Pop
The forefinger woman floated in the pool of Wallace’s cupped hands. The toad he’d rescued her from darted out of sight, hiding in a bramble of moss. Before any other weathered creature could have its way with her, Wallace hid her in his bait box and brought her home. His basement workshop was a secret nook, separated from his house by a stone stairwell and a door that didn’t lock. But it was his. There, among his mahogany shelves and stacks of books, among the shaved pencils and fishing rigs and knickknacks without a proper use, among the smells of mold and varnish and piped tobacco, he finally felt safe from predators and wind and wife.
As the tiny angel dried out, naked and suffocating in his bait box, Wallace brushed aside the old wiring of projects left unfinished at his desk, sweeping sawdust in the air along with them, and caught in the chaos an empty bottle of soda pop. It was the only emergency vessel on hand. Temporary. Wallace climbed the stairs, filled the pop bottle with sink water, and plunked it, spilling some drops from the brim, onto his desk.
Wallace slid the forefinger woman inside the bottle, where she fidgeted like a docked fish reintroduced to water.
“It’s safe in here,” he said, though he still didn’t know if she could speak.
She had the appearance of an ordinary woman, perhaps mid-twenties. With his peppered eyebrows pinched, Wallace marveled at her catch her breath. The arch of her back. The gentle rising of her ribs as she inhaled. That careful clenching of her toes as she bent her thighs up to her stomach. Her hair curled in tufts around her bare shoulders in a way that made his eyes glide across and down and back.
Her eyes drifted open. “You’re staring.”
Wallace cleared his throat. Her voice, even in the water and behind the glass pop bottle, had the volume and timbre of a real woman’s. It had the sound of a song he couldn’t quite place. “Men have stared at you before?”
“Not men.” The pond woman stretched, revealing the length of an armpit. “Only fish with small bladders. Toads.”
“One of them almost got away with you.” It was then he noticed the blotch of a bruise on her shoulder. She babied it out of her stretch, aimed for the surface of the bottle, and finally gave up, leaning against the glass for support.
“I won’t be able to swim like this,” she said.
“I can take care of you.”
“You’d do that?”
Her body was so frail, her skin so clear of blemishes, but for the wound. It was a miracle she hadn’t been injured before. Eaten right up. Wallace couldn’t decline. “I’ll find you a fish bowl.”
The forefinger woman scowled, and the playfulness of her youth dotted her face. “You’d put me in a bowl meant for a fish? So you can bait me and hook me and place me back in the currents with blood stretching out of my neck like all the others tossed back?”
“Is that what you think fishermen do?” Wallace became distinctly aware of his fishing poles tangled in the corner of the room.
“No, I much prefer this basement. It’s safe, though it’s not much of a home.” She tapped her chin, thinking.
“I’ll bring you something to eat.” He thought of all the things a woman the size of his finger might want to eat, and of which foods he could sneak out of his pantry without his wife knowing. Peanuts, chocolate chips, seeds. Then he thought of what a pond diet might consist of and came up blank. “What do you eat?”
“Time and attention,” she said, as if her answer were cottage cheese. “I grew up alone in the pond. Only flies gave me any attention down there. And whatever spider or reptile was looking for lunch. Attention from them would get me by... But affection from you?” She let that last sound of ooo tumble longer between her lips. “I’ll gobble that whole.”
A banging behind the door lifted Wallace out of the conversation and into a panic. He arranged his stacks of books and electronics into a nook, then slid the tiny woman’s bottle behind them, hidden from view of the door.
It opened. Light caught his wife’s face.
“The raspberries are finally ripe.” She tousled the back of his hair, where the locks were fullest.
Meredith fit into his empty spots just the right way. When they played checkers, they did so in each others’arms, which meant spinning the checker board each turn and laughing with each fumbling of the pieces. One peep of this miracle through the stack of books, and... Wallace shuddered. Would Meredith see this scene as nothing more than Wallace gawking at another woman nude? A sinew inside their perfect home might tear and bleed and swell.
“I’ll get buckets out of the garage and we can pick raspberries later this week.” Wallace removed her hand from his hair. “But, love. Remember what we talked about?” Meredith bit the side of her mouth, trying to remember. “About my basement?”
