Schoham: A Vignette
“You’re a fat lot of good,” she said, and the leopard turned over and scratched its belly and swatted at a small horde of fruit flies
Chapter I
Suhana was looking for the gold in the field, her small grubby hands digging through the dirt. The dying warbler, its chest heaving, had told her it would be here. She sighed and the sky looked down bluely. The leopard was dozing in the tree. “You’re a fat lot of good,” she said, and the leopard turned over and scratched its belly and swatted at a small horde of fruit flies. In a futuristic city a man was left alone at a bar, his aged skin red in the neon light. Elsewhere, the moth flew into the candle, extinguishing it. The nectar stained their chins and made them sticky but his hand was broken. The girl pushed aside the stems of grass. “Oh, you’ll never find it,” said the leopard, “go to bed, go to bed,” blowing away the feathers on its paws. One day her mom held her close and wondered where she had been. “He said it was here!” she cried in anguish, and the grass crept up her ankles.
Chapter II
The people who would have listened to him had they still been there, he realized, were filtering out of earshot, into the twilight, like drops of water from a pan that had been rusted through, and it turned out the warbler knew nothing, and neither did the leopard; it was just pretending to know. As he spoke she found the dark wine very bitter. “Tell me more, tell me more.” The garden being very far but we can see it from here, it’s nice to walk there in the evenings, and watch the fireflies flash like you’ve rubbed your eyes too hard. The field being very near and the water up to his shins and noiseless and for something circling overhead he was afraid to make noise. At her bedside the mother said “Achoo” to make her sneeze, or maybe it was “I love you,” and she misheard.
