Duplex by Kathryn Davis

she had run over with the carriage. Its dead body frightened her, the glazed surface of its upward-facing eye reminding her of Eddie’s eyes that night after the prom. She tried to remember how long it had been since she’d last seen him, but she couldn’t. She thought it had been at the ballpark, before he got injured. She used to like watching him stand at the plate, wondering whether he knew she was there in the stands watching him. When they were younger she could tell from the way he stood, the curve at the small of his back—his body was attentive to her even if his mind was on the game. Then again, maybe the last time she saw him had been on the street before she moved away. Eddie had been wearing his Rockets uniform—she remembered the same photographer who had taken their picture at the prom posing him with the lawn mower at the foot of number 24’s extremely steep lawn. That was probably it, Mary thought. She still had the picture that she’d cut out of the newspaper; it was captioned “Local Hero.” After the photographer packed up his camera, Eddie went back inside, leaving his father to do the job.
    The mower’s sound was one you almost never heard anymore, Mary thought, unless you counted the mower like sound of the raptors. The brightness of the sky, the freshness of the breeze, the forsythia in full bloom, like offshoots of sunlight. The winding of the horn, the horn in the wood. Dieu que le son du cor est triste au fond du Bois!
    “I’m hungry, Mother,” Blue-Eyes said. She handed Mary a knife with a curved blade. “I never get enough to eat.”
    “Where did you get this?” Mary asked, before she remembered that Blue-Eyes couldn’t talk yet. Something else was talking—that had to be the explanation.
    “Your milk is like water. Nursing at your breast is like trying to get water from a hose with knots in it.”
    Mary took the knife her daughter had handed her and cut the hare’s body into pieces.

The Four Horsewomen
    Y OU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED NEXT, RIGHT? JANICE asked. She stood there balanced on one leg in what had come to be called the Mary Pose, after the famous Mary who had lived in number 47.
    But no one knew; girls never know what happens next. Days went by, weeks, years even. Everything in life stood poised like Mary on the verge of what was possible. For example Janice had a boyfriend—no one could have predicted this. He went to Our Mother of Consolation and used to be one of the boys on bikes who appeared on the street to throw eggs at anyone who didn’t get out of the way. A little girl jumping rope opened her mouth to scream and an egg went in and after a while a chick hatched in her stomach.
    No one was interested in trading cards anymore. All the good trades had been made, the black horse and the white horse at last together in a pack in the bottom of the cigar box in the back of Janice’s closet. At some point her mother decided to have a new closet system put in. She didn’t admit it to herself, but her mother was preparing for the day when Janice would get married and leave home for good and she could take over the closet as her own. The cigar box was hidden under a pair of toe shoes and a tutu and a black velvet riding helmet and a ton of foil candy wrappers from back when Janice used to lie stomach-down in the closet, producing one foil-wrapped chocolate egg after another from somewhere underneath her like an exotic type of frog. Janice’s mother put everything except the candy wrappers in a carton along with her fox stole and several Reader’s Digest condensed books and took the carton to church for the Christmas bazaar.
    The obsession with trading cards had been replaced with a fad for writing novels about horses. The novels were composed in the same marbleized notebooks that had once been fashionable for schoolwork. The system was: one novel per notebook. Fathers still were forced to buy cigars they would never smoke, but now it was so their daughters could enter a