The Eyes of the Carp
By T.M Wright

March 21, a Thursday

I was in my late teens and I was walking on a narrow road through a scruffy growth of pines not far from my home-in which I lived happily with several brothers and sisters, a couple of cats, a gerbil, a geriatric German shepherd named Bill, and Mom and Dad-and I found a sign that read:

Buckwheat Pillows

Now Serving Custard

The letters were in heavy script on a large white-painted board that had been nailed to one of the pines.

I read the sign a couple of times and became confused. Buckwheat Pillows seemed to be quite an unlikely name for a restaurant or for a place that served custard.

I said to my friend, Leonard, who had been with me most of my life, "Look at that sign, Leonard. What do you suppose it means?"

Leonard, who's always been fat, shrugged his chubby shoulders and said, "I don't know. It's stupid. It doesn't mean anything. How could it?"

Leonard always asks unanswerable questions.

Tuesday, about 7:00 PM

A few years later, I stumbled over a dead carp the size of a standard poodle on the shore of Irondequoit Bay, near Rochester, New York. It wasn't the first dead thing I'd seen. I'd seen dead cats and dogs because my family owned cats and dogs and they were always getting killed in the road or dying for strange reasons or getting mashed in the driveway because my father never looked behind him when he was backing up. That was how he killed Doris, my little sister. She was three years old, I think-maybe she was older-and she was standing behind his big Ford Country Squire wagon-blue and white with a luggage rack and a fake spare tire on the rear gate-and he was on his way somewhere in a hurry, the supermarket or the drugstore. Maybe the bakery. Fall's Bakery. Yes, I remember, now; it was the bakery. He was going to get jelly donuts. A dozen of them. Everyone in the family loved jelly donuts.

March, a Wednesday

My father's name was Warren and he claimed until the day of his death that he looked in his rearview mirror when he backed over little Doris, but saw nothing. And he said, too, that he didn't feel the Ford hit Doris, which was why he ran over her and dragged her a dozen yards until he realized that the car was moving in fits and starts, as if the tires weren't spinning correctly. That's when my mother came out of the house and saw dead little Doris, and started screaming, and my other sister, Karen, too, and my brother, Frank, who stood at the front door with his mouth open.

March, a Monday

Well, you know, on his deathbed forty years later, my father said, "I wish I hadn't killed Doris. I didn't mean to kill her. You believe me, don't you, son?" He was saying all this to me because I was the only one in the family left alive, but before I could tell him something like, "Sure, I believe you," he was dead, so I just looked at him as if he were a lamp that had gone out.

My beautiful and vivacious wife Janet and I bought a house not

too long ago.

Wednesday Evening, near 9:00

As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter much where a house is located because you live in the house, not on the lawn, which is something I told Janet when we were looking at this house-the one in which I'm writing this narrative-and she was complaining that it was "incredibly dreary" and "too far from the malls" and when the kids-my nieces and nephews, you know, who keep in touch-came to visit we'd be hard-pressed to find things for them to do except gather mushrooms and fend off black flies.

"Black flies aren't indigenous to this area," I said. "I've told you that a couple of times."

"You're wrong, Kevin," she said.

"No I'm not," I said. "Black flies are indigenous to the Adirondacks. You'll never see them here, and that's a promise. Look it up on Gaggle if you want." You can find all sorts of information on Gaggle. It's a really great search engine."
She told me I was full of shit, that I came up with pronouncements and announcements and facts that hardly ever turned out to be worth more than a spoonful of piss, and I sighed and told her, "You always say that. You know it hurts."

"Yeah," she said, without much inflection, "yeah, I know," turned her head, looked at the house and said, "I'm not going to move into it. I'll get an apartment in the city and we can visit each other halfway, or you can come to my apartment, and that's where we'll fuck each other, and eat together, but I'm not moving in there, so don't buy it."

"It's not totally my decision," I said.

"Everything's your decision," she said, and she was still looking at the house. Then she looked at me with exasperation clear on her face and said, "Shit, everything's your decision, Kevin. You rule the fucking roost!"

Thursday Evening, Late

The first time Janet and I made love it was pretty bad and she said so. We hadn't even gotten naked. We were in the backseat of my Dodge Coronet (white with a soft blue cloth interior), in a secluded spot near a swamp, a couple of miles from a room I was renting next to an industrial complex not far from Syracuse, New York, and I think we both knew it was about time we did the deed (her phrase) so we could get on to whatever lay ahead for us. So she took her jeans off and rolled her yellow underwear down (though she kept her green blouse on), and I rolled my jeans down and pulled myself out of my white boxer shorts, and she squatted into my erection, which didn't go into her just right, I think, because she yelled in pain and cried out, "Christ, Kevin!"

"What? What?" I whispered, because I was coming hard (I always come hard: it's one of my characteristics, you know), and she said, "What the hell are you doing?" and I said, "Janet, I'm done." And that was that.

She rolled off me and said, "Well, that was, like, out of hell!" and thrust her pelvis into the air so she could pull her underwear on.

I looked at her while she had her pelvis thrust into the air and said, "That's very nice. You have a very attractive vagina, Janet."

She stopped what she was doing-her underwear was halfway up her thighs-and cocked her head and said, sort of as a hiccough, "What did you say?"

I smiled. I've always liked my smile. Other people have told me they like it, too. They've told me it's charming. Even Janet has told me it's charming.. "I said you have an attractive vagina, Janet. Which you do. I've seen many vaginas and yours is especially attractive."

She looked at me as if I'd suddenly grown a second nose. Her underwear was still around her thighs. "And what is that, Kevin? Is that a line you use? You tell women how much you like their vaginas? Is that supposed to make them feel good?"

I shrugged.

I think it's amazing she married me.

06/29:20:13:02