The Ape's Wife and Other Stories Read Free Page B

her, his fingertips lingering at the sensitive bolts where her prosthetics attach. She likes that best of all, that faint electric tingle, and she knows he knows, though she has never had to tell him so. Outside and far away, she thinks she hears an owl, but there are no owls in the city.
     
    5.
     
    And when she wakes again, the boarding-house room is filled with the dusty light of a summer morning. The mechanic is gone, and he’s taken her leg with him. Her crutches are leaned against the wall near her side of the bed. She stares at them for a while, wondering how long it’s been since the last time she had to use them, then deciding it doesn’t really matter, because however long it’s been, it hasn’t been long enough. There’s a note, too, on her nightstand, and the mechanic says not to worry about Madam Ling, that he’ll send one of the boys from the foundry down to the Asian Quarter with the news. Take it easy, he says. Let that burn heal. Burns can be bad. Burns can scar, if you don’t look after them.
    When the clanging steeple bells of St. Margaret of Castello’s have rung nine o’clock, she shuts her eyes and thinks about going back to sleep. St. Margaret, she recalls, is a patron saint of the crippled, an Italian woman who was born blind and hunchbacked, lame and malformed. Missouri envies the men and women who take comfort in those bells, who find in their tolling more than the time of day. She has never believed in the Catholic god or any other sort, unless perhaps it was some capricious heathen deity assigned to watch over starving, maggot-ridden guttersnipes. She imagines what form that god might assume, and it is a far more fearsome thing than any hunchbacked crone. A wolf, she thinks. Yes, an enormous black wolf – or coyote, perhaps – all ribs and mange and a distended, empty belly, crooked ivory fangs and burning eyes like smoldering embers glimpsed through a cast-iron grate. That would be her god, if ever she’d had been blessed with such a thing. Her mother had come from Presbyterian stock somewhere back in Virginia, but her father believed in nothing more powerful than the hand of man, and he was not about to have his child’s head filled up with Protestant superstition and nonsense, not in a Modern age of science and enlightenment.
    Missouri opens her eyes again, her green eye – all cornea and iris, aqueous and vitreous humours – and the ersatz one designed for her in San Francisco. The crutches are still right there, near enough that she could reach out and touch them. They have good sheepskin padding and the vulcanized rubber tips have pivots and are filled with some shock-absorbing gelatinous substance, the name of which she has been told but cannot recall. The mechanic ordered them for her special from a company in some faraway Prussian city, and she knows they cost more than he could rightly afford, but she hates them anyway. And lying on the sweat-damp sheets, smelling the hazy morning air rustling the gingham curtains, she wonders if she built a little shrine to the wolf god of all collier guttersnipes, if maybe he would come in the night and take the crutches away so she would never have to see them again.
    “It’s not that simple, Missouri,” she says aloud, and she thinks that those could have been her father’s words, if the theosophists are right and the dead might ever speak through the mouths of the living.
    “Leave me alone, old man” she says and sits up. “Go back to the grave you yearned for, and leave me be.” 
    Her arm is waiting for her at the foot of the bed, right where she left it the night before, reclining in its cradle, next to the empty space her leg ought to occupy. And the hot breeze through the window, the street- and coal smoke-scented breeze, causes the scrap of paper tacked up by her vanity mirror to flutter against the wall. Her proverb, her precious stolen scrap of Shakespeare. What’s past is prologue.
    Missouri Banks considers how she