“Right, oh, of course. I didn’t mean to bother you.” Meredith backed away to the door. That was good. Less of a chance she could glimpse the woman in the bottle. “Curious is all. What’cha working on, cowboy?”
He tried to dismiss her with, “Bait.”
Meredith notched her head. “With your desk all…empty?”
The desk was, after all, stripped of tools. No flies twisted or magnifying glass in arm’s reach.
Wallace smiled. “I’ll be right up to make dinner, love.”
“Okay,” his wife rolled her eyes with a smirk. He held his breath until her footsteps passed the top stair.
Wallace moved aside his books, revealing again the bottle and the woman inside. Still real. Her hands were pressed against the glass. She had such thin fingers. Were there more like her? Did she have a place to go? Was there money to be gained by… No. Questions big and small pelted him, but only one mattered. “What shall I call you?”
“Nobody’s ever given me a name.” The tiny woman drew her fingers through her hair. He’d have to make her a brush.
“Then I’ll call you…”
“Oh you must catch this sunset!” Meredith called from upstairs.
“I have to go.” Wallace shoved the forefinger woman back into the darkness.
#
Wallace’s wife didn’t catch a whiff of Sandy on him, he made sure of it. He washed her sweaty musk from his hands three times with their thickest soap. Over dinner, he stared at Meredith while they ate, tracing the bony contours of her face over his memory of Sandy’s soft features. How strange attractiveness could be. To be so compelled by shapes alone. Meredith asked if he was okay over their steak and potatoes, and he shrugged it off. Fishing. Work.
“Well?” Meredith asked. “Was it fishing or work?”
“Fishing and work. It’s, er, it’s a lot.”
When he got back to his workshop after the dishes were washed, a tinging alerted him. It was the sound a wasp makes when it attempts escape through a window, the sound of a firefly caught in a tin can.
Ting. Ting ting. Ting.
It was the sound of a naked woman pounding the inside of a bottle of soda pop.
Wallace pulled Sandy out from behind the old magazines and pieces of wood that didn’t fit anything.
“What are you doing?” he whispered.
“You can’t keep me in there!” she yelled.
“Quiet down or my wife—”
“You can’t keep me in the dark. I’ll be as loud as I please!”
“Shh, hush. She can’t know you’re here. Imagine if she found you out. I’d be, well, I’d…” The image of Sandy crushed jagged beneath a dictionary emerged in Wallace’s mind. “It wouldn’t be good for either of us, Meredith finding you.”
“I have my ways of handling creatures like her.” There was a hint of a threat bent in Sandy’s tone. The whites of her eyes darkened.
“Please don’t. Whatever you’re thinking.”
“I’m no monster.” Something in the way Sandy smiled made the shadows in the roomfeel like they could topple and bury Wallace. “I haven’t hurt anyone.”
After twenty years of marriage, Wallace knew how Meredith might react. Sandy would seem like another weed that needed plucking and loading into the wheelbarrow. Yet here was a weed that could pluck back. “It’s best you have nothing to do with each other,” said Wallace.
“I just got here, and I’m so famished for you. But it’s all ruined. You might as well toss me back in the pond. All because of some…” she went on, but Wallace stared off at nothing. There was no way he could put her back. She was too beautiful a secret.
“How about I make you a home to live in?” he said. “Until you’re healed. Is that better than the dark?”
“You’ll make it just like I want?”
Wallace hesitated. Sandy scowled. “However you want.”
“With a little rock I can lay under?”
“A rock, sure.”
“And a recliner chair.”
“Okay. A chair.”
“A recliner chair.”
“Recliner chair.
Definitely a recliner chair.”
She crossed her arms. “Alright, do it.”
#
The moment Wallace returned to the house, he beelined for the workshop, making sure, of course, to glance sidelong into each room to be sure his wife wasn’t home. The basement door had a registered lock, now, and Wallace kept the key wound between dollar bills in his wallet. Sandy basked in her new home.
Wallace sewed loops over his wife’s thimble to make his own special outfits for Sandy to wear. Dresses, along with coats and lingerie. All sorts of things could be fashioned into clothes. Candy wrappers. Stray wires that close off bags of bread loafs. The strings that came loose off his sleeves.
