CATHY: Is it mine to be none other than some name in a tale?
JEFF: It is yours to be as it is mine and all others’ here—words on a page, my love, lines of dark in the light.
CATHY: Is there not a better button we could press, some keystroke combination clever we could with fingers outstretched apply to the transient medium and convert the words to lines of light in the dark?
JEFF: Would that change anything worthy of any change?
CATHY: Upon momentary consideration, likely not. Change this, then—change your memory of me from a lewd and lascivious girl to one tender and bruised of heart.
JEFF: Your wish shall be my task at hand. Let us begin from one beginning. From the day that was the first I saw you—in a neighborhood not the same as that we share in the bulk of this tale—where then you lived in home suburban, and wandered I the streets in early morning delivering newspapers and in afternoons and evenings collecting payments due for same.
CATHY: I do recall. It was an afternoon or early evening in one of the warmer months, you were on your rounds collecting subscribers’ monies. In my front yard I was, and cheerfully I greeted you.
JEFF: You were ever a cheerful girl, until the day I saw you last.
CATHY: Let us leave the last for last. Continue if you will, kind sir.
JEFF: Many details of our early acquaintance now evade me, though I recall you seemed a forward girl.
CATHY: Out in front I was.
JEFF: We chatted in passing from time to time.
CATHY: So passed the time.
JEFF: As it ever will. Soon enough the days of youthful labor tossing papers and securing revenues for same did come to their end, and to your neighborhood I did no longer repair.
CATHY: Forgotten by me you soon were—no offense intended—
JEFF: None taken. In all good faith and honest account, given how many matters, great and small, do impinge upon any life, commanding countless attentions, I cannot say that I would ever have recollected you, had you not moved to the neighborhood where I was then living, your family taking up ranch house residence a few short blocks away from mine. Shortly thereafter we met, you and I, at the yearbook assembly at the end of the school year, though recall each other at first we did not.
CATHY: Mingling we were at festive gathering in our school’s great cafetorium—
JEFF: —dual purpose and resonant cavern—
CATHY: —where we milled about, laughing and chatting and signing our names and our sometimes witty, sometimes salacious, sometimes banal wishes into each others’ expensive and often haunting illustrated indices of the very final years in which life would be other than the dreary, droning, and often dreadful passage through what seems an endless book of days, until it ends slamming shut. How was it we came there and then to meet?
JEFF: I do not recall beyond that we met there that day. A month later—and this I do remember with greater precision, having written it down in the log I then kept—I saw you at the 7-11 down the street from the house where I lived. Being a lusting lad and you a sufficiently pretty and open lass, I took it upon myself to, as we put it, walk you home, upon which stroll we did discourse in the random and largely pointless manner common to persons of that age, evading and avoiding as much as we could the central matters shared by almost all, know it or not.
CATHY: You refer to The Two?
JEFF: Pleased am I you know of them. So many never do, even when they build the bulk of their lives around them. The two central questions—Will you let me fuck you—
CATHY: —and Are you going to hurt me.
JEFF: Those are they. The vast majority of human discourses, conversations, simperings, blatherings, obfuscations, evasions, manipulations—
CATHY: —the great edifices of higher civilization—
JEFF: —and the rapacious machinations of commerce and finance, all could be stilled if distilled to The Two.
CATHY: Am I going to let you fuck me?
JEFF: Let us look more closely at the evidence. I am walking you home. Though you have not requested my escort, and though it is bright summer day in a neighborhood so safe it’s difficult to imagine nowadays that such places once existed in our cities, I am accompanying you. Why? I’m on the make.
CATHY: That was not hard to puzzle out. I was myself on the make, though certain not to go too cheaply into any bargain. We had barely met.
JEFF: And I was patient, laying foundations, sowing seeds.
CATHY: Seeds you certainly would have sown.
JEFF: Unwittingly and haphazardly, bareback rider that I was to become.
CATHY: Would you have put me up unbrushed and wet?
JEFF: Could I have, without a doubt, without a care. We walked along and we talked on our way, along the streets and sidewalks, past the low-slung houses of our modern suburb, making our way to your new digs on Baltimore Lane. You told me you wished to acquire an automobile of your own when you turned sixteen.
CATHY: Dreams so easy to dream when we are too young to know well enough the waking world. What said you to my confessed material desire?
JEFF: I asked you when your birthday would be.
CATHY: October, always.
JEFF: So it was and ever is, and to which, that first time it was to me revealed, I replied that it was a long wait for me to give you your present.
CATHY: A scant four months. The youthful dilation of time, that scarce more than ten dozen days could seem an interval of notable length. Did you reveal what the promised or threatened present would be?
JEFF: Not then and never in words. I simply asked you how old you would be. You answered sixteen.
CATHY: To which you said—I’m reading now your log—Sweet sixteen and never been… you fill it in.
JEFF: Assuming as I did, likely correctly, that the smart girls and boys knew the phrase had changed—
CATHY: —daring days, these, wherein we wandered, making our ways with guidance spare and often unreliable—
JEFF: —and you filled in the implication by saying you had done it once but never would again.
CATHY: What made you of that? I don’t suppose that you inferred I referred to kissing as the saying once explicitly had done.
