The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories by Christopher Merkner Page B

specter of my daughter, would lower herself into the water and swim over to us. But nothing occurred; no person of the three of us moved. My daughter kept the flashlight on this woman and the woman continued smoking.
    She had stopped waving, but she looked back at us as though we were in meaningful conversation. She nodded nicely. She shifted every now and then, and I could hear the harsh scratch of the loose mine surface beneath her when she did. Except when she would wince while moving her weight, she remained largely placid in her expression, entirely matter-of-fact.
    â€œJust wait,” my daughter whispered to me. “You O.K ., Hannah?” she called. “Can I get you anything?”
    The woman shook her head and shifted once more. She pulled a leg from the water and the light from my daughter’s flashlight caught a surprising angle in her profile. I had not been able to see it before, but it was clear in an instant that this woman was pregnant. Her belly was enormous! She plopped her near hand on her womb. She tipped her head back and looked up to the roof of the mine. She opened her mouth and groaned.
    And then the light went out and I stood there stone silent in the dark.
    I didn’t move. I could see nothing. My eyes failed to adjust to the new light, because the new light was an utter absence of light, something I had never seen before, and something I have never seen since. The image of my pregnant daughter burned and glowed in my head, but if there are degrees of darkness there are surely degrees of silence, and I tell you I left a lifetime of relevant verbal matter stuffed inside that hole no one knows how to mine any longer.

THE COOK AT SWEDISH CASTLE

    T he cook was no cook. He had only role-played one at his grandmother’s house in Chicago as a boy. Yet flying back for his grandmother’s funeral, he found himself entirely preoccupied with playing the cook again. The prospect made his feet throb. Maybe, in the end, there was nothing larger than the cook. Even sitting in the pew, silent and solemn before the service, Able could not shake the trembling.
    And then his mother’s sister roped her arms around his neck and asked him if he would say a few words. “You are always our best speaker.” The cook nodded. The liquor on her breath was rum. “So warmhearted.” She paused, pinching her lips shut, suppressing something that had come up from her belly. “You’re just the most warm.”

    Leaning against the baptismal font at the front of the church in a tuxedo was the cook’s cousin, Erik Pederson. He spoke with a dark, plump woman and periodically batted her on her heavy, bare shoulder. When he had done this several times, the woman reached back and whacked him in the chest with the flat of her hand. The sound of the impact was loud. The two of them chortled and tried to conceal their mirth with their hands. It appeared to the cook that his cousin had coerced a woman to marry him; the woman’s ring was a salient and gaudy flash in the spare hull of the sanctuary.
    The cook lowered his eyes. He would not be caught gazing at the cousin and the wife. However, he was really shocked to see his cousin married. Really shocked.

    The cook’s cousin was an educated man, a scholar of obscure philosophies, an adjunct at some desperate midwestern state university. The man had always been a real bastard. He was about as physically grotesque a person as the cook had ever known. Right below the rim of his belt, for example, the cook’s cousin expanded enormously. It had beenthis way since they were kids. The chest, the shoulders, the back, the stomach—all seemed to have dropped into an expansive bubble of body flesh orbiting the waistline; something, it seemed, had always been herniated. The man’s arms were clubby with bloated, hair-thronged fingers that curled into half fists. He suffered from a cleft palate, his lip lifting to his nose and