When her fingers wouldn’t do for hair brushing, he gave her the head of a children’s toothbrush to use instead. He made her recliner chair from snapped toothpicks, and over the headrest he placed a tiny umbrella meant for cocktails. Sandy asked him to place mirrors in her hiding place. While he was away, with his wife or job or wherever it was he spent his day, she tried on the outfits he made for her and pose. Practicing.
The final setup worked like a secret chamber in a castle. Wallace triggered the lock with a lead needle behind the corner of his desk. A secret compartment on the back wall slid open to reveal the woman in her bottle along with all her ornamentation. Her nook was hung with silver keys and brooches and other trinkets. Above her, he’d positioned a red heat lamp he’d gotten from a friend’s chicken coop. Along each side was a mural to simulate the pond. Wallace painted in eyes to seem like preying creatures hungered for her in the shadows behind rocks. The eyes made her feel safe, she said.
There was the aquarium with her chair for relaxing. Whiskey bottles for trying on clothes. An old mug for sleeping. But when Wallace was there with her, Sandy preferred the pop bottle. It was best, she said, to be undressed in the simple glass spotlight alone. Easiest to keep his attention that way. She wanted his eyes on her. Only her.
He spent his evenings there, pleased to watch her float and swim and show off for himwhile he whittled away at something. It was deeper than addiction, spending time with her. His friends became a distant island and his wife started leaving out lunches. She asked if he was feeling sick and needed a doctor. His eyes sunk to bags of grey. Sandy sang to him while he worked, and every day he found an excuse to stay with her longer.
#
One evening, Wallace flipped through an old mystery novel in bed, and Meredith read her beauty magazines. They were those ones with tight-bodied women draped half naked on the covers.
“Ten Ways to Get Your Man to Stare Again,” Meredith said. “Maybe I should take notes out of this one.”
Wallace tossed his novel on the nightstand. “You really want me to stare at you the way men stare at these women?” He motioned to the woman on the cover, whose naked skin was carefully positioned beneath a boa constrictor. “You’re more to me than that.” But his mind went to Sandy and the perfect angle of her hipbone over the seam of her leg.
“It’s not so bad when it’s the right kind of staring.” Meredith’s free hand crossed to his side of the bed.“A little attention goes a long way. You never used to have trouble before…”
“This project...” Wallace’s shoulders tensed.
“Always the project.” She leaned over the bed to kiss him. “Maybe one of these days I’ll copy that key of yours and have myself a peek.” He curled away from her before her lips could reach him, leaving only his back for her to graze. It was love for her that he turned. Couldn’t let her see the doubt on his face. The frustration. Why can’t she leave my private space alone and find something pretty of her own?
After a flurry of neck kisses, Meredith gave up and wrapped an arm around him. As the hours wore on beside his wife’s rising and falling, he twisted the hairs on his arm and churned his teeth. If she ever found his secret compartment. If she ever found it. If she ever found it. He swore he could hear, if just in the floorboards, Sandy’s song.
#
“I love the way you look at me.” Sandy smiled the way a girl smiles when she’s just about to kiss you.
“What if I told you I was falling in love with you?”
“Wowzer.” She caught herself between a breath and a laugh. “Nobody’s ever loved me before.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be okay when you’re fully healed and back in the wild.” Wallace pressed his chin out to rest on his desk.
“I’d tell you to keep on with me. Keep loving. Keep me here, all for you.”
Wallace put his pinkie finger through the mouth of the bottle. She swam to the rimand hugged it. Her forearms felt to him like a praying mantis’s, and her breasts rubbing against his fingerprint reminded him of an old plastic spoon handle he used to rub his thumb over while he ate. She kissed him, which—to his finger—hardly felt like more than a goldfish’s lips sucking. His heart fluttered more than it had in a long time.
“I have something for you,” he said. She loosened her grip on his finger and he pulled the surprise out of his bag. “You’ll have to let me know if it’s safe for you to breathe in.” He filled a plastic dropper and tipped it over her lid, then squirted, and a series of bubbles popped around her.
“Oh, this is lovely! I feel like I’ve been dipped in silver rain.” Her body quaked with giggles.
“It’s club soda. CO2 for the bubbles.”
“I feel it everywhere, throughout my whole body. Outside and inside. Give me more.”