JEFF: Not for even half a moment, though in a moment clarity I sought. When you had said that never again would you engage in whatever unstated act it was we were dancing our converse around, first I asked you why not.
CATHY: To which I unhesitatingly and dismissively answered that it—this it we had not yet defined—was not worth it—the second it likewise undefined, its meaning implicitly understood as being some level of payoff for the commitment and effort inherent in the first it.
JEFF: At which point I sought to solve any mystery of it and said, What are we talking about?
CATHY: A call in any poker game, so I showed my hand and said, I went to bed with a guy once, and I never will again.
JEFF: Did you know when you so vowed that you were lying?
CATHY: Likely I did. I could play a purring feline game. And did you know that when you said in response, Oh, that’s too bad, you were saying close to nothing at all?
JEFF: Likely I did not. I did note I was taken off guard by your apparent candor. Disarmed as I was at that moment by your dismissal of life’s central event, I nonetheless found myself at your house the very next afternoon.
CATHY: Nevertheless, you persisted.
JEFF: Beholden to forces greater than my conscious self. And I had walked you home. I knew where you lived.
CATHY: Baltimore Lane.
JEFF: A name that came to haunt you.
CATHY: It may as well have been branded across my forehead. But do go on. You came to my home the next day. What took place?
JEFF: I knocked, or rang, and you let me in. Summer’s day that it was, you were clad in a bikini bathing suit. You led me through your house and to the back patio, where we sat a while under a pale green awning of fiberglass, and we talked.
CATHY: Of what did we discourse?
JEFF: I kept no recollection, though of one action you took I took note.
CATHY: Took I only one of note?
JEFF: At the least.
CATHY: And it was?
JEFF: Your home’s back lawn had been mowed earlier that day. Evidence thereof were the fragments and clumps of recently-cut grass lying about. As we sat and talked, you casually built on the patio in front of you an arrow out of these discards. The arrow pointed directly at me. You let it sit for a minute or so, then put your lips together and blew it back into the chaos it had been.
CATHY: What made you of this?
JEFF: I thought it notable. Nothing more of it was inquired or revealed.
CATHY: I was revealing quite enough already by my attire.
JEFF: More would have been too much and I do not believe I could have restrained myself had I seen revealed those choice portions that remained concealed under scant flaps of cloth.
CATHY: Was I in danger even then?
JEFF: No. You were sober and awake and it was a sunny day, and your younger brother was inside the house, watching television in the den. And I was still a virgin.
CATHY: Though you would not for long so remain. Rumors were to circulate that very coming autumn.
JEFF: I never spoke of it.
CATHY: You never needed to. Girls will talk.
JEFF: And what they say the boys will never hear.
CATHY: Good that the boys never will, for it would burn their ears down to stubs and how pathetic they would then look.
JEFF: We’re arguably hang-dog even on our best occasions.
CATHY: I shan’t have occasion to argue with that. Now, I was blowing grass at you and driving you mad—was I driving you mad?
JEFF: Mad I ever was. You were a delight to this teen lunatic. The following day, when return to your house I did for further visit, my log reveals that you were wearing a halter top and hip-huggers—
CATHY: Not as brazenly all but naked as I had been the previous day.
JEFF: You could not have known I would be buzzing around your door.
CATHY: I thought I might like it, bumbling bee though you might be.
JEFF: I likewise thought you might like it, to be a blossom not resisted. Though on this second day, we stood at your front door for only a minute before I left. You seemed to be trying to buzz me off, so off I buzzed.
CATHY: Don’t take it personal. Likely I had something else I needed to do.
JEFF: Likely you did, and personal I did not take it, for the text reveals I returned the very next day.
CATHY: A bee that must have its nectar and its pollen? Looking to get honey on your stinger,
no doubt.
JEFF: The ultimate goal. But on this third day we had time again to talk—I don’t recall what you wore—
CATHY: Something safely unmemorable, it would seem.
JEFF: All appearances indicate your appearance on that day was unremarkable in its details. The details I tracked were certain impressions of our talk.
CATHY: Broadly brushed swathes of color? Pointed choice details, spare and precise?
JEFF: Let’s see, let’s see. We talked, engaging in the telling of the life story common to two people interested in discerning whether they have shared interests beyond the pleasures of the flesh—
CATHY: As if any further reach were needed.
JEFF: One does like to keep up appearances. So we conversed, and you told me of the street where you had previously lived—
CATHY: —and then we remembered—
JEFF: —how it was we seemed to be in some way to one another more than newly familiar.
CATHY: And thereby was some bond established.
JEFF: A transformation of our ionic bond into one of covalence.
CATHY: Though metallic it was never to be.
JEFF: That was not a valence we sought or desired. For my part I was pleased to see you again and to recognize such bond as there was. Interest in you I had entertained when first we met, but we had lived too far apart for me to engage in aught beyond risqué fantasies best kept to myself.
CATHY: You are a scamp, Master Jeffrey.
JEFF: Call me anything you like, I will never deny it.
CATHY: That is because it all would be true.
JEFF: I have never murdered.
