Mickey thought France was creepy. She passed narrow and crowded streets, quaint restaurants and big-bellied men slumped in wire-backed chairs. They reminded her of dead whales on a beachfront. There was an all-consuming rot about them. One of the men sitting outside of a bar stroked his paunch like a child acquainting himself with his body for the first time. He grunted at Mickey in nasally French or English--hard to tell, and glared at her midriff as if trying to commune with it separately, as if it deserved severance, a freedom that only he had the right to grant. And Mickey felt lighter, as though she missed a button on her blouse and her guts had spilled into a neat pile by her feet. She’d been cat called before, physically and emotionally groped (who hadn’t?) but this time felt different.
“Little girl,” he said. “Little girl, how pretty.” She could hardly ignore him, her whole body activated, but she tried not to look. He lifted his chin, expelling too much cigarette smoke from one man’s throat. “Come, come,” he purred. Mickey stumbled on the cobblestone, hesitated, turned to face him.
What would he do if she stepped forward? Would he continue to gaze into her belly button as if it was a crystal ball, as if he was trying to summon the dead? Would he take her hand and slide her fingers against his own stomach? Would she feel a heartbeat? Because there was an alarm ringing inside of her own heart, warning her from thinking thoughts she shouldn’t, that no person should ever think--
“Bonjour,” said Mickey, interrupting herself. She floated away from him, drifting back down the street, through clouds of smoke that wrapped around her like warm blankets. She yelled up to the leering mountains: “Bonjour! Bonjour!”
Mickey had arrived in Chamonix, France—a touristy town at the base of the Alps—to attend a writing workshop. The bright, cramped city was bustling and attractive on the surface, but the way people ignored each other, their faces stone hard, felt indicative of something darker, something lurking. She half expected to see lederhosen donned twins Hansel and Gretel nibbling on storefront siding, while a lecherous old woman waited around the corner for a chance to shove them into an oven.
There were all kinds of little restaurants with sprawling outdoor seating areas, which blended into the next eating area of the adjacent restaurant, and so on and so forth. Popular American songs from early 2000s played in bars and coffee shops. And, like anywhere else, all of the young people stumbled about, nose-diving into their phone screens. Mickey watched as a teenage girl smacked into a brick wall while snapping photos of her face. She turned and walked back the way she’d come, tongue wagging, cleavage pursed, facial expressions twisting between rage, lust, grief.
Mickey walked past a rushing river that tore through the little town with such thrashing force that it made her weak in the knees. She was used to the slow, stagnant rivers that she’d bobbed down as a teenager, sucking on PBR and hoping that her inevitable sunburn might fade to tan. This river had a gravitational pull, and she felt a feeling akin to lust that made her ache to dip her toes in. Just try it! The river seethed, just try it you stupid American girl. She knew the moment her toes made contact it would grab her and pull her under, never to be found. She shivered.
***
After a dinner of creamy cheese and bread she went back to the bar and found the man. She sat close by. She brought her pen and paper and ordered a glass of Merlot from a wispy fingered server, sipping the wine slowly while she watched him. They were both angled toward the cobblestone walkway that snaked through the town, him in perfect position to lech, her in perfect position to watch him lech. His eyes followed most women. He did not seem to discriminate based on age or size. His locked onto some aspect of them--what aspect she couldn’t discern from her angle. She watched as his eyes get sticky and slow as the women got close. She only knew he wasn’t looking at their faces.
She wanted him to look at her face.
She wanted to cradle his.
She jot down notes. He had wide set eyes, a nose that bumped out at the bridge and redeemed itself by curving in at the snout. He had big thick lips and a tongue that slid across them, about twice a minute. They were chapped, flecked with white chips of dead skin.
***
That night Mickey dreamt of sitting across from the man in a steaming bubble bath. They sat in a lion-footed tub. The man popped enormous pink bubbles with his pinky fingers, the sound of each pop as shrill as a teenager snapping gum in a doctor’s office. The sound racketed around the empty air until the water was still. And when she looked below the surface, there he was, warped--a floating head. His gray cheeks were soft and still, his puckered scalp bumping gently against her abdomen.
***
Mickey arrived to class late the next day. She didn’t say a word, and neither did they. Mickey had submitted her story the night before. She wrote it in what felt like a rage, and that’s all the story was: a woman raging.
“Not a single moment of interiority,” said the Writer. The story was made up of violent and visceral scenes, hastily stitched together about a girl who had been raped by her teacher, and who sought revenge by hiring a hit man whose daughter had been similarly abused.
