Evening Friday, February 14th, 2025
Lyrou arrived in Reine’s living room with flowers, given the date, and Cognac to take the edge off the pain. Lyrou was upset to see Reine in face bandages, taking care of her toddler. “Ma merde! You’re not in condition for this.”
Reine exasperated, bent and prying a phone charging cord from Elena’s small but powerful hand. “I’m by myself here! I can’t let my fille espiègle go set our house on fire or flush a bath body scrub down the toilet.”
Lyrou frowned out a guffaw. “Has she done that? Elena, have you? Non.”
Elena looked up and over to Lyrou, relinquishing the charging cord. Reine accused, “Yes, you did.”
Lyrou sat with Reine on her couch. “She’s not an arsonist, though. And you told me the bandages were off, oui?”
Reine touched her face. “They are. Oh? No, these aren’t bandages. Heat compresses; reduces swelling and puffiness, increases blood flow, keeps me from looking at myself in the mirror and taking selfies, wondering if the procedure came out right.” She began to peel them off.
Lyrou stood to put Reine’s flowers in a vase and fill the bottom with water at her kitchen sink, and then in her cabinets, grabbed glasses to pour them both some of the brandy she’d brought. “Before you debut the new you, we should be prepared.”
As Lyrou returned to the sofa with the glasses, Reine kept her hands over her face, speaking through her fingers. “It’s not back to normal yet; it doesn’t look good. But focus on the targeted outcome, the nasolabial lines.”
Reine pulled her hands away, and Lyrou looked intently at her face. “Reine, they’re gone.”
Reine pointed along her jaw and cheeks. “It was so tight and painful in here, all through to here,” pointing back to her earlobes and neck.
Lyrou was concerned. “And now it’s better?”
Reine nodded. “Much better. The lines will be there when I’m totally healed, but slight, like when I was 20. Or that’s what women who’ve had this done say online.”
Lyrou held her glass up for a toast. “To your new face, same as it used to be.”
Reine raised her glass with a clink against Lyrou’s. “To my nose, which is next.”
Lyrou objected, “Chasi and his machine are wrong. Your nose is right.”
Reine stopped before she could get a word in, turning to see her toddler stomping through the kitchen, dragging a bottle of floor cleaner, “How did she get the child-proof lock open fucking again? We changed it. Elena, put it down!” and she was instantly in pursuit of the cherub.
⚜
Evening Monday, February 17th, 2025
Lyrou was riding around shotgun in the early evening with Tom in his hot rod roadster when she asked him about the bags upon bags of camera equipment in his backseat. “Ton nouveau centre d’intérêt m’intéresse!”
Tom could guess what she said, “I’m taking a program, non-credit seeking, in…”
“… en photographie?!” She was astounded to learn he was taking a course in something other than martial arts. “Tell me about it, Tom.”
“Rule of thirds, depth and focus, symmetry and reflection, framing, leading lines, and… and depth of field, negative space, background clutter, and foreground obstruction. I have to submit my original photos demonstrating each principle, and then one at the end equitably incorporating several.” Tom drove, his eyes darting around the neighborhood as if searching.
Lyrou clasped her hand over her mouth, then gave Tom a light tap-slap on his lap. “Homework? You’re stuck in a little desk in a classroom; that’d be too much, you’d dart pencils up into the ceiling tiles. But homework? And you complete it?”
Tom pulled over. “It’s online, so the little desk and room are mine, and I can multitask undetected. Sometimes I lose points for turning it in a day late. But you reminded me I have a submission due before midnight.”
He got out, and Lyrou too; he got into his bags in the backseat and produced a real rig. She didn’t like the area, parked under an elevated track, rusty steel beams, graffiti of the blightfully organic street gang type, broken up concrete and black top, an abandoned car, a car someone was living in, boarded up windows, and a pile of blankets some derelict kept for cold nights. Then, looking up at the elevated track, how the streetlights and purple sky cut through its many openings, the shadows they formed, how the brick patterns of the buildings added to it countless lines, and how the track went on for such a distance in an equidistant repetition of columns, as fruit trees in a well-planted steel orchard. “Your studio, in its grandeur,” she held her hands out at it.
