COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published two novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002) and We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006). His first full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), is out from Foothills Publishing and his book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations, appeared in March 2009. He also has two novels set to be published in the next year, The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (Bronx River Press, 2009) and Following Richard Brautigan (Livingston Press, 2010). He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and one of his poems was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He has two children, Toby, (1988), and Chloe, (1995). With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

Traveler

I found myself in Y--, that strange country, with its treacherous terrain and tumultuous politics, its inedible foods and avid police squads. I was lost. I drove pointlessly, hopelessly, relentlessly. The mountains sprang up on all sides, closing in on me. The roads wandered, going in no noticeable direction. The car, a rental, seemed made of infirm materials and coughed and sputtered like an old man.

Suddenly, like a rift in dark clouds, a town appeared. It seemed to glitter in the murk. There were ramshackle houses, buildings colored dun and ecru with brighter trim and small painted doors. There was an inn. My car shuddered under a small portico. I stopped and went inside. I was as tired as I had ever been, a great limb-heavy weariness that almost choked me.

The lobby resembled no lobby I had ever seen.

I stopped an old man in a military jacket.

“Is this the lobby?” I asked him. He obviously spoke no English and looked at me as if I had offered him drugs or my daughter.

Then I saw the desk, a desk that resembled a hotel’s check-in. I approached warily. What if no one spoke English? Would I wander this strange town, voiceless and unanswered?

“Have you a room?” I asked the woman behind the counter. She was a heavy-set woman with a head like a dumpling. On her nose she sported a grisly wart.

“Yours is ready,” she said.

I hesitated. “You have a room for me?” I asked for clarification.

“Oh, yes, all ready,” she assured me.

She had me sign the register and handed me a key. It was made of a heavy metal, the kind of old-fashioned key you might see in horror movies. No one approached to pick up my bag so I hoisted it myself and went in search of the room. The woman smiled her encouragement as if I had solved a puzzle.

The corridors were dank and the walls seemed to sweat, a dark perspiration. I found the door which corresponded to the number carved into my key. I turned the key in the lock and it made a sound like a jailer’s arrival.

I opened the door on a room nicer than I anticipated. It was an odd pink and orange room, pink dresser, orange walls, dirty orange carpeting. It was small but nicely appointed. I set my bag down by the dresser.

“Who are you?” a woman in the bed asked me.

I started, put my hand to my chest.

“This is my room,” I said after a moment. She stared at me. She had the sheet pulled up to her chin. She was not unattractive, with that squarish face that many people in Y—had. “The woman downstairs assured me that this was my room.”

“I don’t know how to talk to you,” the woman in the bed said.

I realized that she spoke English well. My heart began to calm.

“I can go downstairs and see if there is another room,” I offered.

“There are no other rooms. They told me this,” she said.

I stood there foolishly looking around at the walls.

“M-may I stay with you?” she asked me, finally.

I thought about this for a moment. What a strange impasse!

“First,” I said. “Let me see your breasts.”

She lowered the sheet. Her breasts were beautiful, as shapely as a new pair of shoes.

“Yes,” I said. “I think it will be ok,” I said.

She smiled now and I noticed that her teeth were bad. Her breasts were perfect but her teeth were terrible.

“Come into bed with me,” she said. “You look tired.”

“I am very tired,” I said. And began to undress. When I was naked I stood beside the bed.

“Come on,” she said, opening the sheet as if it were a tent flap.

“I am very tired,” I repeated. “I thought I was lost.”

I got in next to her. Her body was warm and smooth like fresh milk. She put her arms around me.

“But you are not lost,” she said. “This is your room.”

__________________________________________________________________________________

Pandora’s Neighbor

Some of us knew who she was when she moved in. Though she came here to retire out of the limelight, a kind of self-banishment, rumors of her arrival had preceded her. Of course, she wanted to forget. Who wouldn’t in her shoes? The guilt alone must have been onerous, not to mention the simple human embarrassment.