“I don’t believe that the hit man would rape the teacher with a broomstick, I don’t believe his anger,” the Writer said. What’s there to believe? Mickey thought. Anger is anger is anger is anger: a hot faucet you can’t turn off. Mickey bit her lip and counted her pulse. She thought of the man-whales blowing their smoke at the sky, she thought of the river.
***
Mickey uncorked a bottle of wine. She sat on her balcony and didn’t bother with a glass. She thought of what the Writer said, about her stories being typical. She supposed she was typical, and she couldn’t do anything about that. She swigged from the bottle. Falling slowly above her were para gliders. Two people were harnessed in tandem to each parachute, but from far away they appeared as singular humanoid specs in the big blue, wired to bright fabrics that sway against high mountain winds she couldn’t feel from this far below. She decided to chase them, to see where they landed.
She sped down the stairs of her building, out onto the street. She flung her head back, taking in the sky, hunting for a glimpse of the floating duo. They were nowhere to be found. She jogged along the road without looking ahead, only up, bumping into people on the street, swinging around signs written in French and Italian that could have said anything: “Go Mickey, go!” or perhaps, “Kill, Mickey, kill!”
She stopped in the middle of an abandoned street. The mountains stared down at her from all sides, goading her on.
She was exposed--as though she loved being looked at, loved the attention. As though she was getting off to it. She pulled down the neck of her shirt, and incorporated a shimmy into her step as she strolled down the long circus of chairs and people and men, their fat heads shining like high beams over the lingering clouds of smoke. Then, she saw him.
***
She didn’t realize she’d passed out. It was the next day, and class was in less than an hour. She bounded out the door and down the stairs and charged up the street. She shouldered through the door of the first shop she comes across: a bakery. Lined before her are pastries so enormous and wet with cream that she can feel herself salivating, the spittle gathering at the sides of her mouth. She plucked at her ribcage, wondering when she ate last. But she couldn’t do the math in her head, confused by all the time travel. She picked one by jabbing at the glass, pointing at the largest and wettest, mistakenly saying in Spanish: “uno por favor.” She bit in. The pastry was filled with cream so dense and cold that it coated her teeth like a soft retainer.
“Merci,” Mickey said to the cashier through her soft teeth. The cashier looked beautiful in her boredom, and didn’t seem to be wearing a lick of makeup. She rolled a slim cigarette through her fingers, performing a lazy baton act.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
As she stepped out the shop door, a man pushed ahead of her. He moved his legs as if experiencing earth’s gravity for the first time, shocked by the weight of it on his limbs. As she stepped around him she noticed his bulbous head tilting southward, down toward her ass. She had half a mind to lift her skirt, to shit all over his loafers. When she saw his face, she felt sick. It was him again, the leching man.
She arrived in class and didn’t remember how she got there. People in class had submitted stories about all kinds of things, but Mickey didn’t care to comment on them.
After class, the Writer approached Mickey. In a low voice she said, “You need to dedicate yourself to the craft. You need to be all in, or it won’t happen for you.”
Mickey nodded, and managed to stumble home. She masturbated on the hardwood floor of her apartment. She thought about the rushing river, how it split the city in two.
Mickey realized the next morning or maybe it was the next-next morning that she didn’t know what day of the week it was. She threw on a dress, tucked her notebook beneath her arm, and walked out into the little town. It was dusk. The para gliders flashed their bright colors high above her.
She walked to the pub where she knew he would be; where all of the fat men lingered on wire-back chairs and sneered at women. She stepped past them as a person does when walking past a nest of bees and told herself, they only respond to fear, while hoping in her gut that they lunge.
She sat at the corner of the bar, in view of the whales. She began to drink whatever drink the waiter had slid in front of her.
A young man walked up to her.
“You a hiker?”
“No,” she said. “A writer.” But this felt like the worst kind of lie.
“Ah, I can see your notebook.” he said, in precise but heavily accented English. “What do you write about?”
She melted inside, words useless.
“Fiction,” she said, safely.
He paused and she realized it was her turn to ask him a question. She could hardly look away from the leching man, who was burning through cigarettes and dropping them by his feet, creating a nest of brown filters.
“I’m sorry,” Mickey said. “I have to go.”
She walked outside and grabbed leching man by the collar of the shirt. He was on his feet quickly.
“Follow me,” she said. She tried to smile, but didn’t think it passed. They walked, her in lead, down the bright cobblestone street and then she took a hard turn down a dark alleyway toward the river.
“You’re a pretty American girl?” The man said. They had reached the river. Now they stood together, hand in hand, on the bridge. The river screamed up at them, only five feet below. The man smelled of cigarettes. He began speaking French, perhaps thinking that he was missing his mark with his broken English. But his French wasn’t sexy like in the movies. It sounded like he was talking with food caught in his throat, a gurgling sound. The underside of his belly hung over drawstring shorts. How could he ever think she would want him? That anyone would?
