In a Freudian knicker-twist, Mrs. Bloom had thought it was a gun she’d packed in her panties, a phallic snub-nose, though she’d had no particular victim in mind.
No one had to die, because the pistol in her britches fell impotent. As she sat among the women at the party, pleased to be in their company, the gun she thought she’d smuggled in snaked into something flesh, and it brought along with it a living history. And when Viv touched Mrs. Bloom’s hand so gentlemanly, even the new weapon between her legs got feet and walked off. And Mrs. Bloom was a little girl again, once again oblivious, curious, unlearned.
In the aftermath of the Sugar Shop party, Mrs. Bloom sat alone at her kitchen table smoking a hand-rolled cigarette of pipe tobacco and drinking oolong from a delicate cup. Her window was open, and the thin curtains spiraled, inviting Mrs. Bloom to slip out, and down, and away.
But, as she knew, no one had to die tonight, no one at all. Mrs. Bloom took her teacup and cigarette to the window to study the snowflakes so big they looked magnified, microscoped, and she could make out the fine architecture of each flake, crystal cathedrals not at all unique, halls of mirrors upon mirrors, dropping to shatter swiftly and quietly against brick and pavement. She took from the pocket of her kimono the plastic baggie of heads and hands and feet, and she turned it inside out, sending the clippings out the window to fall with the snow. A hand landed in a bird’s nest in a bare tree, a head settled in the fur trim of a woman’s coat, a foot figure-eighted across a frozen-over puddle. Maybe Mrs. Bloom would not confess on the front cover of the Omaha Street after all but would let the Flirt vanish, and the local news anchors could out-shout each other with reports of the Flirt’s sudden silence. As she thought about it now, it was exactly the way she wanted to go—in a flurry of quiet.