Half a bottle of seltzer made her euphoric enough to sink to sitting and hug herself in ecstasy. It was more than Wallace could handle. He wondered what it might have been like to touch the rimof the bottle with his cracked lips.
#
After work, Meredith kidnapped him. Bags were packed, and the destination picked. Aweekend away. Bed and breakfast. It’s not like he could turn it down or she’d start asking questions. Every comment Meredith made, his mind drifted to Sandy. Those nimble fingers, the curve of her neck. Red puckered lips. Poor gal would be starved back home without him.
On the drive home, when the weekend was spent, Meredith suggested she come down to surprise him in his workshop sometime. See what he was working on. The argument kicked up sand.
“You don’t need a podium in every second of my day!” Wallace was yelling by then. “I deserve a free moment without you!”
“You have it, you have it!” Meredith slammed the dash board. “I let you fish alone! I let you—”
“Well this project isn’t fishing!”
“See, I don’t know what it is because it’s some big—”
“And by the way, let me? You shouldn’t be letting me do anything! I’m my own person and I…” This went on for miles. Twilight turned to dusk.
I love you, he wanted to say, but there are parts of my life I shouldn’t have to share with you. I love you, but I have to keep things from you and I have to keep you from me for both our sakes because I’m terrified of the things I am myself. I love you, I love you. If only the words would come out of his mouth in a shape she could understand.
Meredith had finally stopped crying. “What are you talking about, breathing down your neck?” She sniffed. “I have my job and all that volunteering. We hardly see each other anymore.”
“Then maybe we shouldn’t.” He stared hard at the road. Checked that his brights were on. Wiped stray spit from his chin.
“I miss you, okay?” Her voice was still something like a sob. “It’s been boring without you, sure, but I’m just… I’m worried.” Meredith fiddled with the heater and crossed her arms, wrapping her sweatshirt tighter against her. She wiped away her splotched eyeliner with a napkin, along with her lipstick to follow. “Something’s wrong and you won’t tell me what, and I miss… I wish I could sweep you off your feet the way you used to do for me and, oh I don’t know…” She tossed the napkin into the backseat. “Goddammit!” She kicked at the car floor. “And after such a weekend.”
Meredith went straight to bed when the car arrived home, and Wallace snuck to his basement.
“I was so hungry while you were away,” Sandy said with a sharp frown. She lifted her dress to tease an ankle, then covered herself again. Point made.
“Well, I’m here now.”
“Don’t ever go away like that again.” Her teeth were sharper than he remembered. “You have to warn me.”
“There is more to my life than you and me, you know.” He was still exhausted fromthe argument. And the weekend had been nice, even without Sandy.
“Oh, is there now? Because I see it, the way you feel when you’re here. I’m your only relief. You can’t handle life out there without me. Too much stress. Boredom. And I get you through all of it. I’m almost healed, you know. You can toss me away from here before long.”
Wallace wanted to scream, to grip the bottle close to his nose and spit in it. He was the one who built all Sandy’s decorations, the one who nursed her back to health this whole time with his gaze.
“If my wife catches you, she’ll kill you. Without thinking. Without regret. You’ll be like any other rodent or cockroach she finds down in the floorboards.” The walls shifted only slightly, the way houses do. “And then where would I be?”
“You just don’t want to be in trouble.”
“That’s not it.”
“Then you won’t mind if I sing loud enough for her to hear me.”
“No, I…”
Sandy gave him a pointed look. “If you find a way to get rid of her, you can gaze at me all you’d like. Without fear, forever.” She smiled wickedly and bent the rim of her dress up, up, up. Her garments shifted to the side just so, revealing certain shadows. Certain corners.
Wallace wiped sweat on his trousers.
#
It was somewhere in those following weeks that he started eyeing knives much differently at the dinner table, offered drinks to bring his wife and noticed the simple opportunities presented to him in her open glass, tested her ability to sleep through his noisy standing and creaking back to bed. Meredith held up no walls to him. It would be easy.
That was the same period where he noticed his workshop key lying on the top of his bedside table, free from the ring of cash in his pants pocket. Not where he ever remembered leaving it. Careless. He pocketed it before his wife could enter the room.
#
“I want to show you something,” he told Sandy as he replaced her fresh water with the rushing fizz of club soda. This time, like so many before, it was full carbonation, nothing static.
