My good friend and cohort (along with Blake Butler) in hosting the solar anus reading series, Amy McDaniel writes stunning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Amy’s a native Atlantan, though worldly she is, having earned her MFA from the New School and spent a stint in Bangladesh. But she’s back home, with us, where we love her best. And here is a weird story, one only Amy’s imagination might dream up. Curtain.

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The party was over but the guests were just arriving. Bethany was holding a bowl of hot crab dip. “Would you like to dance?” Landers asked her.

She smiled and said, “Yes! Mind holding this? I’ll be back.”

Landers took the bowl and watched as Bethany grabbed Vick’s bulging tricep and coaxed him onto the dance floor. They waltzed for twenty minutes—forty minutes! It seemed to Landers, who gamely offered crab dip to the laughing partygoers who swirled around him, that Vick was molesting Bethany’s face with his purple eyes. It seemed to Landers that Vick was molesting Bethany’s back with his hand.

But Bethany said she’d be back, and so she was, at long last, her brow lightly glistening. She tilted forward in her heels, which made her almost a foot taller than Vick. “Thanks!” she cried, taking the long-since-emptied bowl.

Landers pursed his mouth, about to say, “You’re more than welcome.”

“You can thank me later,” said Vick, in mistaken—so it seemed to Landers—reply.

But Bethany said to Vick, “It’s a deal,” in a serious tone.

Vick was eyeing the dried remnants of dip caked on the bottom of the bowl as if deciding whether to scrape them up with his pinky fingernail. Landers thought: Vick looks at Bethany the way he looks at those desiccated flakes of imitation crabmeat.

“Mario!” said Bethany, as Mario Diaz approached them. “You haven’t met my husband, have you?”

Landers turned away as Mario shook Vick’s fat red hand.

_The following day_…

There were concerns about the wind. Two hats had already flown into the river, and the horses bucked and eyed their handlers sidelong, spooked.

A woman jumped in front of Landers. “Excuse me, Mr. Landers!” the woman said as she straightened Bethany’s parasol. It had been inverted by a particularly stiff gust. After the woman shuffled to the side, Bethany whispered, “Excuse me, Mr. Landers,” and laughed. Landers’s last name was Allen.

“Action!” said Mario.

“Every time I consider remarrying, I buy another pony instead,” said Bethany-as-Renata.

Landers-as-Silky reared his head back. “You mean to refuse him?”

“You had better not,” she said, when he tried to take a drink from her glass. “I feel a dreadful cold coming on.”

“Come, Renata, you are the picture of health.”

“Anyway he hasn’t asked.” Landers/Silky raised his eyebrows at her. She paused, “Well, he hasn’t asked nicely.”

“George will not wait around as you fritter away his time.”

“Nor should he.”

“You think you can treat him the way you treated the others—”

“You mean the way I treated you?”

“—but you can’t. George Nesbitt doesn’t need any of your money, Renata.”

“As if George Silky did!”

“We’re starting to look old, my dear.”

“You mean I’m looking old, don’t you, Silky?”

“Yes.”

Vick was somewhere near the set with Bethany’s children. He tended and tutored them, kept them in tow wherever Bethany went. They were not his children—anyone could tell that.

Surely he exacted a price for this deep servitude. A fiendish, possibly vigorous sexual price. He probably had her standing upright in specific shoes and hats while he sat on a stool and petted her heavily.

Vick was likely the kind of man who locked the bathroom door in his own house, even while brushing his teeth. He brushed his teeth seriously and privately, Landers was sure. Odds were Bethany let herself be instructed by this, and to close the door herself, but where Vick felt pride, Bethany must have felt hot shame at a long history, pre-marriage, of grooming openly in front of friends sleeping over and, later, in front of boyfriends.

Yes, Bluebeard of his toilette, was Vick. As if to say, I may be an artist, but I have principles, I uphold a standard of decorum even, and especially, in the domicile. Vick dressed well, for a painter. These uncharacteristic ways, Landers imagined, helped him to seduce Bethany. Probably other painters had met her and painted her, and then he met her and had not painted her, for he only painted gigantic oils of dead animals, and this, the not painting of her by him, had captivated her. When actually it is nothing at all not to paint someone.