“A ‘Queen of the World off the Bow of the Ship’ shot in this underworld, counter-environmental portraiture would prompt feedback.” Tom surveyed about for ideas.
She looked up at the pigeons nesting under the elevated track. “Just don’t call me one of your French girls, please.”
“Why not? What does your Caledon call you?” Tom spoke in the register of a high-grossing romance movie.
“My husband has called me a slut and a… cockroach,” Lyrou said with a high-pitched resignation.
“Uncalled for. Those hurt more than ‘mouch’. I’ll borrow ‘cockroach’ for my pupils. But come now, hasn’t your 2nd favorite lover called you by a sweeter term of endearment?” Tom was curious.
Lyrou thought and then answered with a pleased tone. “My husband has called me a seraph.”
Looking at Lyrou, measuring her face with his photographer’s eyes. “Angelic? I agree with him that you are, but I might not agree with you that he meant it affectionately.”
Lyrou flick-slapped his arm. “I think he meant ‘mouch’ affectionately, Tom. And, he hasn’t left me.”
Tom whistled a long, high note that echoed under the tracks at the cut of her words. “He meant slut affectionately. He hasn’t left you since discovering your infidelity because it’s made him not less but more attracted to you.”
Lyrou listened but objected. “He’s not a masochist or compersionist.”
Tom agreed. “Right. But unlike you and me, he’s a normie. Whatever they think, feel, or say against us, normies’ instincts predispose them to be attracted to cads like me and sluts like you. We give them our lustful do-don’t-think deoxyribonucleic acid, promiscuous progeny; juicy apples not falling far from their lush tree, who thereupon better proliferate, by virtue of inheriting from us our extra-pair mate-switching trait, their normie parents’ genes with ours.”
“That’s an explanation befitting the era; our destinies spun by spiraling double helixes. If we were in Salem, you’d attribute our misdeeds and temptations to the devil.” Lyrou lightly kicked an empty glass beer bottle away.
Tom stood as he finagled with his camera. “Slutty, sluttish, sloot. It feels nice how it forms in and leaves the mouth.”
Lyrou smiled and sighed. “Because he demanded it, I reluctantly confessed to him how many other men I’ve had since marrying him, afraid he would do I don’t know what. And what he did was he called me a relentless slut, beyond a slut.” Lyrou put her wrists together, her chin in her palms, framing her face and flashing an innocent smile.
Tom adjusted his rig. “It would’ve been worse for him, and so then for you, if you’d said you’d fucked only one other man, because he would’ve thought that one other man must’ve meant something to you. That there have been many other men says to him that none of them were singularly special to you, like lying on a bed of nails rather than a single nail, it diffused the pain with none piercing. They were all transitory, while he was the constant through line. If you had told him your post-nuptial body count was twofold instead of whatever number you gave, then he would’ve been half as hurt and twice as attracted to you.”
Lyrou was watching him prepare the big device. “Half of his jealousy over me is against you.”
Stopping and speaking seriously. “Because you made him feel like he’s half what I am to you. I’ll tell you this: a man who enters the ring with a smile is either a can crusher or the grim reaper.”
Lyrou’s eyes widened with wonder that someone like Tom could see her Garin so, “Could the Angel of Death come in the guise of a normie?”
“If not, then my entire business model is built on a lie. He’s an executive in his domain, and executives execute. Your husband has the balls to kill, and the brains to get away with it.”
“Oh no, why is he hot?” Lyrou joked, snickering between her teeth.
Tom shook his head, “Of course, you hear a man might be mulling murder, and your fallopians flutter. But listen, I’m serious about him being serious.”
“Are you scared of him, scared he’ll visit your gym again? The cameraman never dies,” Lyrou reassured him.
“Not over a cockroach,” Tom smirked and took her hand, slipping through a busted chain-link fence and deeper into the under-track. Stopping, he took hold of an H-beam. “Up.”
Using his big shoulder for support, the leather of his jacket an ideal grip surface, she climbed up onto the H-beam about 3 and a half feet off the ground. Her palms were red-browned just to touch the old structure. She held it on either side, feet together, she leaned back, face to the sky, hair hanging long. “Maybe one like this?”
