By Any Chance
Chapter 5 Moveable Feast
By: Nicholas Nocketback

“Go ahead and have a seat, Evan. You must be starving, right? I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone sleep that long. You don’t have mono do you?”
“No, I mean, I did when I was a teenager. Wait, is Janelle here? How’d you know my name?” Evan, bewildered, pulled out a wooden chair, surveying the room as if he’d opened his eyes for the first time in years. A salmon linen tablecloth covered a significant oaken table which sat atop an oatmeal marble floor; black and gray veins stretched across the polished stone. The table was set with several ornate black platters, all complete with bite-size morsels and Greenleaf garnish (four pieces of rye toast, some raspberry jam, several slices of Gouda displayed like a deck of cards, hard boiled eggs with brown shell, and melon balls with prosciutto skins); porcelain figurines governed the four place settings. In the center was stationed a teapot, steam rising through the spout. Evan guessed Earl Grey but wished for coffee. Pictures, presumably family photos, surrounded the room, some black and white, some color.
“Well, you’ve been asleep for about forty-eight hours now, so we had to check you out. Shit, we thought you might’ve died, didn’t take anything, though, don’t worry. We just had to make sure you weren’t a crack head is all.”
“You could figure that out from an ID?”
“Sure, Nelly and I are supreme judges of character. You could say we have a sixth sense for such things. I am January, by the way,” she said, pushing a soupy egg onto Evan’s platter with a silver spatula before dropping one onto her own. Her smile both calmed his nerves and frightened him, like hugging your mother on her deathbed.
“January? Of all the months of the year to name a kid, your parents chose that?”
“Yeah, hippies do that. I wasn’t even born in January. I like it, though; at least it’s not May or June. I’ve never met a clever or pretty May or June. Eat up”
“Thanks. This is quite a set up you got here. I’m used to Cinnamon Toast Crunch and a Parliament Light at this hour,” Evan grinned and scooped a fork full of egg in his mouth, nodding in approval, studying his chef out of his peripheral vision. Her hair was black and shiny, cut close, the back an even parallel with her earlobes. Her breasts were small and perky with no undergarment so the physical effect appeared larger than they were. Skin, a lighter shade of brown, produced a tone somewhere between decaf latte and a Baskin Robbins waffle cone. Her soft features and blemish free skin seemed unnatural, like the porcelain figures that stood guard over his breakfast.
“I know; we like to celebrate everyday as if it’s our last. We always have an abundance of food and rarely finish it. Nelly, sorry, Janelle, says that the day we don’t have a full table set, is the day opportunity knocks looking for a bite to eat.”
“You have any coffee?”
“Drink tea.”
))((

The shower was made of cream tile with brown grout, not a touch of mildew tarnished the walls. He turned the white porcelain knob to the right and waited for the water to steam. Adjacent to the sliding glass door there was displayed an array of cleansing products. Shampoos and conditioners reined supreme, brand names facing out, like a supermarket shelf. Evan decided on a combination of Brilliant Brunette with a Paul Mitchell chaser. He’d never utilized so many products at one time on himself. He packed the maroon washcloth with a foaming body wash of some French concoction and lathered aggressively. Torrents of hot water pounded his body, the shower doubling as a sauna. From the bedroom he heard the stereo; The Rolling Stones’ “Cocaine Eyes” in subtle cacophony with the splattering drops. With two arms bracing him, Evan let the water from the pulsating head saturate his hair. The door opened to his surprise and January stepped in, sliding the door behind her. “Thought you could use some company, seeing as you’ve been sleeping for two days. You like The Stones?”
Evan dazed and caught off guard stood speechless; looking over his shoulder the water and his inundated bangs hindered his view. January reached around him and grabbed the bar of Irish Spring, grazing his back with her breasts. She manipulated the nozzle so that the stream switched from pulsating to a light mist and hit her directly.
“I should probably get out,” Evan spoke as if questioning himself.
“No, stay, showering is always such a lonesome affair. It’s nice to have someone to do it with now and again, don’t you think? Think about it. Every time you shower, you come up with some great idea, or sing really well all of the sudden, and there’s never anyone there to hear it.”
“I suppose you’re right. This is a really nice place. I’ve never felt so clean. Although, I think after this I might smell a bit too feminine. I can’t read French but that body wash smells like jasmine and melon.”
“Good guess, peach and jasmine, actually, so you really were only off by about ten feet,” January said, cleaning her ears with the washcloth Evan used.
“How do you figure?”
“Well, peaches grow on trees and melons in the ground. So the height from the tree branch to the soil is about ten feet,” she said, in a matter of fact tone.
“Is the place yours?”
“Naw, it’s Janelle’s place. She lets me stay here rent free, can’t beat it.”
