sudden fiction: HIPS

It was his hips that bothered her the most. His pelvis was razor-sharp like a girl’s and his jutting hipbones sliced into her whenever she was beneath him. He had eyes the color of still water at the bottom of a very deep cave, a pool where translucent fish swim in the darkness. He mostly kept his eyes shut when making love to her but every so often at the moment of climax they shot open suddenly and bored deeply into hers, and she always had the sensation then of drowning. His hands were like twin white birds with broken wings that explored her shoulders and the small of her back as if afraid of being caught, wounded and flightless, ready to retreat into hiding at any second. She went to bed with him exactly five times before telling him that she couldn’t see him anymore. He had gazed into her with that piercing dead stare and she had looked away. All these things came back to her many years later when one afternoon she got into the car, turned on the radio, and heard his name. He had burst into a church on the other side of town the previous morning and taken a handgun from inside of his coat, firing upon the members of the congregation nearest to where he stood. The survivors described his face as composed and blank. Then he had pressed the barrel of the gun to his temple, closed his eyes peacefully as if he were about to pray, and collapsed to the ground in a halo of smoke. The police had no apparent motive, and were questioning his father with whom he had lived. The father’s voice came on over the airwaves crying out to the reporters, “Leave me alone, for God’s sakes, please leave me alone!” She could hear the old man sobbing bitterly as the media chased him back into his house. As she listened, sitting there in the parking lot after work, she became aware of the fact that she was wringing her hands. They were clasped desperately in front of her as though preparing for an invocation, but when she looked up at the high arch of blue through the windshield, no words came.