Tom had stepped back from her about ten feet and crouched down. He clicked away, then adjusted his angle, crouched some short distance to the right, and then again… each time so that he would have variable backgrounds to choose from. “Kick up your right foot behind you, and stretch out one hand behind you.. don’t fall off.”
She obliged. “I can do it without falling because of my yoga practice. I can crawl up higher than this, too,” she chirped with verve.
Tom walked in a semi-circle around her, clicking and clicking. “Higher?”
“Good question.” She steadily climbed upward, testing her grip and footing. She was now five and a half feet up, from her heel to the black top. “ If I fall, please get a shot of me screaming just before I paf-crac on the ground. That should earn you a passing grade.”
“The descent of Lyrou, brought low by pride.” Tom continued from behind his rig.
“Pride? Brought low? Maybe, but not before reaching the heights.” She climbed up farther, now to a height that would break bones if she slipped. She reposed, kicking her leg up behind her and stretching her arm out, her head craning and her hair hanging long. “Is this an improvement?”
Tom took only a few more, with a touch of worry for her in his tone. “Alright. Watch yourself. Yes, better.” He positioned, snapped, and offered her a thought. “I think, you know, he called you a bug not because he wanted to crush you under his shoe. He just couldn’t understand why you did it, why you did it to him.”
Lyrou held herself to the beam by two fingertips and her tippy-toes. “It’s not because he’s a bad man. Garin isn’t a bad man. And it’s not the easy reasons men imagine that center the husband and derive from adolescent, pornographic insecurities; I wasn’t man enough, I couldn’t sexually please her, she wasn’t attracted to me, I got boring for her, her friends corrupted her against me, we didn’t have enough time together, I didn’t help with chores and the kids.”
Tom nodded, holding his camera and taking more shots. “But those are reasons women themselves cite, sometimes.”
Lyrou shook her head. “Maybe to throw the blame back at the man. But these are all things that happen in this marriage or that, and they might be agitating factors… but the main regret a woman has isn’t even all that exclusively feminine. It’s something men feel too in marriage, and it often really is more about her than him. She recognizes she gave up another road she’ll never know, and the mundane married mom life, while fulfilling and precious, can also seem so… containing and restricting.”
Tom regarded her with his own eyes, not the camera lens. “And so you had the anti-onistic impulse to run off into the night like a wolf.”
Lyrou repositioned herself on the beam, her hair hanging over her eyes. “Mm-hmm. Like being a wolf locked in a kennel when it could be prowling the forest mountains tasting not dry pellets, but warm blood, wind in its fur, the growling-howling life under the full moon, no master.”
Tom had become too concerned she would slip off and hurt herself. “Now come down. Careful.” He set his camera down on the ground and reached both arms up to help her descend.
In truer dark now, she fumbled for him, sliding down him body-to-body, his hands gliding along her ribs then up into her armpits, until her foot crushed his little toe. He pulled his foot and kicked over his camera with a heavy plastic crankling. “Oh!? I caused you to break it!?” she worried.
Tom ignored it while he checked her up and down. “It’ll be fine. Are you OK?”
“I’m OK, Tom,” she assured him. Taking his hand. “No more late deductions. Let’s get to your place so you can get me submitted before midnight.”
“I’m not in such a hurry as you. Suddenly, you don’t like it here?” Tom gestured at the scene, now immeasurably scarier than it was just a moment ago under different hues and lighting.
“The bridal sheer on violence is especially thin here, the darker it gets. In these shadows, I see her teeth too clearly.” Lyrou quoted him as he led the way, stepping backward.
“Good. She is here. That’s true. But she was here in the daylight just the same, and she’ll prowl wherever we leave to. Better would be if you saw her clearly everywhere, always. Tell me, what would you do if I were a bad man and I approached you just like this…” Tom took on his posture and persona as Maestre Tom.
Lyrou hurriedly produced from her purse the multipurpose Swiss gadget Vincent had gifted her in Paris. She fumbled with it to get the taser to zap. “I’d do… this.” And she got it to spark and sizzle.