CATHY: Deny you that, then, though unstated it has been. But you have been a prowler, walking the sidewalks and schoolhouse halls, remembering where every girl was and often the day they came into the world.
JEFF: Remembering birthdays was one of my specialties.
CATHY: It can make a girl feel special. Be sure to remember your wife’s.
JEFF: I remember them all, and others besides, though I am sad to say I don’t remember yours, not after all these years, though I do remember that I remembered it that first autumn when together we were in school.
CATHY: The day I turned sixteen? Gave you me the promised present? I know it wasn’t the car I desired. That I would recall.
JEFF: As would I, though what it was, as mundane as it was, I do recall. It was a school day—not the present, but the time—and either late that afternoon or early that evening, I stopped by your house and we engaged in what was called making out.
CATHY: I’m certain I enjoyed it.
JEFF: As am I and as did I, though your boyfriend did not enjoy report of it, which seems to have reached his ears later that same evening.
CATHY: Tell him I did not. It was my younger brother who did, and him I did upbraid roundly when I found out.
JEFF: Discovered both he and we were then, and I did discover how exposed I was when the very next day at school, your boyfriend knocked me to the ground.
CATHY: Were you hurt? For my warm kisses did you suffer?
JEFF: A small humiliation in passing, nothing more. I trust that does not disappoint.
CATHY: A dream of many a girl is to have the boys fighting over her. I am glad you were not hurt, as I was glad to be so desired.
JEFF: Several were we who wanted you, as you were to know over time.
CATHY: Oh, yes! You and that unnamed boyfriend and several others who likewise shall remain in the shadows or the margins. And to be so wanted was what I wanted. It was all in good fun, even the playful offering to you of my sensual services entire for a goodly piece of change—you recall?
JEFF: I do. Your proffer equaled nearly a week’s gross wages for a common worker. I had not the cash at hand.
CATHY: Had it would you have played? Laid your bet upon my table?
JEFF: Laid it there and you where I could, I’m fairly certain. You were coquettish to and past a fault, and I was cocked up to my lasting distraction.
CATHY: We could have made a warm and close coupling, though as ever I was careful to avoid being hurt—though looking to its obvious vectors and never suspecting from whence it would come. Played I my game of hearts with all comers until came my house of cards crashing down.
JEFF: The house you built for yourself in your home on Baltimore Lane. You learned at a later date the nicking name given you, the cutting label affixed. I do recall the bleak and cold sadness of our final meeting. It came but three years after the day I gave you your sixteenth birthday present.
CATHY: Much can happen in little time. It takes but a second to say goodbye. Had you stopped by to give me a reprise gift?
JEFF: Likely, though it was not to be. We were both graduated from high school by then—
CATHY: —and I had learned a thing or two.
JEFF: Smart girl that you were, and one thing in particular—
CATHY: A name. A nickname given me but never spoken to me until it was revealed and took a thing or two out of me—a piece of my heart and my breath away. But you never called me it, did you? The Baltimore Whore?
JEFF: Never. But when the other boys did, I smiled along with them, never sought to dissuade them, never stood to defend you—
CATHY: I hate you. You know that, don’t you? You and all the others. I despise you, as you clearly despised me—don’t think to deny it, you have given your game away as surely as I discarded my honor and reputation—
JEFF: No, Cathy! I did not despise you, I—
CATHY: You never stood up for me. You never said, She’s a winsome lass, frolicsome and fair and of no harm to anyone. You never said, I have held her and kissed her and treasured her in passing and will hear no disparagement of her.
JEFF: Cathy, fair Cathy, be fair. You were, scarce more than a year after I first gave you present of close embrace and open mouth, to commence repeated sleepings with your then best friend’s father, a man old enough to be your own. I cajoled you one winter’s afternoon to put that affair aside as all too unseemly, even for our daring post-revolutionary generation.
CATHY: I don’t recall any of that now. What was my purported response?
JEFF: In so many words, but at somewhat greater length, you encouraged me to attend to my own affairs and leave you to yours.
CATHY: Did you heed my reasonable and adamant demand?
JEFF: Did I ever and ad infinitum. But gossip I did not. I never called you by any disparaging name. I merely collected facts and arrayed them in records privately kept, that I might at some later date review and recount.
CATHY: An interesting form of masturbation you writerly lads undertake. Use you lube? Do you come? You can go now. You may conjure me forth in some ghostly form on your pages, but you will not see me again outside the eye of your mind, or other than in some mug shot in a high school yearbook or two, where I shall always appear so young, so happy, so fresh. You will not know what will become of me. You will think of me from time to time, though not often and not much. And you will never know if I ever again gave you even a single flashing moment’s immediate thought, though I will tell you, don’t presume to flatter yourself.
Tetman Callis is a writer and artist who lives in Chicago. His stories have been published in a variety of literary magazines, most recently Book of Matches, BULL, Tahoma Literary Review, Elm Leaves Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Propagule. He is the author of the memoir, High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner’s New Mexico (Outpost 19, 2012), and the children’s book, Franny & Toby (Silky Oak Press, 2015). He can be found online a tetmancallis.com and facebook.com/tetman.callis.
Read Tetman's story in Propagule 2 here, and his story in Propagule 5 here.