Specimen & Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

Sanskrit characters. Her hands and feet were beautiful;
she could have modeled either for fashion photo shoots.
    If she’d been in her twenties, he’d have
assumed a rich kid runaway, high on a cocktail of drugs and booze
and sexual freedom, rejecting ambitious parents who’d expected her
to go into medicine or law, going AWOL instead to freak them out. Don’t tell me what to do with my life .
    But this woman was in her late thirties,
early forties. He’d seen her naked in the river, a full frontal.
Beautiful as she was, she was no kid. But do her hair and nails,
put her in heels with a clean dress, she’d look ready for a
business meeting. Give her a Blackberry, she’d take Bay Street by
storm, stealth or sheer sex appeal.
    She removed the fish from the fire and
handed him a piece, keeping the head for herself. He hesitated a
moment, debating the wisdom of eating an anonymous catch from the
Don River. He didn’t even trust his local fish market, and
preferred to buy from Loblaw’s, where fresh flash-frozen filets had
neither skin nor tails to betray their origins.
    “Something to drink?” She pulled on a cord
anchored to a tent-peg in her front yard. Up from the bottom of the
Don came a net bag with two bottles of wine. She selected one
that’d already been opened, pulled the cork with her sharp white
feral teeth and passed him the bottle.
    It was cool to the touch, not like it’d come
from the fridge in the LCBO, but acceptable. Stanley read the
label. A Niagara riesling, he’d had it before. Although he wouldn’t
bring it to a friend’s dinner party, the price/value equation made
it perfectly suitable for home consumption.
    They ate with their bare hands and drank
from the bottle. Stanley had never had fish, let alone wine, so
early in the day, and he chalked it up as a novel experience.
Fearing a fish-provoked gastro, however, he drank perhaps more wine
than was necessary.
    He looked at his watch. It was 7:15, by
which time he usually left home to catch the subway. He knew that
if he went now, he could jog home and shower and arrive at work
only an hour late.
    As he was thinking about that, she leaned
forward to take the bottle for another swig, and he looked right
down the décolletage of her dress. He saw her bare breasts loose
within the shadow of the fabric and he didn’t know what came over
him. He leaned forward at the same time, like a moth drawn by the
green fire of her eyes, and put his lips on hers.
    All the air went out of him and he felt
breathless and dizzy and excited at the same time, like some little
kid taking his first ride on the roller coaster. They fell sideways
onto the ground and his hands groped her, one going for a breast,
the other going for the ass that had caught his eye in the first
place, luring him into this insanity.
    She responded with an enthusiasm that
startled him. In moments she had the better part of him out of his
running shorts. Wary of being caught in flagrante delicto ,
even though Martha was now at the airport, and Isabel on her way to
work, he inched toward her makeshift dwelling as she clung to him,
her mouth fastened on his neck like a remora, her hand fist-full of
his manhood.
    Inside the shelter was a sleeping bag on a
piece of foam, and it was on this flying carpet that Stanley was
transported to heaven. In moments they were completely naked, and
entwined together like snakes in a fever. Her skin was hot, her
body muscled, her molten core as tight and buttery as a teenage
prom queen. After half an hour, Stanley let out a groan that could
have been heard all the way downtown, and collapsed beside her in a
spastic post-orgasmic heap.
    He awoke an hour later with a headache, his
mouth tasting like a fish drowned in a barrel of cheap wine. For a
moment he wasn’t sure where he was. Or wasn’t sure if he wanted to
know where he was. He felt for his penis to make sure it was still
there. From what he remembered, there’d been a terrific struggle,
and he