Удушье (Choke)

'So what you're saying is you only sleep with mortals?' I say.

And Paige leaning forward, she gives me that pity look, the one the front desk girl does so well with her chin tucked to her chest, her eyebrows lifted into her hairline, and she says, 'I'm so sorry I butted in. I promise you, I won't tell a soul.'

And what about my mom?

Paige sighs and shrugs. 'That's easy. She's delusional. Nobody would believe her.'

No, I meant, will she die soon?

'Probably,' Paige says, 'unless there's a miracle.'

Chapter 37

Ursula stops to catch her breath

and looks up at me. She shakes the fingers of her one hand and squeezes the wrist with her other hand and says, 'If you were a churn, we'd have butter a half hour ago.'

I go, sorry.

She spits in her hand and makes a fist around my dog and says, 'This sure isn't like you.'

Anymore, I won't even pretend to know what I'm like.

For sure this is just another slow day in 1734, so we're flopped in a pile of hay in the stable. Me with my arms crossed behind my head, Ursula is curled up against me. We don't move very much or the dry hay pokes us through our clothes. We both look up into the rafters, the wood beams and woven underside of the thatched roof. Spiders dangle down on their strands of web.

Ursula starts yanking and says, 'You see Denny on television?'

When?

'Last night.'

What for?

Ursula shakes her head, 'Building something. People are complaining. People think it's some kind of church, and he won't say what kind.'

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't under­stand. How we need everything labeled and explained and de­constructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.

'Defused' isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

It's not a church, I say. I throw my cravat back over one shoulder and pull the front of my shirt out of my pants.

And Ursula says, 'They think it's a church on TV.'

With the fingertips of one hand, I press around my navel, the umbilicus, but digital palpation is inconclusive. I tap and listen for changes in sound that might indicate a solid mass, but pre-cussing is inconclusive.

The big trapdoor muscle that keeps the shit inside you, doc­tors call that the rectal shelf, and after you shove something above that shelf, no way is it coming out without a lot of help. In hospi­tal emergency rooms, they call this kind of help colorectal foreign bodies management.

To Ursula, I say, could she put her ear against my bare stom­ach and tell me if she hears anything.

'Denny never was very together,' she says, and leans in to press her warm ear against my belly button. Navel. Umbilicus, doctors would call it.