Full Frontal Fiction by Jack Murnighan Page B

go on more car rides. I am especially pleased when he decides that we are going to skip the country together. “Fuck ’em,” he says, his face a pale green in the light from the dashboard. “We’ll drive up to Canada, then fly to Israel. No extradition, immediate citizenship under the Law of Return.”
    â€œWhen?” I ask.
    â€œTomorrow.”
    But the next day he doesn’t show up. I talk to his answering machine, stare into his darkened windows, bang on the door. My valise feels like a ton of rocks in my hand, but I carry it all the way up the Avenue, to Violet’s house. Violet is the girl I have been—not dating—no,
circling
is the better word. I am, in general, a circler.
    Violet and I sit on the couch in her basement, talking, but I can’t really listen because my brain is full of my father’s darkened windows—that blackness.
    â€œRunning away?” she asks, looking over at the valise in the corner.
    â€œMoving in. Your parents won’t mind. Will they?”
    â€œFunny,” she says, and I am caught off guard as she leans toward me. I see her face approaching mine, growing larger and larger till it fills my vision, and I smell the sweet scent of her, then I feel her lips against mine, a very light pressure, hardly more than a tingling in the skin. I almost draw back, not because I don’t want this but because it’s too much, too much and yet not enough.
    â€œHow’s that?” she whispers. I’m not sure if I actually hear her or am merely feeling her breath on my face, the shape of her words on my skin.
    â€œWow,” I say, a little drunk with the sensation.
    She moves back to look at me and her eyes are huge with interest, a childlike curiosity at the effect of her experiment. She looks like a kid who’s just built something amazing with blocks that may tumble at any moment. “One more time,” she says.
    We kiss again, her body against mine, her arms around my back. It is a strangely anchored feeling, like climbing a tree and coming to a fork in the branches, the kind that allows you to wedge yourself in and dangle your legs, suspended in air with no danger of falling. And yet it feels like falling too—falling without the pain of landing. My lips move but no words come out; I can hear the click of our mouths, the rhythmic huff of our breathing. “Umh,” she says, “mhrr,” and I know exactly what she means: bird, sky, branch, lips. I can feel her hand reaching under my shirt, palm against the skin of my back. Everywhere she touches tingles.
    So this is getting laid. I am falling and I am in the tree, watching myself fall. My father is in Buffalo, carrying a tote bag full of money and a passport with a new name on it. He is eating room service with the TV on. He is in his big white Caddy, driving toward the Canadian border, Niagara Falls a silent roar beyond his window. The world is neither good nor bad but huge and a father can get lost in it.
    â€œStop,” she gasps, sitting upright. “Take this off.” She begins to work at the buttons of my shirt, fumbling. She looks a little cross-eyed, dazed, like someone coming out of a movie theater into daylight. The buttons come slowly, one after another, and then she is sitting with the shirt balled up in her hands, looking at me with that same expression of curiosity.
    â€œNow you,” I say, and begin lifting the T-shirt over her head—to stop the staring, really. I see the white of her stomach, the black lace of a bra, the curve of her throat. And then her face again, smiling through a mess of hair.
    â€œScared yet?” she asks, brushing the hair from her eyes. It is my first indication that we’re playing chicken. She sits with her back straight and shoulders squared, clearly aware that of our mutual toplessness hers is the more powerful.
    â€œNo,” I lie.
    â€œWell, then.” She lifts her hands to the black