The Hound and Horse

Jas looked naked, Will thought. She walked into The Hound and Horse, the sunlight from the doorway momentarily slicing through the pub’s perpetual dimness. Her hair was pulled back, she was wearing jeans and sneakers, no jewelry. Jas always wore jewelry. Even in the shower she had on some ring or necklace that she hadn’t thought to take off. She’d lost weight, he noted, taking inventory of her, not a lot, but enough.

They hadn’t spoken in six months. Will had counted on the calendar when he’d gotten her voicemail. Six months of nothing and then, “Hey Will, its me... Jas... Jasmine. Can we meet up? How about The Hound on friday? About six? Call me, kay?” It hadn’t ended that well, in the end. Or what he’d thought was the end. Hadn’t ended that badly, if he was honest. He’d heard worse. Will rubbed his palms over his face and looked back at her as she crossed the room. She use to strip, Will remembered, before they’d met. He raised his hand to greet her. He didn’t stand up.

“Hey,” she said somewhat hesitantly, while leaning down to kiss his cheek. She missed. Grazed his ear instead.

Will nodded at her as she slid into the booth across from him.

“How’ve you been?” she asked, tilting her head slightly to the side. Did he hear pity in her voice? Concern? Screw you, he thought.

“Great,” Will said, a little too enthusiastically.

“Oh! Great.”

Will looked away, scanned the room. The Hound and Horse, or The Hound as they’d always call it, was their place. It was a valiant attempt at a posh British pub. Dark, green walls, framed prints of nondescript paintings of horses, hounds, or both. They’d even managed to hire an older British bartender. But is was all a little rundown, a little sad. That's what Will and Jas had liked about it. Something posh gone to rot. The stools at the bar didn’t match anymore. Most of the many mirrors, put up at some point in a misguided attempt to bring in more space, were cracked.

Jas was starring at him.

“What’s on your face?”

Shit! Will thought, turning his face to the mirror next to them. Nearly giving himself whiplash. Toilet paper, he’d guessed. He’d shaved before coming, but he was tired. Tired he told himself, not nervous. He was tired and had cut himself. A few times. Nothing, he thought moving his face around. Damn crap lighting, what was she seeing?

“I don’t see anything,” he accused, turning, more slowly, back to her.

She pointed at her own eyebrow.

Will’s hand touched the bar in his eyebrow. Shit. He’d forgotten. He really did need to take that thing out, he told himself. “I like it,” he said.

She raised her shoulders, giving him a look of ‘what can I say?’

Will felt like shit. “So, you want a drink or something?”

“Yeah, um. I can get them.”

“No.” Will stated firmly, standing up. “I’ll get them.” After a few steps Will turned back. Jas was chewing on the skin around her thumb nail. “Same?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she smiled at him, sadly.

Screw you, he thought, as his stomach dropped.

“So, what do you want Jasmine?” Will asked, settling a half pint of cider down in front of her. He never called her Jasmine. Had never called her Jasmine.

“Want?” she asked, glass paused halfway between table and her mouth.

“Yeah. Want. Why am I here?”

“I wanted to see you,”

Will waited for a better answer. An answer he could do something with.

“I had heard... I’d heard you weren’t doing that well.”

“You’ve lost weight,” Will threw back at her.

“What!” Jas’ head jolted back in surprise.

“Who told you I wasn’t doing that well? I’m great. I’m doing fabulous.” Fabulous? he thought. “Who said I wasn’t?”

“I’ve lost weight?” Jas drew the words out quietly, looking down at the table. “It doesn’t matter who told me,” she replied looking into his eyes.

“Doesn’t matter to you,” Will muttered, taking a deep drink and looking away. The neon Harp sign behind the bar was on the fritz. It was blinking a little.

Jas reached out her hand, grazing her fingers against Will’s own, wrapped around his glass. She drew back sharply. As if he’d burned her.

Will swallowed. He looked over at her hands. At the fingers that had touched him. “Why does it matter?”

“I love you... loved you,” she emphasized the “d”. Duh.

Will nodded, staring at her hand. “You’ve lost weight,” he stated to her fingers.

“So have you.”

“No.” He shook his head, staring at that hand. “Ten pounds.”

“What?”

“Gained. Ten pounds,” Will said looking up at her. He smiled. Held up his glass. He’d been drinking a lot these last months. It was starting to catch up with him.

She smiled back at him. A curl was coming lose near her right ear. “I’ve lost weight.”

They both took a drink.

“What are we doing here?” he asked.

“I wanted to see you.”

“You already said that.”

She shrugged. Bit the skin near her nail.