Tom shook his head, still nearing. “Fatal mistake.”
Lyrou did her best to wield it, but in precisely the second she lunged at him to make contact with his shoulder and stun him, he weaved, bobbed, and took her by her wrist in one lightning-fast movement. He held her arm straight up over her head so strongly, so aggressively that she had to come up on her tiptoes not to have her shoulder yanked out of the socket. “Oh, Tom!”
Tom slid his hand up and over her hand, like a de-glover that might pull the skin off her bones, and out of her grip came the gadget. Tom had it now, and holding Lyrou against himself with one arm tight around her waist, her opposite wrist locked under his armpit like she were in a straitjacket, he asked, “Did your husband give you this?”
Lyrou could barely expand her ribs to breathe. “Non. Someone.”
He breathed in her ear. “I would’ve expected pepper spray.”
“Not since years ago spraying as much on myself as the creep.” Lyrou flexed her body against his, but there was no give in him; he was rock solid around her.
Tom whispered, his voice a deep, low growling baritone, “Next time, conceal it; blade, spray, taser, whatever. The creep should feel before he ever sees it and wonder in shock what the pain is. Then, before he can decide what to do, you sting him again and again and again.”
Lyrou poured out every box in her mind in search of a solution, she tried stepping on his foot as she did when climbing down, but she couldn’t generate enough stomp for it to hurt, she tried biting him but in the way he seized her she couldn’t touch her mouth to his skin without him shifting away, she pinched about his core but it could only tickle, and she felt so helpless… and wet. “Having failed to surprise, am I done for, Tom? What would a bad man do to me now?”
As if he already knew how it worked, he switched the function on her nifty device intuitively, and out sprang the blade. “A bad man would do this…” and he poke-touched the point of it to her neck.
With the point scraping her skin, her carotid artery pulsing against it, she confessed. “I’m embarrassed. To be so helpless, it’s embarrassing.” Lyrou let her body slacken and surrender in his embrace, this spring-loaded trap of muscle she’d been captured by.
Tom tossed the nifty implement down like litter, and his same hand seized Lyrou around the back of her neck, and he pressed her down onto her knees. “Unbuckle me.”
It was so dark now she had to feel for his belt to find it, but she undid it as he unzipped. There came his cock, and he pressed her face into it. His warm skin ran along her lips laterally rather than enter directly, and she tongued his shaft to his base. Her hands found his waistline, and she pulled his pants down to his knees. Then he took her head by his left hand and guided his cock into her mouth with his right. She gagged a bit with each attempt to fit more of him in. “Ng-ng-ng.”
Tom stood, splaying his feet and arching his back, gently gyrating into her face. She sucked him to the sound of the city at night, police sirens, drunks shouting in the distance, the rumble of the train passing overhead, passenger jets humming faintly, and he readied his camera. No flash, Tom timed each click-whir to capture her face, as she consumed his cock, with the naturally occurring passing light of vehicles and rail. And then, feeling himself ready to release, set it to burst mode, a rapid, continuous click-click-click as his warm, salty meat filled her mouth and her eyes turned up to peer into the lens. Tom pinched her coiled bangs and parted them like curtains to get a clear view of her face taking his cock in, “Now this is the better angle to photograph you; not up high but below.”
Lyrou wrapped one hand around the base of his shaft, jacking him, and did her best to slurp on the greater part of his rod. She kept her opposite hand on his abdomen to slow his thrusts. Tom commanded, “Stand. Turn.”
She stood and turned, leaning into a chain-link fence, and allowed Tom to take her from behind, sticking her fingers through, shaking and rattling the cold metal mesh. A breeze cooled her smeared saliva on her cheeks as Tom released inside her pussy. “Take it, take it.”
And she was in ecstasy to be there, doing that instead of anything else she should or could be doing. “Please, more please.”
He took a bundle of her hair in his hand and pulled her up straight, pressing her so hard into the flexing metal fence that it left a cross-link skin imprint across her face. He fucked her from behind, but now with an upward force that lifted her feet from the ground and suspended her against the fence, “Someone will stroll by and see you like this,” he warned.
