Two Stories: “The Duel” & “Marching Season”
By Christopher Luis-Jorge
The Duel
It was that liminal period between too late for sex and still early enough to be horny when Manny worked up the nerve to ask Ximena “what’s something you’ve always wanted to do but have never tried.” He then clarified “sexually,” before he got an answer like skydive or marathon John Ford’s filmography. Considering their bedroom was long dead, that question—or some mutation on that question—was overdue; If not by Manny then by Ximena. The only thing that prevented them from taking that first step to save their lifeless bed was, ironically, that their sex life was so absolutely and utterly lost to years of routine and humdrum that such inquiries were almost a venture into necrophilia. But to Manny’s relief, Ximena didn’t seem upset. To the contrary, she didn’t even need to think before she answered.
“I want to duel you,” she said. “With guns to the death.”
On some level, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Ximena’s fascination with westerns, spaghetti or otherwise, used to entice Manny. It was quirky when they were dating and tedious now that they were married, but it was familiar enough that the answer might have seemed natural if it weren’t for all obvious ways that it wasn’t.
“To the death?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“High noon? Tumbleweeds and all?”
“Ideally.”
Manny considered Ximena’s request. It wasn’t the answer he was expecting, but then again, he wasn’t sure what he was expecting. He knew he would concede. He was, more-or-less, out of ideas at this point and they needed to do something spicy.
If it had been up to him—which is to say if Ximena had asked him the question—Manny would have revealed his long-time quicksand fetish. He would have, in pornographic detail, described a fantasy of helplessly slipping into a shifting and uncertain ground, completely defenseless. Legs: useless; hands: obsolete in Mother Earth’s rocky maw. As his body slithered into oblivion, Ximena would, at the very last moment, appear from the foliage dressed in full khaki, possibly—no, necessarily—swinging a machete.
Manny found the thought tasty, but unrealistic after a disappointing night, some years ago, Googling how quicksand actually behaved. No, Ximena’s fantasy was more obtainable and was, by default, the winner.
They opened their shared calendar and found a day in the coming week where they would both be available at noon. They cleared the lunch plans and set the date.
***
On the morning of the duel, Manny searched the dregs of their closet for the colorful green and red poncho he’d purchased as a souvenir during their honeymoon in Cancún. He found it under a box of film negatives they once kept for sentiment but now kept because they’d forgotten about them. The day they bought the poncho, all those years ago, began with an inconvenient amount of honeymoon sex, fueled in equal parts by passion and Catholicism. Manny’s walk of shame was wide like a horse-riding stance or, as Ximena put it, “like a cowboy with a malignant wedgie.” Manny picked up the poncho in a gift shop that night to impress Ximena with his unsustainable whimsy.
The poncho smelled like closet, but it hung nicely on his shoulders and, when draped over his gut, had an unexpected slimming effect. Not quite as trim as the stomach Manny misremembered from his youth, but a step in the right direction, for sure. As ferociously as he admired himself in the mirror, Ximena, who was sporting a Stetson hat of indeterminate origin, admired him a little harder.
“Que sexy.” She tipped her hat in respect. “You look like a vaquero.”
***
They met in the playground attached to San Laz Blvd Elementary. It was a good school. If Manny and Ximena ever conceived, this would have been their neighborhood school. The kids playing on the nearby jungle gyms were all active little monkeys with smart eyes and the good sense not to talk to the cosplayers circling their playground. SLBE lived up to its reputation, though none of this mattered any more. Since one or both of them would likely die today, the subject of kids and their education was a moot point, but Manny found vicarious pleasure for the neighborhood’s dads and a slight nugget of hope for the American educational system. Ximena handed Manny a six-shooter and holstered her own.
They were unclear on the rules of dueling and, much like in matters of sex, decided to wing it based upon what they’d seen others do on video. At 11:59 am, they kissed, turned about-face and took ten paces from one another. They turned back and starred one another in the eyes, squinting under the glare of the noon day sun. A kickball rolled between them, which made Ximena smile a smile the likes of which Manny hadn’t seen in a decade.
Manny kept his gaze on Ximena’s eyes, fingering the cold steel by his hip with the tender tips of his finger pads. It seemed that the softer he pressed, the more of it he could feel and he continued to lighten his pressure until his finger’s tips were placed so delicately on his revolver that he was all but certain he could feel the gun’s heartbeat.
The school bell rang noon.
As Manny tightened the grip on his gun, six thunderous cracks filled the playground as, by twitch impulse, Ximena unholstered her revolver in her right hand and fanned six shots with left, filling her husband with hot lead.
The impact struck Manny’s chest. The force of the blows connected long before his synapses had time to gossip about the latest happenings. His trunk cooled as blood began to seep and spurt through his poncho, marrying the red stripes with the green. His arms and legs and mind seized in an adrenal explosion that numbed him and stripped him of all voluntary movement, save maybe for his head, and he crumbled to his knees in a fit of pure ecstasy. As he coughed blood down the front of his poncho, he watched—helpless—as his wife blew a cloud of gun-smoke from her revolver before twirling it back into its holster. She walked toward him bowlegged and produced two hand-rolled, unfiltered cigarettes from her jeans pocket. She lit them with a match and placed one cigarette in Manny’s mouth and one in her own. The cigarette trembled on his lips.
