The Night Manager

Yasmine snorts and grunts and sings hymns down the Chapstick isle,

From the maternity of her explicit, thundering breast-

She is the night manager.

Tiny, tiny claws seem always to be at the back of her throat

So she hums a hot rhythm to shake them from their place

And when she coughed, some great inside canyon ballooned and gusted bits of clay and cloud into its cavities

The contracting walls cracked like old leather left in the sun, left crumbles lodged in the windpipe.

Every scuttling spider she killed with her sole landed in her gut and one day she would find a few hundred spiders, all with fuzzy backs and the smallest claws of geckos, tumbling weightlessly from her thick, bright tongue, tickling the ruddy gums planted with certain molars. It would be an unsettling sense of déjà vu.  

She had an irrational fear of spiders in her drinks and so she drank from clear glass glasses and never from the rustic pottery that blacked out clear water in its mysterious wells. She would cradle a mug in silence; say she was holding the abyss. She had that laugh from Louisiana.  

L’avenir.

Stare into its belly waiting to be eaten or possibly saved and once when the light had changed she caught the muddy glimmer of her own two eyes, the exotic bulge of nostrils, and declared with some insistence, in a lilted, sultry song:

I knew it,

I knew it all along.

© Jennifer Chaussee

 

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