She moaned, “I don’t care… mmmn… let them.” and the internal pressure of his cock rubbing the same spot, the total sensation of vaginal fullness, the stretch, her feet dangling, being pinned, and the rocking motion put her over the edge; contractions, euphoria, heaven.
⚜
Noon Thursday, February 27th, 2025
Home alone, Lyrou had finished reading her English poetry guide and followed every exercise therein, filling a notepad with poems she didn’t share, but was proud of unto herself. Reading through them for a review, her thoughts drifted to the subjects of her poems.
Going through her poetry, she came to a tender one she had written about Garin, but it reminded her of when they first moved into this house, going way back to the time before Penny was born. The old dishwasher had broken down. Garin and Lyrou had argued a little about whether it was worth fixing or if they should just buy a new one. Garin defied Lyrou by ordering the required part from a supplier in Guangzhou, researching how to fix it himself, and did just that. He didn’t say a word and allowed her to find it was fixed by coming in one evening to hear it running. She was thankful, but regretted that he had to “mess with it” as much as he did, and that they wouldn’t need a new dishwasher just yet. Later, he recruited Alan to help him assemble an outdoor grill in time for July 4th. Another time in the driveway, he had Penny tighten the lug nuts to a tire, cross-iron in her tiny hands, that he and Alan had changed, because she had watched them and wanted to do something helpful too.
Tucking her notepad away in her drawer, she drifted through the house. She stopped and stood in the center of the dining room, the noon light spilling through the windows, casting a soft glow across the table where her unfinished mosaic lay. The pieces were placed across the surface like fragments of a long lucid dream, colorful stones, glass, and gems arranged in a pattern she’d worked on for over a year. It had started as a project to fill the empty hours, a way to carve something out of the silence of the house, to give her hands something meaningful to do, like her green-thumbing and yoga. It had been fun, very fun. She didn’t like to think that the fun in this project had since evaporated, but lately it had.
She moved slowly around the table, leaning in at odd angles, trying to see her mosaic not as an artist but as someone else might, someone distant, someone without the intimate connection to each tiny piece. The faces in the mosaic, the twisting of the figures, the emotion it tried to capture, were they right? Her eyes narrowed, and she sighed deeply. It didn’t ease the pressure that had built in her chest.
Penny was just like Lyrou! Penny had knocked a porcelain vase over while running through the house, breaking it. It had been a quick cleanup, but Alan had teased her for her clumsiness for days. Alan’s teasing stopped, though, when Penny had fractured her collarbone at the playground. She had blindly walked behind another girl on a swing and got knocked over onto her shoulder. Lyrou had rushed to the school to pick her up, and Garin met them both as she went in for an X-ray. Penny had worn an arm sling for a couple of weeks, and everyone had pitched in to make her more comfortable. Lyrou’s heart warmed to see Alan helping Penny do everything from putting toothpaste on her toothbrush to getting her shoes on in the morning. Lyrou didn’t say anything so as not to make Alan feel sappy and ruin it.
She recalled how some years ago, many years before Garin had discovered the other, hidden Lyrou, there was a much smaller Alan and tiny, tiny Penny who had started watching a trending kids’ animated series. The family had talked about the silly, funny plot at dinner, and Garin impersonated the characters’ voices to the children’s laughter. Lyrou was privately concerned that the actors voicing the enchanted characters were known for some adult roles. Lyrou didn’t tell them this; she thought bringing attention to the fact that the female fairy character was voiced by an actress who’d been fully nude in several movies and TV series would put bad ideas in their heads.
There was one time Garin and Lyrou had opted to order out. The kids were thrilled, and everyone enjoyed a relaxed pizza & mozzarella sticks delivery dinner on the couch. While Lyrou expressed a slight undercurrent of guilt about not cooking, they’d all appreciated the ease and simplicity of it. The family had decided to take a spontaneous walk around the neighborhood that evening to “burn off the pizza calories,” according to Garin. The four of them had enjoyed the calm as they passed familiar streets, stopping to say hello to a few neighbors.