“Don’t,” he said softly, reaching across the table, moving her hand away from her mouth.

“Its gotten worse lately,” she admitted in seeming amazement, staring down at her thumb. “It bled the other day.”

“Its gonna get infected.”

“I clean my hands a lot.”

“It’ll scar.”

“Maybe I’ll get some of that stuff.”

Will had been trying to get her to use this gel that mothers put on their children’s fingers to force them to stop chewing their nails. It tastes awful. Apparently. That was more than a year ago.

The bartender was pulling clean glasses out of the rack and stacking them behind the bar. It wasn’t the old authentic British bartender. Rod was working today. He was about twenty five and from Texas. He was humming a Modest Mouse song, Will couldn’t hear which.

“What have you been reading lately?” Jas asked.

“What?” Will hadn’t been listening. “Reading? Um. Nothing much. Why?”

“I’m just curious. I read this really good book about a guy who was born in Azerbaijan and then lived in Berlin and pretended to be a Muslim, but wasn’t.”

“That’s what it was about?”

“Yeah. Well, sort of, anyway, it was good. A journalist wrote it.”

“Hm.” Will took a drink. This was awkward, maybe he shouldn’t have come. He’d wanted to see her, but maybe it would have been better to stay home. But that would have driven him crazy too. She seemed, somehow... more.... in his head. “I just finished a book about China. Well, it was about the Cultural Revolution and the destruction of distinctive environments, pollution, endangered animals. A little slow, but interesting.”

“China? I didn’t know you were into China.”

“Well, I’m not really, I guess. But it was in the library and it looked good. I saw it, and thought about how you were always on about the environment and pollution and that, I remembered you saying someth...” Will cut off mid word. She was staring at him. Shit. He’d said too much. “I mean, it looked interesting. Anyway, it was. Interesting.”

“You miss me?”

“Jas, seriously. What am I doing here?” He looked at her for a minute, waiting for a response. A reaction. She was staring at his chest, avoiding his face. “Do you miss me?” he continued. “Is that what this is about? You’ve gotta give me something here.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know.” There was a shattering noise. Rod had dropped a glass. Some guy on one of the mismatched stools laughed and clapped. Rod told him to fuck off.

Bacon

The glitter felt gritty beneath Mai’s shoes. She stood for a moment starring down in the chaos. The tiny red metallic pieces reflected the fractured midday sun. They stuck to her sneakers, the sidewalk, the lollypop dropped disastrously moments ago. They swayed in the run off, accumulated from last nights rain, in the gutter.

“Merry Christmas!” bellowed one of the over stuffed and teetering Santas as he passed. Girls in red velvet threw more glitter from the back of a truck. “And what do you want this year, little girl?” a teenage elf asked a toddler in pigtails, while he leered at Mai.

Mai grimaced and attempted to turn around. The city was having it’s annual Christmas parade. It was December 11th.

“Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock...” screamed a loud speaker tied atop a cider stand. ‘Hot cider $5. Waffles $3. Mulled Wine - ID Required.” the chalkboard read in red, white, and green capital letters. “Rocking around the Christmas tree...” the hamburger van’s competing loud speaking yelled back.

Mai sighed as she motivated herself to push through the crowd of young families, teenage cliques, and elderly people. What am I doing here? she thought, turning sideways, shoulder shoved high, to shimmy through an obese family unit. “Sorry, excuse me, sorry,” she muttered without conviction as she pushed, slide, and danced her way toward the hot cocoa stand.

“Merry Christmas!” sang the teenager inside the window decked out in a pointed green hat, pointed ears, and a showgirl smile. It really was amazing what orthodontists and money could do, thought Mai.

“Hi,” she smiled weakly in response, while digging around inside her messenger bag for her wallet. The corduroy monstrosity held two books, a note book, four pens and a highlighter, a small Spanish-English dictionary, a bottle of water, keys, two tubes of lip balm, two elastic hair bands, a handkerchief, a mobile phone, a camera, a bag of roasted nuts she had purchased about twenty minutes ago and not eaten, a bag to use if she needed an extra bag, and, somewhere, a wallet. “Sorry, I can never find anything in here.”

“Hot chocolate?” the Colgate commercial prompted.

“Yes, please” Mai smiled again.

“Dark, milk, or white?”

“Um, I don’t know. What’s best?”

“Best? Well, they’re all good,” she nodded slightly as though agreeing with someone else’s statement.

“Which do you like best?”

“I really wouldn’t know.”

Mai paused, her own smile was beginning to feeling a bit forced. “Milk.”

“Excellent choice. Size?”

“Medium. No whipped cream.”

“You sure? The whipped cream is really good.”

