Nine Island by Jane Alison Page B

ear ashed by cigar. Foreign rat? Imported with bananas from Ecuador? A big boot landed near it just then, and it slipped back into the leaves. When I turned to the bar, the conventioneer was leaning close to M, who whooped and skidded half off her stool, but he caught her elbow; her nails set themselves in his sleeve.
    She noticed me over his shoulder and said, Wait—hi! Weren’t you here earlier? When the soccer team was here?
    He snapped his eyes toward me.
    I’m heading out, I said around his shoulder. Want to walk?
    Oh no no no! she cried. I just got here! Didn’t I?
    Way too soon to go, the guy said, and gave me his back.
    Paid and left.
    And walking home in the sulfurous light, I realized: baby possum.
    The third outing was last night. This has taken almost a week. This time, a place closer to home: over by Publix, across from the marina with aisles of restless shark boats, their internal red lights blinking. There was the old faux New York restaurant and the new Corsican place—chose New York. Cold and loud inside. Walked up to the bar. Boiled eggs sat inside a big jar; I slipped one out and ate it. Ordered fish and wine and swiveled to face the situation. Two men, each alone. No. A woman appeared—one of Lino’s Russian light-girls! Neither she nor her man spoke. She pointed to the menu, and soon a plate of raw meat arrived. She pulled at it in tendrils with her fingers while he studied his cell.
    The other man also looked at his phone. Then suddenly palmed it over and stared dead at me. And bark ran over my skin.
    Sono chiuso! I wrote K beneath a street lamp. All done.
    Nope , she wrote, you’d rather bury yourself alive with those deadbeats and your dead poet and that dying old cat. It’s a kind of emotional anorexia—
    Switched off the phone.
    The moon was full, tide high, salt water slopping the seawall of Belle Isle. From the manhole bubbled foam. Airy pale damp puffs rose through the grate, hovered in a tender, jiggling mass, then drifted free and blew along the curb, flitted and skittered over the road.
    Sea foam. Sea girls once, who traded tails and tongues, in love, for legs that felt like knives.

R EAD TONIGHT THAT a college girl has disappeared. Cameras on shop fronts show her, tall and lovely, loping along in the dark, looking drunk or drugged. These days, sure, she’s been drugged. What some boys like to do. Thin beauty loping along like a deer. A jewelry-store camera shows her amble past, then shows a man in an alcove see her. He waits a moment, looks around, follows. She lumbers into another camera’s view, the man now close behind.
    Think I’m lost , she texted a friend.
    Then she shows up no more.
    And now have read a long awful story: another college girl told a reporter she was raped. Drugged, yeah, and taken upstairs. But not drugged enough to forget what she saw. The faces of the seven above her in the dark, shining bottles in their hands.
    Seven men, or boys, or dwarfs, or gods, or wolves, or uncles, whatever.
    Turns out she imagined this story.
    This story.
    My friend S types me what he thinks: Why wouldn’t girls imagine rape. They’re being raped the moment they’re born.

T EN MORE O STORIES of wanting and not wanting to transmute, and it’s already July.
    There’s the story about the girl in love with her father who sneaks into his bed when he’s drunk. But I’m saving this for nearly last.
    There’s the girl who tries to sleep with her brother.
    And the one in love with another girl who can’t figure out what to do.
    The first gets what she wants, her father, then begs to be extinguished. The second does not get what she wants and weeps until she dissolves. The third turns into a boy, gets the girl, is happy ever after.
    Between passages, I keep checking on news about the lost college girl. But nothing.
    Back to O and then back for news, but there’s never anything. Can’t keep dwelling like