.
The road dead-ends at the dock. For whatever reason
James and I are holding hands. This blissful look
paints his face. The realization comes that I like
him quite a bit. Self-love, partially, that reflexive
fondness a man feels for another whose beggared
circumstances mirror his own.
    “Nice boat,” he says. “I had a motorhome. That
baby was repossessed.”
    James swings his hand, attached to my arm,
as if we are on a playdate. Matilda paws down the
gangplank. Wind blows off the liftlocks, ruffling our
thinning hair.
    Black Box: Wife
    This flight was buggered from takeoff. Headsets
broken. Beef stroganoff poisoned with botulism.
An albatross got sucked into the right fuselage.
Some
other
bird—flamingo?
charred
pink
feathers—sucked into the left. We’re going down.
Mayday, mayday! . . . screw it.
    When we dated she made it known I must
earn her. A breathing kewpie doll. I learned to
tango. Bought a ’78 Cougar with flake-metal
finish. Was the first to say, “I love you.” Once I’d
won her, everything that was hard in her went
to goo and I hated it and we married. She’d howl
when we fucked—I mean, firing on all cylinders.
Sounding like a stray cat yowling on a winter’s
night. Has chemical castration been undersold?
She drove a school bus when we first wed. Cash
was tight. My young bride behind the wheel of a
big yellow bus, jouncing down the road on leaf
springs that make school buses less conveyance
than amusement park ride. So young, strong,
and
gorgeous,
whereas
school
buses
were
usually driven by bat-faced hags with names
like Carla. But as the years wore on it became a
way to wound her. When arguments got heated
I’d find myself screaming: “You were a fucking bus driver !”
    The steering wheel—what do they call it on
planes? a yoke?—just busted off in my hands. A
shitload of shrieking in the cabin. Gunshots.
    My grandfather sang my grandmother’s
name in the shower after she died. They
quarrelled, publicly, often at Christmastime,
but lived sixty years together until she died of
liver cancer and he followed from cancer of a
different sort. While still alive he sang out her
name, a trilling call like a bird’s. He missed her
more than he could bear and called her name
without knowing.
    My wife and I could share a roof sixty years,
she could die, I’d grieve—but would I ever sing?
    The emblematic event signalling the derailment of
my marriage, the precise instant the train skipped
the tracks to hurtle headlong into a ravine, was
when my wife attempted to fellate me while I slept.
    Shocking she even bothered. Under her gaze my
member had become a poisoned salt lick ringed with
dead deer or worse: as if through some means of
anatomical gymnastics my asshole had cartwheeled
round to my crotch. Not to mention I was dead asleep.
Oblivious, unconsenting. What if I had rucked up
her nightie and gone down on her like a thief in the
night? Her timing was flawed. I could have been in
the grip of a nautical nightmare. The sensation may
have knitted with those stark terrors. A hungry
sea-leech sucking out my blood and vigours? My leg
lashed out instinctively. I awoke to my future ex-wife
at the foot of the bed. A goose egg on her forehead.
    Our divorce was highly amicable. My wife could
have challenged for sole custody despite my being in
those halcyon days a functional member of society.
I relocated to Sarah Court. Quaint, family-friendly.
Myself clinging to the outdated notion I was ever
that sort of man.
    At the risk of sounding like a