Mai tried to suppress the image of the girl eating cups of whipped cream through perfectly crafted teeth. “Positive. Thanks.” A passing frazzled mom in an out of date trench coat rammed into Mai as she was paying.

“Jimmy, I said no,” she whispered in a tone used only by mothers and cartoon villains.

“Would you like a cookie to go with your hot cocoa?” asked Colgate in a tone that sounded simultaneously mocking and propositioning. She held up a reindeer shaped, cellophane wrapped, technicolor cookie twice the size of Mai’s hand.

“Um. No, thanks” Mai smiled, grabbing for her paper cup.

“Merry Christmas!” shouted at least ten people in the crowd.

“Jesus is your savior, dear” assured an elderly woman attempting to push a Jews for Jesus pamphlet into Mai’s free hand.

Why am I here? Mai asked herself, again.

Mai had awoken that morning with no plans to attend the Christmas parade and accompanying carnival. She had awoken that morning with no plans at all. As her alarm kicked on the voices of NPR commentators, Mai had stretched her body so that her toes curled over the foot and her fingers over the head of her bed.

“Arugh,” she sighed in pleasure and buried her face further into her pillow. It was Saturday and there would be no demands on her. She scratched her head, flipped over, and rubbed her face. The commentators were talking about Pakistan, as the often did of late. Sunlight was streaming from the curtains and Mai knew that it was at least two hours past when her mother would think was a reasonable time to sleep in. Mai lived alone. In living alone Mai had no one to tend too and no one to narc on her if she failed to tend competently to herself. She wiggled her toes out from beneath the duvet and thought about coffee.

Mai’s apartment was not large. It was a one bedroom flat in a converted house. She lived in a back apartment on the ground floor. She had a small kitchen, a good sized common room, an adequately sized bathroom, and a bedroom just big enough for a bed and dresser of which the bottom two drawers really did not open. But Mai was happy with her island of “all me alone time.” She had filled her good sized common room with a hand me down couch, a large reading chair, an old desk upon which her grandfather had written dirty detective novels, and enough books to fill at least 30 boxes. Mai enjoyed a good book. Mai even enjoyed a bad book, if it was bad in the right ways.

This morning the floors of her flat were cold. Mai kept meaning to buy slippers, but with no one at home to nag her with reminders of “well, of course your feet are cold you still haven’t bought any slippers” she continually forgot.

“Cold,” she said to herself, tucking her feet up onto the rungs of her singular kitchen chair after turning on the coffee pot. Not being a morning person, Mai ground the coffee beans and filled the water tank of the coffee machine the night before so that in the morning she would only need to press “on”. Her laptop was sitting in it’s usual spot on the kitchen table.

“What is going on in the world this morning?” Mai asked the inanimate object. The screen light up with the comforting and familiar hum. As the computer was doing whatever it is that computers do in order to function properly, and truly Mai had no idea what that was, Mai braved the cold floor once again to examine the contents of her refrigerator.

Bacon.

Oh, yes, though Mai with excessive pleasure, bacon. Mai had once dated a man who was horrified to learn of Mai’s love of bacon.

“Bacon?” he questioned with incredulity.

“Bacon” she nodded, smiling.

“Really? You know how bad that is for you, right?”

“Well, sure. But its not like I eat it everyday. I mean, I would, but I don’t.”

“Bacon?”

“You don’t like bacon? A nice crisp, salty piece of bacon?”

“Sure I like it. I mean I remember liking it. But its so bad for you. And, I mean, I thought girls didn’t eat that stuff.”

“What stuff, bacon?”

“Yeah. Bacon, steak, you know... meat.”

“What?!” Mai had snorted coffee out her nose at the very idea of women not eating meat. Sure, she knew that there were some women who didn’t eat meat. There were some men who didn’t eat meat, for that matter. But all women? Where was he getting this information about women? “All of my friends eat meat,” Mai replied. “All of my friends love bacon. Well, except two, but they’ve never had it. Religious reasons. I am sure if they’d tried it they would love it too.”

“I’ve never dated a girl before who liked bacon.”

“Are you sure?” Mai questioned, the fact that he kept referring to her and all women as “girls” was, Mai thought, a conversation for another day. Mai was quickly nearing 30 and as her mother would have gladly pointed out, was no longer a spring chicken. Mai figured if you couldn’t be considered a spring chicken you, likely, could also not be considered a girl.

“Of course I’m sure.” He was getting defensive.

“I mean maybe they never ate it in front of you. Or maybe they told you they didn’t like it,” Mai drew out the word “told” to imply that his not knowing may not be his fault. He heard, ‘maybe they didn’t trust you or like you enough to be honest with you about whether or not they liked bacon’ and thus ‘maybe you are inherently flawed and bad with women’.

