Thirteen Phantasms by James P. Blaylock

really.” She said nothing. “Now who’s bottling?” he asked.
    Her face had a distant, saddened look on it, the look of a mother who’d just got evidence that her favorite son had been arrested breaking into a house. He picked up the wine, even though their glasses weren’t empty. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little beat, that’s all. Bottle?”
    She smiled. “Just a little,” she said.
    He filled her glass then filled his own, leaving a couple of inches of wine in the bottom of the bottle. He didn’t like the idea of empty bottles. There was something finished and sad seeming about them, the notion, perhaps, that the party had ended. “I’m wondering about that chicken,” he said.
    “What are you wondering?”
    “Whether it was stewed in the same herbs we’re stewing in.”
    She pulled the dome off, and there the thing sat, sprinkled with sweet-smelling herbs and ground spices. Spilling out of it were nuts and raisins. The whole thing had been cut into pieces and then reassembled. Nona could cook; he would admit that freely.
    He ran more hot water while Nona dished chicken, spooning the tofu mix onto the side of the plate. He took the whole mess from her and instantly forked up a slice of the suggestive mushroom. There was no room here for half measures. He had to tear into the loathsome heart of the dish to get over his antipathy to it. Who was that Watergate conspirator who had eaten rats to overcome his fear of the creatures? He loved politics and politicians when they carried on like that. It was fun to imagine what sorts of things they got into when they were alone—eating rats, dressing in their wives’ clothes, plotting to wreck the leaf blower in their neighbor’s garage. The rat-eating man was considered a sort of paragon now. His rat nonsense was reminiscent of Clyde and Moe, except that Ted’s own methods tended to civilize people and bugs both; the rat-eating approach was a reversion to savagery.
    “Like the mushrooms?” Nona asked.
    “Yes,” he lied. “Are these the … you know—dick mushrooms?” He smiled at her.
    She put her fork down and stared at him.
    “You know, the phallic things. The picture in the magazine. Where do you buy a thing like that?”
    “Ranch market. They aren’t cheap, either.”
    “Well you’ve got to admit what they look like. I didn’t make that up, did I?”
    She rolled her eyes at him comically. What he said must have been okay—maybe because it was overtly sexual. Sexual banter was good, even if it stemmed from mushrooms. Stems, phalluses—he struggled to turn the words into something clever. He gave it up and wiggled his toes against her again, giving her what he hoped was a tantalizing look, the look of a man worked over by aphrodisiac mushrooms.
    She smiled back at him and leaned forward, running her hand up his leg, and suddenly the whole idea of the bath, of Nona lounging there in the heated water, shifted and settled in, moving down out of his head and into his midsection. She paused long enough to find her wineglass on the floor, and he shifted pleasurably beneath the plywood, knocking the edge of it with his knee. A chicken leg plopped off the plate into the bathwater, an oil slick blossoming around it like a ring around the moon.
    Surreptitiously he palmed it and buried it under his thigh. Nona wouldn’t see it there. When she was involved with something else he would drop it over the side. He wouldn’t let her know it was in the water, though; that much was certain. Not after the apple core. And there was something about oily, cooked chicken in the bathwater that would spoil the romance of the whole endeavor.
    Nona bent across the plywood, shoving up against it, sliding toward him. He bent across too, to kiss her. The sight of her breasts lying heavily on the board next to the remains of the food nearly drove him wild. He breathed hard, unable to do anything with his hands above the water except to paw her shoulders. Their dinner