Four Stories

Études

The pianist was a structuralist, though thoroughly unorthodox, and as I watched him exercise his fingers before the rehearsal, I thought about the boy I once was who observed his Czech instructor with the reverent curiosity of a deer at the treeline. I remember the way she oiled her hair while I played the piano, overlooking the mistakes I made for the attention she was paying her scalp. She dropped the oil at the place her hair parted, where the white of her scalp showed through the dark hair, and she massaged the oil through her hair with strong, bent fingers. She kept a dog behind her house chained to a post dug into the ground. The sound of the dog’s simpering protests hung over our heads as I played badly and together we pretended not to hear them.



Bunk

She found him in tea leaves. Swirling the dregs and pushing them about with the tip of her finger, she found him there. And in the lines on his palm. Another time, she found him in the stars. As far as he is concerned, it is bunk spirituality—but he cannot argue with the results. Instead of believing that she has tapped into some metaphysical knowledge accessible by faith and concentration and ritual, he believes that she is something like a psychic with a clairvoyance that is trained only on him. What I mean to say is that he trusts her. He puts his confidence in the things she explains to him and he wants her approval all the time. She knows everything about him without knowing much about him at all. That he was born in Ecuador to a woman of Persian descent is of no concern to her. That he spends his evenings reading Browne’s Hydriotaphia matters even less.



Pulp

As he bends to tie the laces of his daughter’s shoe, he sees, out of the corner of his eye, the tapered cover of the dimestore mystery he purchased on a whim in New Orleans. It is the sort of book you read on a plane, he thought when he bought it. The woman on the cover of the book looks scandalized, wrapped in a wrinkled yellow bedsheet, looking over her shoulder. Returning from New Orleans, he slept on the plane and he did not dream and he woke with a bag of pretzels in his lap. I am running from something, he thinks as he notices the bruises on his daughter’s lovely knee.



Peter on the Shore

Having read the scriptures front to back, he was convinced that the climax of the whole thing—the point of it, it seemed—occurred the moment that Peter stripped his clothes and dove naked from the fishing boat and swam to the shore where the resurrected Christ was waiting. And it was Peter, naked to the waist, sitting beside a fire as the Christ cooked fish, that came to his mind as he watched her car backing out of the driveway, pulling onto the street and moving sluggishly toward the hills. It was Peter he thought about as he considered how often, at the pivotal moment, we do not say what we mean to say; how even after, even much later, it is not clear to us what we meant to say—only that it was not said.



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Stephen Mortland writes fiction and he lives in Utah.