Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion by A.R. Taylor (beach read .TXT) 📕

“Sounds creepy,” she said with a grimace, and then let her hand glance off his leg.

“I don’t really care where you live, David.” Outside in the parking lot, when normally she would have lured him to her motel room, instead she kissed him on the cheek.

David’s final farewell to Helena turned out to be similarly perplexing.  Granted, he had gone out with her only three times since their meeting at some deplorable dinner party filled with her U.C.L.A. colleagues in the specialty of Finno-Ugric linguistics.  Tall, thin, with a weary Modigliani kind of face, she had stared at him across the baked Brie.  “I aam Helena from Hun-ga-ry,” she had said, sounding an awful lot like Dracula.

In preparation, he had begun drinking vodka as soon as he arrived at her neo-Gothic apartment.  This worked, so much so that he couldn’t adequately frame the parting words he had crafted.  Helena only seemed to register his pain without absorbing the fact that he actually planned to flee the state, and responded by launching into her own tormented personal history.  He lay sprawled on her couch while her story floated over him like Liszt – in fact, he thought he heard her mention Liszt, although he was not a close relative.  When he awoke, it was light, and she was passed out beside him.  She opened her eyes as he leapt up.

“Goodbye,” she said, snuggling into the couch cushions, smiling – so apparently she was less than heartbroken, if she understood what was going on at all.

Back at home, David found himself wanting to phone each of his women with some sort of heartfelt pleading. Finally, though, in terse, straightforward e-mails he lied once again to Valerie, he lied to Cosmo, even to Helena, telling them how crucial the Larson Kinne Institute of Applied Physics was to his scientific future, when in fact he knew little about it. In the service of these lies he became eloquent, hyper-rational, as if he could fix his life by talking about it.  Worse yet he lied to himself, thinking he could live a solitary outdoor life, perhaps hunting, maybe fishing.  He would wear hiking boots and down vests while chopping logs for the wood stove, and soon enough he would go to sea.  Even if he met a gorgeous woman who offered to play the mandolin by the fire, then fuck his brains out every night right after they’d eaten her home-baked blackberry pie, he vowed to say no.

A. R. Taylor writes fiction and non-fiction, was head writer on two Emmy award-winning series on public television, and performed at the Gotham Comedy Club. She taught at Oregon State University, and that experience forms the background for Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion. To learn more visit www.lonecamel.com.

Publication Date: 01-23-2014

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