Actaeon turns into a stag, I say, as I spear the fourth
oily olive on my toothpick. He saw her nakedness, which was
appalling in the way it tested the air around it.
Then come the hounds, with their complicated names, the baying
and the lurid viscera. Down this road we can scarcely follow in words,
but I always feel the clothes newly on her back, and the low
calm that comes when bad temper is spent. He is inhumanly excited.
A rack of antlers emerges from his forehead as I talk; there’s no
stuffing it back in. He doesn’t seem to notice, as he pulls me into his lap.
I sip my drink, and the bartender decants striped red straws
with their determined gaiety into a glass jar, carefully wipes down
the scarred tabletop. Humiliation, what of it? Formerly, I had a few
feathers around my mouth, but nothing in my head.
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