Avery and Jacob ~ fiction by Perry Genovesi

FIFTH

So Avery plays the Serenelli, her shoulders bobbing, floating around the living room, hovering over the couch and the TV, up over the roofs of the terraced houses, through the schoolyard, soaring, fluttering, down the slide and between swing set chains. Through the tire in the backyard and then back in. Another tooth pops from the accordion and bounces onto the carpet. Jacob chokes.

FOURTH

Avery springs up and walks to the boxy television where the accordion rests. She hoists it over her shoulder, sagging under its weight. She taps brass buttons and plays, clicking a shanty with her loafers, Eliza Lee, but the accordion has problems keeping up. It’s an old snake. She can’t charm the accordion much longer and, like Jacob, it’s getting older, grayer. Last week a single plastic key fell on the carpet and she bent for it. She’d sized it with her mouth, holding it between her lips. Jacob had been stretched on the couch, his fuzzy socks resting on the arm and the saddest look in the world spread over his face. He knew he had to explain it to her now.

THIRD

Jacob scrapes streaks with his butterknife into rye toast. He unplugs the toaster and while gray cold fills the orange coils the toast zips off the paper towel.

—Plate under that! he says. —You’ll crumb everywhere. Please.

—You lied, she says, lips glistening. —I found a gray hair. Trailin down my hand.

—Is that why you were in the dog house?

Her crunches pitch. —No. One of them saw me.

His forehead wrinkles untense. —That was most certainly the dog’s fur, not yours. He dabs her lips with the paper towel while she eyes his knuckles suspiciously. —Now, he says, would you like more toast?

SECOND

They walk around a tractor tire half-submerged in the dirt. The gray, shaggy terrier whimpers outside. In his living room, an accordion – a Serenelli Cassotto – droops on top of a snowy television.

FIRST

Avery had torn a trail through the wet leaves, hunching in the doghouse corner. —Avery, he says, are you mad at me today?

—Yes, she says into her sweater’s neck.

—Ah.

—I’m not telling you why.

—Feels like everyone’s mad at me today. His head draws back and his red-pinstriped paunch folds in like a pocketknife. He grunts, his arms reaching toward her. —Come. Breakfast.

Perry Genovesi works as a librarian, serves his fellow workers in AFSCME District Council 47 and plays in the empty-arena rock band, Canid. You can read his published fiction in the Santa Monica Review, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather Review, and collected on tiny.cc/PerryGenovesi. He lives in Philadelphia, where the worst feeling is when you’re walking around and your foot collapses through some soft unknowable mass you thought was the sidewalk. Twitter: @unionlibrarian.