Then his hands pressed all over her chest, as if searching for a secret lever. It felt no different, really, than being felt up by security at the airport. Mickey was fucking bored.
She whipped around, her backside split against his thigh, and arched backwards like a ballerina, plunging her elbow into his throat, thinking, now there’s the lever! He fell over the side of the bridge easily, too easily. She didn’t even hear a splash. She pulled her notebook from her purse, preparing to document the experience. She paused, pen attached to paper, an inky blot expanding out from the felt tip. Then she threw that in, too.
As she walked down the street she noticed her upper thigh was wet, right above the hem of her dress. Perhaps he splashed, after all.
***
The next day Mickey tried to write at a cafe. She watched people walk by while crouching over a rickety metal table with a session lager because she got nervous about mispronouncing the names off the wine menu, so said “Stella” to the waiter instead. People watching, she thought, was something writers do. But everyone began to look the same after a while, so she made up a game: she told herself to identify the qualities that separate American faces form European faces. Americans: their faces are younger-seeming, more innocent. Even old men and women have large expanses of eye and smile, ready to absorb whatever free samples the world is offering. Mickey thinks they look stupid, that she must look stupid, too. Europeans, on the other hand, have narrower expressions--not unpleasant or mean, just protective like shields.
She tapped her pen on the blank page. She thought about the fat man falling into the river, meditated on it. But the exhilaration seemed trapped in that moment--she couldn’t find an in. She felt as though, throughout the course of this trip, different parts of her personality and memory had been systematically restricted of access, that she’d become a narrower version of her once exuberant, once fully fleshed out self.
That’s when she saw him--a man who looked as though he spent the night in a river. His skin, even from afar looked gray and sagging, in need of a blood transfusion. He was clearly the type of person you crossed the street to avoid. Just a mere glance in his direction and one felt at risk of being permanently injected with rotting stench. He wore the same sweats and yellow shirt he had on the night before. But his stomach was no longer hanging over his drawstrings, instead he had tucked his shirt into his pants in an effort to conceal himself, or perhaps to strap himself in as he bouldered up the hill, his stomach shifting back and forth in time with his angry, arm-pumping stride. Micky smoothly lowered her sunglasses.
“You!” he said to a woman. He had stopped a few feet away, and was glaring down at a young woman who was sitting alone at a table, a thick book lying open on her lap. She had dark hair, longer than Mickey’s, and was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat. She looked up at the filthy creature, wedging her thumb in the book’s spine to save her page.
“Excuse?”
“You are the girl?” the man said, losing a bit of his momentum, questioning himself. He placed his hands on his hips, leaning on one leg for support. Mickey wondered what the man was expecting--a confession, an apology? Maybe. Mickey wished she had someone to turn to in that moment and laugh, “Well, I didn’t expect him to make it out alive!” She wondered if any such person existed.
The girl made a flapping gesture with her other hand, as if to say, “shoo now,” and leaned back into her novel, concealing her face beneath her protective hat. The man stood there for a moment or two with that same huffy look on his face. Then he took a few slow steps backwards, sweeping his gaze across the seating. When he turned up the street, his chest had deflated, his shoulders hunched. Was that it? Mickey thought. She expected him to put up a fight. She got up, deciding that it wasn’t a good writing day after all, and followed the man. He walked all the way back to the bar where she found him originally. He stepped up to a man smoking a cigarette and gestured for one with two fingers. He transferred it to his mouth, and collapsed into the wire back chair. He never moved his eyes up from his lap, never appeared to take a single puff of the cigarette between his lips. His head fell against his shoulder. He’d fallen asleep--legs and arms sprawled.
Mickey stared at him, feeling what might be sympathy. There was a part of her, very small, that was glad he had made it out. There was a larger part that wished he hadn’t. She wished he was tangled up with his arms whipping against the current. She stepped up to him and pinched him by his silver dollar earlobe. He woke up with a snort, and said what sounded like, “Gi-Gi?” There was a momentary softness in his expression that made her wonder who Gi-Gi was. Was Gi-Gi a mother or sister or daughter or wife? Or perhaps he had readjusted the snot in the back of his throat. She released his lobe, cupped his chin, and pressed her mouth against his forehead. She flattened her lips and teeth against his skin so that he could feel the difference between soft and hard things.
Samantha Tkac is a woman interested in the aesthetics of the grotesque, in releasing the dark matter inside of a woman's heart, and in the creation and consumption of good beer. She loves beer.