Frederica morgan davis

My Lover Suggests I Read James Salter

The library still hasn’t found the book I requested, suggested by the man I like. We met at a bookstore where lonely people go to listen to stories and sniff books. Perhaps happy people go there too, though I have little evidence of this. Not trusting the library’s digital system, I write down the book’s call number, climb the stairs to its stack. Still, a gap on the shelf.

I return to the library café, order another coffee. Beside the creamer and cinnamon, a discarded article: “How to even consider having children when they will inherit a planet plagued by climate change.”

The man I like has a wife. She believes having children is irresponsible. My lover’s wife might be any of the female library patrons, but they look too old, too young, too frumpy or rumpled. I imagine she is stylish, but effortlessly so.

The man cannot buy me flowers so I buy them myself. I’ve always bought flowers myself, like Mrs. Dalloway before her party, but now I purchase extra bouquets—tulips—and consider the splurge a savings because I do not have to go on dates or buy him presents on holidays.

I find the story my lover suggested on a podcast, read aloud by a woman who sounds stylish.

The tulips are yellow and I listen to the story. It is about an affair. The husband kills his wife—with her consent as she suffers from cancer—then walks downstairs to seduce his lover.

What if my lover’s wife has cancer? What if he has cancer, what if I do?

The tulips resemble Degas’ dancers, elegant limbs extended, graceful craning necks. How their folds hide light, how it hits their stems.

Little Free Library

Please Don’t Put Porn in the Little Free Library: the email reminder went out, accusing neighbors of exposing local children to mature materials.

The hipster couple in 1502 Sperry, the stone bungalow with the red geraniums and wide periwinkle front door, had built the charming Little Free Library box. They sawed and hammered scavenged wood, made a racket a little too early on a Saturday morning, according to a post in our neighborhood Facebook group. The art teacher who lived kitty-corner from me had painted the box faux-brick, mimicking the closest local branch (kitty-corner, as I had begun to say; catty-corner, my mother had said, when I was growing up). The little free library had been erected, with a plaque saying as much (now a shameful choice of words), by the East End neighborhood group September 24th on the southwest corner of Virginia Street’s 1500 block.

But I did.

Accidentally.

Put porn in the Little Free Library.

When dropping off a stack of children’s books I had saved, hopeful for too long.

So a local child eager for my yellowing Ramona Quimbys and worn Mrs. Piggle-Wiggles and forgotten Goosebumps would now learn the pleasures of cunnilingus from a thick book with an inviting image of a ripe papaya on its cover.

And so at the annual Christmas block party, I nodded in agreement, and casually sipped my IPA when the stylish wife of the blue-door red-geranium couple said, “It was probably Susan—in the yellow bungalow? Green roof? Susan never mows her lawn.”