HERE AND AFTER IAN HOUTS She’s fingering the produce and I can’t remember the last time I ate a vegetable. Days like these are mine alone. The town stews choked in a swelter and Lengel keeps the front door propped with a milk crate to allow an imaginary breeze to flush out how stale we are. People move slower in heat, their brains all marinating, and there is a buzz in the air like faint television static. Flies love me. She is strutting the aisles in the back of the store like a highborn picking slaves, her handmaidens in tow. She touches everything, grazes and caresses with long slender fingers, bonewidth fingers that glide. They run the lines of cans of beans and trace Hostess cartoon characters, thumb cardboard corners and crinkling plastics. Nothing holds her interest long. The other two are in awe of her; one fat girl in a two-piece green swimsuit stumbles more than walks, so eager to keep up; the other, taller and dark, looks down her pointed nose in embarrassed condescension. They are all in bathing suits and their skins exposed. Sunburned and pale, polemic antipodes, patches here and there but so much flesh it all evens out. A law of averages. The Miss is wearing a taupe suit peeled down off her shoulders and she looks at any moment to step out of it altogether. The straps hang down like suspenders after work. Folks in this town are scandalized by less, and as she brushes the top of her chest with those pianist fingertips, the other patrons take notice—the old women bemoaning the loss of their own beauty and the old men like me feeling happy dirty inside, each disguising it with scorn.
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