Richard Wirick

Loved a Woman Who Wasn't Clean

Warner had no idea the Hubshi woman would occupy his dreams, and even the half-sleep shreds of waking life that slowly soaked him every night into unconsciousness. He'd recognized her as a Khasbass: the Tatar cheekbones, a thin blue wire necklace hung with yellowed wolf teeth. She ran the canteen on the road he drove to the new Siberian geological site. He'd hung around one night after she closed and they flirted, listened to Moscow rap stations on the jukebox, drank grain alcohol and Armenian cognac. They'd groped each other standing up against the stockroom door. He touched the wiry region underneath her tool belt.

The first night she appeared as if inflated in front of his window, her face encrusted with pufferfish-like spines, the blue necklace trailing his furniture like a kite string. Subsequent evenings had her face assembling itself in collapsing and reappearing segments of silver, like an escalator of weightless, persistent mercury. He knew a shaman had observed their tryst. All visitors to these roads were seen as conquerors, contaminating agents. By the third appearance she was insubstantial, foggy, filling the column of air before his bed like a drape of crystals. The window wasn't completely closed and a breeze came in. She lifted and disappeared, leaving only a whiff of kerosene and pine-scented gravel.

  email this article     print-friendly version
Last modified on October 19, 2005  | © Telegram 2005