Two Terrible Ladies: A Short Story

Previous short stories featured on The Toast can be found here.

They hadn’t expected sleaze at their romantic getaway, but sleazy it was. The motel’s parking lot was crazed with cracks, and loose tiles flapped from the carport roof. Huddled into the shelter of a payphone, a woman with fried blonde hair was cursing into the receiver and blowing jets of smoke out of her nose. Claudia and Leonie looked at her, and they looked at each other. “Well, this ought to be good,” Leonie said.

The key to their room jammed in the lock at first, then they were greeted by an unpleasant smell wheezing out of a vent in the wall. Because they had been dating for a very short while, this was all tremendously funny. Leonie lay back on the bed, looking very sweet and winsome with her tawny hair fanned around her face, cheeks flushed, her blue eyes set off prettily by her blue dress. Claudia rested her head on Leonie’s stomach and let the little wavelets of happiness come.

Leonie sighed. “I feel absolutely filthy.”

“I don’t mind at all,“ Claudia assured her.

When Leonie smiled, her pupils dilated like a cat’s. While she repaired to the bathroom, Claudia burrowed into the snarl of bedspread. Among the floral mayhem of its pattern, which looked like gigantic cabbage roses hurling themselves against smaller cabbage roses, she discerned a menstrual bloodstain, a labial Rorschach blot. She reflected that the pattern must have been chosen to mask just such stains.

Leonie emerged, mouth foaming with toothpaste. “I’m running us a bath,” she said temptingly.

But the water was cold.

Some hours later they staggered out of a bar and into the thick seaside mist, drunk as lords. They could not really see where they were going and did not especially care, since they were getting excited by pointing out how dangerous a match they likely were for one another. They began a rapid exchange of the many awful things they had done to past lovers.

“Opened mail!” Leonie said.

“Cut up clothes!”

“Read diary!”

“Slashed tires!” Claudia said. She had been going to say something worse but changed it just in time.

“You realize if we stay together, we’ll both end up in prison!” Leonie said gaily. Which was not quite true; only one of them would. They came upon a pole festooned with streamers of yellow CAUTION tape, and Leonie tied one in a jaunty bow around her neck. Claudia bandaged her wrist with another. Joining hands, they stumbled off the curb.

When they rounded the next corner, their eyes were dazzled by klieg lights. A circus was packing up for the night behind the civic center, filling the loading docks with heaps of reeking sawdust. An ill-tempered-looking woman strode by them, flicking a whip against her boot. She was followed by a black terrier, who leapt expertly into the cab of a horse trailer bearing the legend THE SVITLANDERS. That must be Mrs. Svitlander, horsey people are always ill-tempered, thought Claudia.

The ladies peered into the windows of the Svitlanders’ trailer. The horses’ eyes were pale blue, with a gaze that was eerily human. Their white manes crested stiffly over the white arches of their necks. One of them had a tidy little braid in its forelock. Claudia reached through the bars and tugged gently on that braid. The horse stayed still as a statue. The animal’s stillness made Claudia want to weep, though she didn’t know why.

Parked behind the horse trailer was a truck that seemed impossibly long. Claudia paused to press her ear against it and heard mysterious thumps inside. She was not embarrassed when a man in coveralls who was pushing a dolly with nothing on it asked her what she was doing.

“I want to know what’s in there,” she said.

“I got hyenas in the back, ponies in the front, and llamas in the middle,” he said.

She wondered what would happen if the barriers between the different kinds of animals should break. “Where are you taking them?”

In response he unfolded a piece of paper and stood very close so the women could read over his shoulder. The note was a nearly illegible scrawl of highway numbers and ended with the directive, “DON’T STOP UNTIL YOU SEE ‘THE INDIAN.’”

What was ‘the Indian,’ they wanted to know. He pushed his empty dolly away as though he had not heard them.

They roved the unfamiliar streets with no special purpose; at times Claudia pushed Leonie against a wall and kissed her very hard.

“You’re pretty wild,” Leonie panted.

“You drive me crazy.”

“I bear no responsibility whatsoever,” Leonie objected.

It took them a long time to find the restaurant district because the close, zagging streets of the town were disorienting, cloaked in a fog so dense it obscured church steeples and even the cozy glowing windows of apartments. When at last they found a place that was still open for dinner, Leonie discovered her wallet was gone.

“The circus man stole my wallet,” she said, remembering how very close he had stood. She let out a hiss of air between her teeth. “Those motherfuckers should be lined up against a wall and shot between the eyes.”

Claudia put an arm around her. “I’ll take care of everything,” she vowed, unsure of what she was promising.

“That’s my girl,“ Leonie said. She gulped from her flask of gin and then screwed the cap back on before proposing that they return to the motel.

Back in their room, Leonie took another nip of gin and put on a cheap red negligee. She shimmied and pranced. “Do I look like an old-time hootchy-cooch dancer?” she said. “Whoo! Hey, you’re stronger than you look.”

Soon Leonie’s negligee was torn and her moans, Claudia thought, were surely loud enough to disturb the people in the adjoining room. Claudia’s brain felt split in two: it was galloping with desire, and yet was fixed on the image of her fingers tugging on the white horse’s braid. No matter how roughly she handled Leonie’s body, she could not really touch her, any more than she could disturb the circus horse in its spooky calm. The room seemed to tilt and spin on its axis. I am mad with desire, Claudia thought.

Tags: fiction, jenna leigh evans, short stories, writing