“Oh, anything at a time like this.” Sandy’s eyes rolled back, her mouth agape. She always fully undressed before he gave her the bubbles, to better experience the bittersweet rush of it all. No chair or clothes or anything to get between her body and bliss.
To get to it, Wallace had to shut Sandy’s wall chamber, since his second hiding place was within the desk shelf used to wire the chamber open and shut. He pulled out a tiny, sharpened wood splitter. In case it wasn’t obvious what it was for, he jabbed it a few times in front of himself. Sharp and down.
“Are you really going to use it? Or are you showing off to impress me, so that I knowyou’ll finally get on with it and off your old lady?”
Wallace wiped sweat from his lips. “Well, I…”
Sandy laughed. “I’m only joking. I know you want to run off with me.” The sound of a door slammed. “What’s that? I thought you said she wouldn’t be home for hours.” Sandy was curious, not worried exactly.
“I did.” Wallace didn’t move. Footsteps spiraled over them in odd arcs. They were already at the top of the basement steps.
Mouth dry, Wallace went for the lever to the secret compartment, but it was jammed.
Real fear hung in Sandy’s voice now. “Wallace, what are you doing? Wallace? Open the compartment.” Her body pressed against the bottle’s shell.
He realized the mistake and shut the paper drawer, then noticed the wood splitter on his desk. How would he explain that? He opened the drawer back up, not tall enough to stuff Sandy’s bottle, and tossed the splitter to it.
A knock on the workshop door. Three bangs, back of Meredith’s hand. Must be.
“Hurry up!” said Sandy.
The splitter had clattered to the floor. Wallace bent, picked it up, and set it in the paper drawer.
Meredith’s muffled voice from behind the door. “Wallace? Is there someone in there with you?”
“No, uh, no.” Wallace gripped his lead needle to unlatch Sandy’s secret compartment, but it snapped between his stupid grubby fat sweaty fucking fingers.
“I’m coming in.”
“It’s locked!” he called.
“I copied your key.”
Sandy gasped. “Wallace!” He left the pencil lead and gripped Sandy’s bottle. There might be enough time to drink it and hide Sandy beneath his tongue, if only…
The sound of an outside key in the lock gripped him back to reality. There was no time. Reality bit down.
“Wallace, please!” Sandy’s eyes were wide like a puppy’s. “Let me—”
With a thumb over the top of the bottle, Wallace shook vigorously. He jacked the club soda even as his wife notched the door open. In brief seconds it went from clear to bubble white to blood red. The bottle slammed flat onto his table. Foam splurted out the top like a popped volcano, and collected to the top fifth of the glass, curdling down the sides.
“What is this?” Meredith eyed it, curiosity overtaking anger.
Wallace’s heart pounded so fast; he had trouble keeping his voice steady. “The p-project I’ve been working so hard on.” Sweat spilled down his face, his chest felt tight. He couldn’t cry, couldn’t choke or wince. It was too soon for all that.
“You’ve been making…”
Wallace nodded, shaking. “Soda pop!”
Before he could stop her, Meredith lifted the bottle. The foam had settled. An eye, still attached to grey membrane bobbed to the surface. With closed eyes, his wife licked the bottle against her lips and tossed her head back for a swig. A lone, detached forearm, still leading to a bent hand with three stubs and two fingers, rolled through the drink’s red fog to the underside of the bottle. Backwash.
Meredith clicked her tongue, rolled spit around the inside of her mouth, swallowed, smiled bright, and said, "It's sweet."
By L.J. Ruh
Austin Ruh works professionally in post production for film and TV, with credits that include: Daredevil: Born Again, The Beast in Me, and No Hard Feelings. Their writing has been featured in the Open Book Zine and onstage in readings throughout NYC. Ruh has written and directed a number of plays that had successful performance runs. A Snowball Tragedy was sold-out Off-Off-Broadway and jump-started a burgeoning theatre company, Lecoq on Acid was shown at the community favorite Open Figure Theatre, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune reviewed Too Punk to Care, calling it “satirical musical gem.” Ruh currently lives in Brooklyn, NY with their overwatered plants, manga collection, and some unopened mail.
Instagram: @based.on.a.ruh.story