Memories! Alan had a small part in a school play, and Garin and Lyrou had attended, Lyrou especially beaming with pride as their son had performed. Though it had been a relatively low-key event, they’d still felt a strong sense of accomplishment. Neither of them mentioned how few lines Alan was entrusted with, but Penny made fun of his role and costume. “Were you a butler or were you like the hero’s sidekick? Was your power not doing or saying anything?!” to which he told her, “You can read the graphic novel, it doesn’t have a lot of big words,” and she quieted down. So returned the sibling teasing.
Alan had, when he turned 12, gone by himself to the men’s barber and gotten a haircut that had turned out much to his delight, to mirror a rapper he worshiped. The fresh fade, dead-straight lines, the lethally sharp corners… it almost looked drawn on. Lyrou lamented that he was much cuter before, but Alan couldn’t stop posing in the mirror. She didn’t say so, but he looked remarkably mature, in an immature teenager way. She laughed at herself, thinking that if she can’t handle a new haircut on Alan, then she really better brace herself for his imminent first facial hair.
Memories! Garin had read an article about student debt growing to astronomical proportions in the US. It had prompted Garin and Lyrou to have a talk at this same dining room table about saving for Penny and Alan’s college tuition. Her maman had suggested that her children go to Paris for university. Alan swore that he’d join the French Foreign Legion. Were his FPS computer games luring him? Should she yank them from him?
On a sunny but cool Saturday afternoon, Garin and Lyrou had packed a picnic basket, a couple of wooden sleds, and headed to the park with Alan and Penny. The kids had run off to sled down the hill together with several other neighborhood kids they recognized, while Garin and Lyrou had chatted quietly in the car, with heated seats and a nice view out the windshield of the kids from where they parked. They didn’t chat about anything deep, mainly pointing out what they could see with their own eyes; ‘Alan is going up now, Penny is talking with friends at the top of the hill, Alan is going to try and go up and off the ramp the boys made’ and so on. Garin and Lyrou had done well by their children. Hadn’t they?
Was that Garin gone?
She couldn’t look at the fucking mosaic anymore. Clenching her teeth, a surge of anger, frustration, and hysteria so fierce she couldn’t contain it broke. Her fists balled at her sides, her knuckles turning white as she leaned in closer to the mosaic, the reflection of her clenched jaw and furrowed brow staring back at her from the scattered stones. Without warning them, her children’s faces in stone, she brought both hands down hard on the table, pounding the mosaic as the pieces scattered in all directions, small shards of color bouncing away from the table’s edge, tinkling across the hardwood floor.
The impact wasn’t enough. She needed more. She needed it gone, the satisfaction of its destruction flooding her chest with a strange, terrible release. With a grunt of exertion, she lifted the heavy slab, feeling its weight in her arms, its fragility in her grip. She turned it in her hands and, with a sharp movement, flipped it over. The sound of the break was thunderous, a deep, echoing crack that split the mosaic down the middle. Pieces flew off in all directions, scattering far and wide, some tumbling under the table, some slipping into the dark corners of the room, and a couple even disappearing into the vent.
For a moment, the room was silent. Her chest heaved as she paused, her eyes wide, her body trembling. The relief lasted only seconds. It was quickly replaced by a wave of regret, sharp and cutting. The broken pieces, the fragments of her family, of her love, of her life, lay scattered in disarray before her.
If she couldn’t look at it intact a minute ago, she found now that neither could she bear the sight of her mosaic broken and destroyed. She’d ruined it. She’d ruined everything. The thought pressed down on her, and a lump formed in her throat. The weight of it was suffocating. Lyrou’s hand came up to her hair, smoothing it down as she tried to collect herself, breathing in deeply, attempting to regain control. Her hands trembled as she dropped to her knees, her body bowing forward in an almost desperate motion. She crawled to the scattered pieces of the mosaic, rent asunder, collecting them one by one, then scooping them up in her cupped palms, whispering apologies to the empty room. She’d fix it. She’d rebuild it. She’d rectify it. She’d make it right again, piece by piece. It would be beautiful, just as it was meant to be.
⚜
