All the Voices Cry by Alice Petersen

flesh and blood into something rich and sweet, then emerge eventually for brunch, wet-haired and blind in the afternoon sun. It was natural, between the ages of 15 and 35, to feel this way on a regular basis, once, if not four times a year. Even in the past year, Colin could not deny that he had experienced a definite physiological response to the new administrative assistant: small, dark, compact as an old-fashioned cigarette case. He overran his photocopying allocation ruthlessly during the winter session, all for the pleasure of being pistol-whipped by Tulipa Ferrari’s sharp tongue.
    Still, Colin shied away from the physical logistics of entanglement. He worried about his weight and the moment of displacement; if a woman should invite him to share a bath with her, for example. And of course love does not last, and does not improve, but only atrophies. Do not all the novels demonstrate it? The fever that does not bring about death or lifelong separation from one’s parents abates and clears up. One only has to survive the dangerous years (15 – 35, as mentioned above); to build a life raft of useful things strapped together with webbing—a good pepper grinder, a modest
wine collection, the complete recordings of the Beethoven string quartets, a gaseous golden retriever called Calliope—and then one is ready to ride out the tempests.
    Surely there could be no harm in paying a visit to a former student and her relatives?
    Colin pulled off the highway at a coffee place where rows of Harley Davidsons glittered in the sunlight, mocking him for the roads he had not taken. He straightened his waistcoat and stood as upright as possible in the lineup behind a man in black leather with fringed sleeves. Dada’s Donuts, the place was called. He ordered a plain one.
    Back on the road he drained the last drops of his coffee. It had taken two goes to get the car started. The Volvo was beginning to show its age.
    â€œFuck,” said Colin, into the coffee cup. He was disappointed that this was the first monosyllable that came to mind, but he quite liked the hollow sound that his voice made inside the cardboard cup.
    â€œBook,” said Colin into cup, “tea.” Could these words have more integrity than a word like “crappomundi,” which he had once heard a student mutter while collecting her library books off the floor? The monosyllable as the thing itself was a silly conceit, like pitting the grunt against the drawn-out moan in a great competition to express a truth that, as the theorists had so lately discovered, no longer existed.
    â€œSam,” said Colin.
    When he arrived, the young woman in question opened the cottage door and heaven was there, on the screen porch,
for the brief span it took to say that he hoped he had the right place, and she said yes you do, and she looked at him as if he were as delightful as spring blossoms under snow, and she said, where is your bag? and he said, it’s in the car, and before he could prevent her she dashed away to get it.
    Colin leaned against the doorframe, smiling at the insouciant rustle of the pine needles beneath her bare feet. How quickly those qualities of samnicity came rushing back to him: tough as a stalk, bony of finger and knee, together with his own shortness of breath at the thought that if she turned her head fast enough her ponytail might make a whistling sound in the air.
    Then she took him down to the dock and it quickly became awful. Three seconds after they had been introduced, he could not recall whether Sam’s stepmother’s name was Myra or Myrna. Myra/Myrna gave him champagne with tiny Quebec blueberries in it to choke upon. The stepmother pointed out a grove of old growth white pine, and a boathouse that they were accustomed to rent out to a postman. In response, Colin commented on the tongues of light licking up the trunks of the cedars. After comparing the water lilies bobbing in the cove to poached eggs, he