Sometimes when I got off work late from the gas works, I would see her in her kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table, a small glass of something amber in front of her, her face a study in loneliness. I felt for her. No other neighbor approached her house. The jokes at her expense were horrible.

One night, after a particularly grueling day, I didn’t arrive home until 10 p.m. From my driveway I could see into her living room. She was on the floor. I didn’t know whether to be concerned or not. What was she doing?

I went inside and put my things away and changed into comfortable clothes. For some reason I brushed my teeth and ran a hand through my hair. I found myself thinking about her, worrying about what she might be doing on her living room floor.

As I approached her house there was only one dim lamp burning. The living room was yellowy and she was still on the floor, but I saw now that she was moving. I could see her arms move and her back heave with sighs. I stopped in front of the window. I didn’t mean to spy but I felt like I needed a good reason to knock on her door.

I saw then what she was doing. She had her box open in front of her and she was poking about in it desultorily. The indescribable objects she was fingering were antiquated, some rusted, fusty, some limp and lifeless. Their powerful days had come and gone. I could only make out one half of her face. She was aged, more through despair than time, one imagined. Her once famous and well-favored visage was clouded and lined, her brow a furrowed field. The sadness of the world seemed etched there.

I knocked lightly on the front door. It took several minutes before she came to the door. And when she opened it she was still wiping away one more tear with her sleeve.

“Hello,” I said. “Sorry, I haven’t said hi before. My name is Stan and I live next door.”

“Hello,” she said. She managed a sour smile.

We stood there in silence for a few moments. The cicadas were singing. The night was grey and still.

“Come in,” she said.

Her house was pleasant inside but not very well kept. There were dust bunnies along the walls and in the kitchen dirty dishes on the counter. Her box still sat in the middle of the living room floor but its lid was closed. It was smaller than I had imagined it; it was a plain, black box.

“Something to drink?’ she asked.

“Yes, thank you,” I said and took a seat on the couch.

We drank and made small talk for a while. I told her about the gas works. I told her a little about the neighborhood, things I had gleaned from twelve years of living there. She was a pleasant conversationalist. And while we talked she seemed to grow younger. Perhaps this is fancy on my part but after a while I found myself in the company of a woman many years younger than myself, a lovely, lively woman.

It was Pandora who made the first move. She placed her mouth over mine and it was warm and wet and I felt as if I were drinking from an oasis after years in the desert. When we both undressed I was ashamed of my thick, white body, next to hers which seemed unspoiled in every line. Her breasts were marvelous, her pubic hair a deep thatch of dark imagination. When she took my penis in her hand I grew to a dimension formerly unimaginable in my long life. I felt as if I were using another man’s cock, a more powerful man.

We made love for the rest of the night. We went through so many positions that by daybreak I was emptied and tired and hopelessly in love.

“If the neighborhood only knew,” I said in the morning light as she lay unmoving next to me.

“Any one of them could have been the first to fuck me,” Pandora said, and she smiled a feline smile.

I laughed uneasily.

“But it was you,” she added.

“Yes,” I said. I began to fret a bit. And my stomach felt odd, unsettled.

“It was worth it, wasn’t it?” she asked.

“Pandora,” I said. “Will you be mine? Will you be mine forever, Pandora?”

“You have no idea,” she said.

And that was how it started. That one evening changed my life. Who’s to say if I am better or worse off? My life before Pandora had been placid but dull. Post-Pandora, though half-animal, I am fully alive, like a beast, something feral and happy in its own skin.

At night I prowl the neighborhood. The other neighbors no longer make jokes about Pandora. They no longer say anything at all, behind their locked doors and darkened windows. The streets are unnaturally quiet.

Pandora and I still talk about her box. We handle her things with reverence, though, really, they are quite lifeless, quite useless. And Pandora looks old again, her breasts and stomach sag, her hair is a wild nest of grey. It is all I can do to make love to her, my needy Pandora.