“Wow, she seems pretty young. How does she afford it?” Evan asked with a concerned manner befitting a young child.
“She’s loaded; it’s a sad story really. I should let her tell it, but I’ll feel you in; the shower’s like a confessional, no? When Nelly was sixteen her father died at work. They never really had money, but her dad took out an insurance policy on himself and her mom. He was the manager of a grocery store, Save Mart, heard of it?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s a pretty big store; anyway, he was closing one night and the baler stopped. The baler is this big machine that smashes cardboard boxes so they can be…”
“I know what a baler is, I used one back home.”
“Back home? Where?”
“Worcester, it’s near Boston.”
“Oh, well, he was closing up and the service clerk who usually baled the cardboard went home sick. Instead of calling someone else in, Ron, that was her dad’s name, tried to fix it. I guess there was something stuck in the back, keeping it from working. So, Ron climbs in the baler and pulls out the mess. No one saw what happened because everyone was gone. But at four in the morning when the cleaning crew came in, they saw him in the baler. He apparently tried to get out but wasn’t fast enough. The machine actually severed his body. Only his legs and were visible. It cut him in two. Hold on, pass the conditioner; the blue bottle.”
January squeezed a liberal dose of the cream into her hand and worked it in her hair, back to Evan, water hitting her calves. “Anyhow, Janelle and her mom got like two million dollars from the policy and moved into this place.”
“Damn, that’s terrible. What a way to go,” Evan said, unsure of where to put his hands. He backed up against the wall and let January finish rinsing.
“If only that was it. After that her mom was like wicked depressed and never left the house. She didn’t even go to the funeral. It really freaked Janelle out. She had to take over. Often times she’d be the one that went shopping for groceries and paid the bills. This went on for two years, Janelle cleaning up after her mother, bathing her like she was a toddler. One day Nelly gets home from school and finds her mom in the backyard face down. She had slit her own throat from ear to ear with a kitchen knife. It was a fucking mess from what I heard. She used a serrated blade. One of the detectives said she must have had to work at it, sawing back and forth. She eventually died of blood loss, so she was alive for a while. Let’s get out of here; my fingers are starting to look like raisins. Oh, yeah, her mom’s policy kicked in after that and now Nelly’s worth around four million, from what I hear. She’ll never tell me, though.”
Evan remained silent, the coincidence startling. He thought about sharing his story but felt that January would probably give it the same deficient concern as she did Janelle’s. Besides, if Evan was going to leave the past three thousand miles behind, he needed to construct a fresh life and a new history, though he hadn’t thought about what he would tell people when the time came. But for the time, he noticed January had changed the album—Julia Dawn sang of Darwin and his killing spree while January crooned along. As Evan looked for his pants, covering his genitals with his black BVD’s, January had already rolled them into a ball and used them as a pillow, her nude body splayed out on the carpet, eyes closed.
“Bang, bang, love is dead, get me stoned or give me head…I met you at the bottom of a bottle, while the bubbles go wild, we go down, down, down…” her voice mimicked the singers, pausing and changing cadence on cue.
Evan, moving forward, aroused and a bit embarrassed, could only think of how he’d slept for two full days in this room, presumably with both women frolicking about and had no proclivity to awaken. Perhaps it could’ve been a drugging, a strong sedative, conceivably. But at this point, there was just one force driving him along, a primal inertia. January, feeling him above her, continued her blind serenade, pulling Evan on top of her. The two mashed each others flesh, Greco Roman wrestlers struggling to deliver the fatal blow. Tongues matched dexterity, chasing one another around endlessly like children at recess. Evan hadn’t been with another woman since Jeanie—that he could remember—and the absence of yielding female flesh seemed interminable. January, while aggressive, offered herself up, dough to be kneaded, fissure to be filled. The soundtrack to their coupling worked as an opera, switching themes, octaves, and settings. Four songs played: Fragile, All You Do Is Lie, Just a Little, and during Judges Burning Bibles their bodies failed and the fire extinguished, both gasping in unison, winded as asthmatics. Evan reached down in his diaphragm for something clever to say, anything, but found nothing and remained voiceless. January, while also not speaking, sat up and collected two Marlboro Lights from her pack on top of her chest of drawers, lighting both with one Valero match. As they sucked in the hearty, earthy draughts of smoky air together, Evan looked at the ceiling, covered with bottle caps like a college frat house. Budweiser caps created a likeness of Che Guevara while a large mushroom loomed over the window, made exclusively of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Heineken caps outlined what appeared to be a one hundred Euro note. The craftsmanship was elaborate, seemingly flawless. As he studied the note and its complex lines, he remembered his money. What had become of his Jansport and the hundred grand? Without warning, he leapt to his feet and ran outside. There wasn’t a sign of his Volkswagen for blocks—no money, no car, not even the shirt on his back.