Three Hybrids ~ fiction by Emma Raimondo

Spa Day

My lips are creased with smoking indents. A patchwork valentine shape. “They’re beautiful,” the aesthetician notes, “but you’re too young for static wrinkles.” Active wrinkles, she explains, are accepted at thirty. “We weren’t built to be impassive,” she winks. We cry at birth. That’s where they come in.

Snails.

Toffee colored, completely selfless. She plays a highlight reel of their work: crowning a woman’s dry scalp, plumping a hollow cheekbone, softening crow’s feet with gentle, wet kisses.

It’s their patented specialty: Snail Treatments.

I try to imagine how they’ll feel around my mouth.

Sticky. Ticklish?

I watch them make tiny figure eights with mucus.

Skating around in circles like a lazy tongue. I think of my boyfriend. Boyish pride between my legs. Thoughtless, sensual creatures.

The before and afters are startling. Working hands on the screen become baby paws. Chubby and clueless. Middle age has been destroyed. My mother, who jokes about getting a boob job. My grandmother, who got a botched rhinoplasty.

The aesthetician beams. “This is the frontier of beauty.”

I frown forever until they make me leave the office.

Homesick

The lake is fake. Man-made in the desert where he’s not from. He googled bodies of water and found only one and decided, that’s where I’ll live. The realtor gave him the last lakeside apartment. A studio on the sixth floor with a balcony big enough for a plant.

He got a gym membership: $300 a month to use the men’s spa and stop at the Russian deli on the drive home. Sit in the sauna until someone coughs, through the steam, remind him that he’s not alone. He buys mustard, a pound of pig fat, and chocolate with a baby’s scarf swaddled head on the wrapper.

His sister sent him a pitcher shaped like a fish. No note or tag attached, just a gaping mouth painted yellow. He googled “yellow fish pitcher small” and found out it came from Maine.

“They’re called Gluggle Jugs,” she told him over the phone. Sounds pornographic, he thought, thanked her, and hung up.

She lives in a farmhouse with two white borzois. They sprint across the lawn graceful as snow. When it gets colder, she takes them to an elementary school gym. Watch them race from the bleachers and think about her mother, who let her quit dance, and soccer, and singing lessons.

Her neighbor thinks they’re hot, the borzois. “Your doting boyfriends,” she calls them. “My doting sons,” she corrects, but thinks, still horny. Her Olympic twins. Well-bred, active in the community, beloved. She cooks the three of them salmon.

There are fishermen who catch nothing. They sit still by the water to give the lake legitimacy. Like, “we have always been here.”

Afternoon at the Playboy Booth

I met the guy who runs the Playboy booth at the antique shop. I blew off reading for my Russian Literature class to go hunting for issues of Playgirl. Bald, middle aged; coincidental; he watched me flip through bunnies. Eight bins of magazines and no Playgirl. He stopped me at a Christmas issue. A bunny in a red, Fair Isle sweater with her breasts cut out, and a matching knit cap topped with a pom-pom.

I thought he was an amused pervert.

“Are you looking for something specific?”

“Yeah, actually, Playgirl.” I’m friendly.

He explained that this was his booth, and that while you wouldn’t find any here, some of his competitors were known to keep some.

“Let’s go, let me show you.”

He led me to another end of the shop where “this other guy” usually had one or two for sale. This other guy had him beat by stocking issues of Topper and Carnival, too. Topless women with pigtails and giant bloomers on. None of the art direction that Playboy had. No cultural references for a discerning pervert.

I watched him work the bins. My grandmother did a boudoir shoot once. I came across photos of her in dreamy lighting, soft-focus photos in pink gauzy babydoll slips. “For a friend.” When she married my grandfather, he was missing his two front teeth.

He found one. Just one, for me. I was disappointed to see a fully clothed Ted Danson on the cover, ear-to-ear with another woman. They looked like siblings on a sitcom. Not even a hint of incest. For every 10,000th Playboy, one Playgirl was made.

I got an A in Russian Literature. I bought a magnet with a bunny on it to stick on my fridge. A woman in pigtails and a crop-top that read, Student Power.

Emma Raimondo is a writer based in Arizona. She recently graduated from ASU with a BA in English, Creative Writing.