Flying Shoes by Lisa Howorth

that, M’Byrd. Love is nothing more than a dope trip.” Mary Byrd found the idea of it all being science oddly affirming. It was like taking acid back in the day: part of the thrill of it had been knowing that you would eventually come down—you couldn’t sustain that intensity forever—and get back to normal. She’d cut the boy loose when he’d started to badger her for butt sex. It was natural, she supposed—maybe a med student needed to explore all the options, or orifices. Lucy, who was single and still on the market, said that ass was the new pussy, due to too much easily available porn. Mary Byrd was also generally against hanging with younger guys: memento mori fucking. Who wanted to see her loosening, dry skin pressed against the taut, peachy flesh of a twenty-five-year-old? And really, she decided, it took adults to commit adultery, and he wasn’t quite one.
    There was the professor with a pygmy-haint wife. Whenever he saw Mary Byrd he would stare hungrily at her bony parts—her clavicles and wrists and knees, her sternum exposed by an unbuttoned shirt. After a drunken party, they had stepped behind a pool house and he had cupped her elbows, lightly brushing his palms across them, around and around. Then he’d gripped her hipbones, and kissed her. Did that even count as adultery: a mercy hump against a shed? After that they’d avoided each other for months. And anyway she knew that an affair with a married guy would suck; it would be like stealing a great piece of jewelry that would excite you and make you happy until you realized that you weren’t going to be able to wear it anywhere in public.
    Then there had been the semi-famous filmmaker who had passed through town scouting locations for a Civil War movie. She didn’t know why she’d bothered—boring. The whole time the Chubby Checker “Limbo” song had played in her head, all Zildjians and tom-toms and Chubby’s hoarse, high encouragement: “ How looow can you go ?” She hadn’t really minded the indifference, it was just difference she had seemed to want, and maybe, she recognized, the guilt. Later, he had sent her a picture he had taken of her that he wanted to publish in a photo-essay for Harper’s . He’d gotten her about half-right. In the shot she was framed by the sharply limned leaves and deep shade of a magnolia tree. She herself was in full sunlight, her eyes averted and her face unfocused; it might have been any thirtysomething woman with a guilty, tentative look. She looked more intelligent and interesting than she was. A critic described the photograph as “sparkling” and “brilliant.” Maybe the tree had been that, but she, anyway, looked neither.
    After her children, she hadn’t felt the old joneses and self-destructive compulsions. At least not as much. And of course with babies around there wasn’t a lot of time for clowning around. It wasn’t that she was such a devoted mother, into reading ridiculous “parenting” books and “making memories” and her own baby food and crap; in fact she was a little afraid of her children, she loved them so much and their very existence had so much power over her. She mooned over them and worried about them, but fought it, following Liddie’s advice: “Treat children like house plants. A little neglect is good for them.” Which was in direct opposition to her own poor mother’s MO, to overprotect, at least after Stevie died. When Eliza and William were born it became crystal clear to her what love was. What you felt for your children was the purest, most intense, most primal and true feeling a person could have. Everything that you felt for any other human being was about something else: lust, convenience, vanity, power, neediness, companionship, pity. What you begat was as good as it got. That was just about the only thing in this world of which Mary Byrd was one hundred percent confident and convinced. But there still were the challenges—disturbing jack-in-the-boxes