Landers-as-Silky and Bethany-as-Renata stood up from the lawn chairs and mounted their horses.

“I can’t make it to dinner tonight,” said Landers/Silky.

“Line, please,” said Bethany.

“You say ‘Oh?’ as a question,” came the reply.

“Oh?” repeated Bethany/Renata.

“No.”

“Suit yourself,” said Bethany/Renata crisply. So crisply! thought Landers. Crisply but not tartly. Here was fine acting: Bethany Drake, herself so uncrisp, herself so loose and tender—delivering a line so crisply. Luckily the script called for a long contemplative pause before Landers’s next line, affording him time to admire Bethany’s exquisite, learned command of crispness.

“Renata,” he said at length, reaching unsuccessfully for her hand, “My dear. You know she means nothing—” But here he breaks off, for she has kicked her pony and gone cantering off along the river. Landers wondered how long, in the final edit, the camera view would linger on his face—which he hoped was contorted into an expression of soft regret and love—before panning over the diminishing figure of Bethany-as-Renata.

By the time Landers dismounted and joined the others, Mario Diaz was shouting angrily at or at least about the wind. Jim Voorhies was laughing and pointing at something.

“That’s funny?” said Mario, “To you?” He was still shouting but seemed more relaxed.

“Relax,” said Jim, “We’ll pick it up tomorrow.” Mario walked off, and Jim began again to laugh, and to point at the thing, vigorously now, while looking at Bethany, who was looking where he pointed.

“Oh, I see it! I do see it!” Bethany said. She laughed hoarsely.

Don’t ask what it is, Landers, said Landers to himself.

“What is it?” said Landers, looking at Bethany, who was laughing and now shaking her head.

“You explain it,” she said to Jim, momentarily sobering herself, but Jim, still laughing, shook his head, too, and waved his hand as if to shoo away the request. Landers smiled and walked away backward, almost tripping. Jim and Bethany were by now in hysterics. Landers could still hear them faintly after he closed his trailer door.

Soon enough, Landers fell into a nap. He didn’t dream as much as twitch. He twitched about Bethany’s wrist, primarily: the thinness of it, the thin gold bracelet she couldn’t possibly unclasp herself at night, the thin bracelet with one tiny, flat charm, a frog, a silent gold frog—what was that about, Landers twitched. He twitched a thousand tiny, flat, silent gold frogs, one after another like a plague, he twitched until a sharp thwack at the door roused him from his bed of frogs. The frog was he! Landers himself! How like a frog—but, oh! Bethany wore the bracelet the day they met. And yet—knowing him now as she did—he had come to be the frog, surely. What was just a whim of a purchase, a pleasingly unusual fancy, was now, surely, to Bethany, symbolic of her—beloved?—costar, of Landers—or it could be. In time.

The thwack was Tatiana, the long-time treasurer of Landers’s fan club and now his assistant. Or rather, the thwack was the heel of her umbrella, for Tatiana, who was as birdlike as her name would imply, couldn’t have the strength to thwack so loud, so rousingly loud.

Landers didn’t mind being awoken from his twitching, even by such thwacking, for Tatiana had brought takeout Thai for the two of them, as she did every night.

Landers enjoyed his tom yum soup noisily to make Tatiana feel appreciated for her efforts. She smiled appreciatively at each of his loud slurps.

“I saw glimpse of Misses Drake today,” said Tatiana in the kind of accent her name would imply. “She looking very beautiful of course.”

“If you would like to meet her…” Landers trailed off, for he did not want this.

“I wish I look as beautiful as Misses Drake when I am so old. Don’t you?” Landers and Tatiana were both twenty-two; Bethany was forty-nine. It was unclear whether Tatiana was asking whether Landers hoped to age beautifully himself, or whether he, too, hoped Tatiana would.

“Yes. But I am sure you will always be a vision.”

“My auntie say I will have skin like lizard.” Landers had heard this before. They finished their soup and had sex.

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