This relationship had fallen apart shortly after the bacon conversation.

Bacon, Mai smiled as she hopped lightly from foot to foot in her kitchen. She rubbed her stomach for good measure, as though she were trying to convince a child present that something good was about to be offered.

By the time Mai had prepared herself six strips of bacon and a large mug of milky coffee her computer had grown impatient and gone to sleep.

“And what do we have here?” Mai stated aloud, wiping her bacon greased fingers on a dish towel. There was an email from a dating web site she had recently joined.

“You have a message!” it declared joyfully.

“A message. Hm” she said to herself. Mai had become a member of three dating web sites over the last six months. Her biological clock was ticking, her mother was pushing, and her romantically available social pool was drying up. She had been asked out by a sixty year old. Enough was enough.

The web sites had proven less then God sent, but she was reluctant to give up quite yet. Plus, her membership contracts didn’t run out for another three months.

“Hi!” opened the message “My name is Brian. I am thirty nine, healthy, and laid back. I am going to be in your area for work this coming week and was wondering if you were available for a hook up. ; ) No strings attached. You wont regret it.” Mai paused before hitting the delete button. The winking smily face was what got her. It is one thing to ask a complete stranger to have sex with you over the internet, but the smily face made it seem weak and torrid. She thought he was wrong, that she would regret the hook up, and to her the smily face said he knew that too.

After reading threw the rest of her emails, two from human rights mailing list, one from her sister, one from a friend from college - “I’M PREGNANT!!!!”, Mai stretched her arms over her head and washed her dishes.

“Everybody is kung fu fightin’...” she sang, “everybody’s fast as lightin’ duh duh duh du du du duh duh duhhhh.” Mai threw in a good side kick and a butt shimmy as she scrubbed the frying pan. “Oh it was a little bit frightnin’... uh hu, everybody was kung fu fightin’.”

Mai’s mobile rang part way through a deep kick turned lunge move.

“Mai!” her mother’s voice greeted her. Her mom always sounded so excited when she picked up the phone, as though they hadn’t spoken in a long time. They spoke almost daily.

“Hey mom, dun dun duhhhh.”

“What was that?”

“Oh, nothing. Sorry. What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just calling to check in.”

“Uh hu.”

“What are you up to today? Are you busy?”

“Not really. I’ve got some laundry I should do,” Mai glanced over at the mountain of clothing, towels, and bedding that would likely amount to five loads even if she didn’t properly sort them, “and some stuff to do for work.”

“But its Saturday!” her mom objected.

“Yeah, Mom, I know. But stuff’s still got to get done.”

“I’m just saying a little fun would be good for you. You should go out. See people. Meet people. What is Macy doing today?” Macy was a good friend of Mai’s from high school. They were facebook friends and occasionally got coffee.

“No idea mom. She has kids, she’s probably doing some mom things today.”

“You should call her.”

“Uh hu,” Mai responded, while sorting through her underwear drawer for something clean and not depressingly un-sexy.

“The Christmas parade is today, you should go to that. She could bring her kids!”

“Mom, how do you know about the parade? You don’t even live in the state,”

“I have the internet. I like to know about things where you live.”

“Uh hu,” Mai nodded trying not to be annoyed. Did other people’s mother’s do this? One time when Mai’s old flat had been broken into, her mother had written a letter to the mayor complaining about his lax stance on crime. She was furious when she did not receive a reply. “Yeah Mom, maybe I’ll go. Probably not with Macy though.”

“I don’t understand, you two were so close.”

“Yeah mom, we were. Like fifteen years ago.”

“Whatever you want. Its your life. I know, I know.” But she didn’t know, of course.

Mai thought it might be nice to go to the parade. There would be the carnival and the stands. People would sell crafts and salty snacks and hot chocolate. Maybe she would go.

And, of course, she did. Wearing her least appalling pair of panties and her favorite, only slightly dirty sweater, Mai found herself at the Christmas parade, holding a cup of hot chocolate. The girl had put whipped cream on it.

Maybe living alone was starting to get to her, Mai worried. There were so many people here. Too many people. Did she not like people? Mai thought with sudden concern. She use to like people, didn’t she? A large man in a torn football jacket bumped into her, almost spilling her cocoa. Maybe not.

Some glitter had landed on the lid of her cup. “I saw Mama kissing Santa Claus...” sang a loud speaker nearby.

Yeah, thought Mai, who hasn’t. She decided to go home. She had a book to finish. And really, that laundry wasn’t going to do itself.