Lexi
That night in bed with the lights out I lifted my nightgown. And stroked my legs high and higher. Circling. Thinking about the man in the blue suit. Edgar Allan. The most beautiful man I’d ever seen. Personally. Asleep in the next bedroom. Or maybe as awake as I was and thinking of me. I thought of him getting out of Cristofer’s bed. Leaving Cristofer’s room. Entering mine. In the dark my ceiling fan turned and turned and I circled higher and higher.
I spoke his name out loud in the dark. The name we had made for him together. ‘Edgar Allan.’ If he heard me through the bedroom wall and understood that name as a beckoning. If he got out of Cristofer’s bed and came to my room. Who was I to stop him? That question was all it took. A pin prick. A spark of light. A swelling as big and mean as the fireball that rolled from the tar kiln when Walter lit it with a kitchen match.
I fell asleep. Alone. Exhausted. I dreamed that Goneril vent-pecked the white chicken until the white was bloody. The poultry yard was a mess of blood and feathers and innards. The white lying on her side. Her black eyes glassy and unmoving. But then she started laying eggs through her open wound. Dozens and dozens of eggs. Hundreds of eggs. Endless eggs. Filling the yard. Piling on top of each other. Until the heap of them buried the white chicken. But still the eggs came and each one gleamed as bright as a star in the night sky.