She ran her finger down the front of his poncho and admired the blood that collected under her fingernails as if the iron in his blood had been replaced with pure gold.
“Wow. You really bled a lot.”
Manny nodded. Ximena lowered the brim of her Stetson to shield her eyes.
“Was that good for you?”
Manny nodded yes and his cigarette fell from his lips, leaving his bloodied corpse crumpled and lifeless in a spasm of terminal bliss.
Marching Season
I: Yanni
You’re not at all comfortable with this, but you try and get out of your head anyway. It is just
dance—a dance.
No. There at the truth of the matter lies the discomfort. It isn’t a dance at all, it’s your dance.
You hold SPT’s dirty old razor to your beard and glance once more toward the door, like you’re doing something wrong. But you’re not. This isn’t wrong, what you’re doing.
The door is locked. You’re alone in the bathroom of Dick’s Wings in Jacksonville, Florida. On the door handle, a size medium spandex leotard from Paxon School For Advanced Studies’ theatre department winks at you. There can be no intruder.
You open your phone up once again and raise your reference into your field of vision.
You bring the razor to your beard, the raw marble of your untamed visage, piece by piece you chip away until you leave behind only a mustache, a familiar mustache, a mustache you have modeled after Greek new age musician Yiannis Chryssomallis. Yanni.
Yanni.
Yanni.
No, that’s what this is, after all, that’s what this is, this is his mustache you’re creating. There’s no sense in pretending like it’s anyone else’s mustache but Yanni’s. You could leave—you could always leave—leave while it’s still your face.
The razor vibrates against your skin as you tidy the scraps. It’s easy work. You’ve shaved a million times before; the movements are automatic. It’s scary, how quickly you become Yanni. It scares you a little bit how easy this is—that’s the hard part.
You hold your phone in your left hand and look over your own shoulder into the mirror, comparing and contrasting the authentic Yanni ‘stache to the one you’ve rendered for yourself. A facsimile? Not as such, but it’s obvious what you’re going for.
This is so weird. This is so alien. You’re not doing anything wrong.
***
II: Sean Patrick Taylor
“I first heard Marching Season way back in—oh god, was that 1989? No, yes, yeah it had to be 1989, okay let’s see here. I was 19, fresh out of high school working at Bingo’s records, which by then was all CDs anyways, and I guess that’s where I first heard it. Yeah, it had to be ‘89 because Marching Season was being used by the NFL or NBC Sports or someone as
***
III: Isadora Duncan
You hope that the dance—your dance—will be just like in the movies. Like in Napoleon Dynamite, when Napoleon bares his soul for Pedro, or in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia when Mac bares his soul, or in Spongebob Squarepants when Squidward bares his soul. Though you’re not sure what you’re about to do, you hope it will be called soul baring.
You know, there’s actually a lot of nuance to the interpretive dance? It’s not fair—it’s a fucking injustice—that an expression as pure as movement can become a punchline. Isn’t it at least a little mean spirited? Interpretive dance had its Shakespeares. When you were most panicked and thought Google would be your salvation, you read about Isadora Duncan. You even felt kinship with her. And you, of course, felt intense pity, real honest to goodness human pain, when you learned of how she died—what a shame?
This Marching Season dance, this thing you’re about to do. Is it in good taste? Are we just mocking the Isadora Duncans, the Yannis, the people who feel?
It doesn’t matter, though.
You have to do it. It’s weird.
***
IV: Sean Patrick Taylor
“No, I remember now. Okay hold on. Yes it had to be ‘89 because the next year, 1990, was ‘Dream Season’ and the song was back again, but on CBS this time. They were calling 1990 the ‘Dream Season,’ which in hindsight is hilarious because
***
V: "Marching Season"…Live At The Acropolis, 25th Anniversary!... 1080p Remastered
Description:
We are all exposed to life's Marching Seasons!
Take time seriously for it waits for no one!… Yanni❤
***
VI: Your Friends
Your friends are drunk.
You are their whore.
SPT presses play.
***
VII: Sean Patrick Taylor
“And that’s when we added the rule: the team in last place must shave a Yanni ‘stache, wear one of those faggy tight things, and do an interpretive dance to Marching Season. The whole song. The whole six minutes and
***
VIII: The Dance
You are their whore but the hormones are real and your own. You’re out of breath but the cortisol in your blood is lower than usual. You breathe deep, catching your breath where you can.
In three seconds, they will mock you.
Your heart throbs in your chest. This dance was hard. This was no easy feat. You feel weird.
You’ve never felt exactly like this before.
In two seconds, they will mock you.
You’re not even really a dancer, you know? They have to understand that, they have to
understand. Every word in your entire rhythmic vocabulary, you put out there.
In one second, they will be mocking you.
Your friends will be mocking you. In one second, your friends will be mocking you.
Christopher Luis-Jorge is a Cuban-American writer based in Philadelphia and former art director for The Cypress Dome literary magazine. His work has been published in The Acentos Review, The Golden Walkman, and The Cypress Dome.