Beautiful Blemish

Beautiful Blemish

Stories by Kevin
Sampsell

CONTENTS

Gloves

Donna
Basinki
(1970-2004)

Locker Room

Skip the
Walker

New Suburban Lit

Stuck

Safety

Personal

Blowjob

Legs

Factory People

Discourage

Earotica

Beautiful Blemish

I Heart Frankenstein

What She Can Do

The Plant

Options

Photo of Deformed Fingernail

On Your Bed

My Old Man

The Birthday Present

Some of these stories have previously appeared (some in slightly different forms) in the following publications and web sites, to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made: Gloves in
Little Engines
; Donna
Basinki
(1970-2004) in
Gobshite
Quarterly
; Locker Room on
Lime Tea
; New Suburban Lit on
Pindeldyboz
; Stuck in
Anodyne
; Safety and Legs on
Suicide Girls
; Personal on
Del Sol Review
; Blowjob in
Bridge Magazine
; Discourage on
The American Journal of Print
;
Earotica
in
Sniffy
Linings 3
, I Heart Frankenstein in
2 girls review
and on
Reinventing the World
; What She Can Do in
The Organ Review of Arts
; The Plant in
Eye-Rhyme
; Options on
Identity Theory
; Photo of Deformed Fingernail and On Your Bed on
5_Trope
; and My Old Man in
Northwest Edge: Fictions of Mass Destruction
.
    
 

Gloves

It was 23 degrees outside. He would walk to work and find single abandoned gloves all over the city sidewalks and streets. There
were never a pair
. But he still picked up every one. At his office he'd lay them out on his desk.
A leather one.
A gray wool left-hander.
A knitted orange and black one.

    
He thought maybe he should put up a sign in the window: SINGLE HAND GLOVES FOR MATCHING or LOST AND FOUND GLOVES.

    
On the streets he'd look at people's hands, making sure they were wearing both gloves. Maybe some people wore just one glove these days. Maybe a music star is doing that again.
People.
Sheep.

    
It was getting colder every day and still there were gloves discarded everywhere. They'd end up on his desk.
A laundry sorter's nightmare.
No matches. No pairs. Twice he found identical gloves- normal leathery driving gloves, but both right-handed. He tried to wear one on his left-hand.
A little ingenuity.
The hand looking deformed, twisted.
People staring at him through the window.
What are you doing?

    
Once he saw a clean white one in the street, waiting to get ran over.
To destroy itself.
White trash.
It was the kind he imagined a rich attractive woman would wear. It reached the elbow. Inside a fancy restaurant her date (husband?) would take off her big warm coat. She would stick her arm out in front of her and peel the glove off like panty hose.
Then the other.
Foreplay.
Peeling away cloth until you reach the skin.
Touch, sweat,
enter
.
Intercourse.
Then the man peels the last thing off to complete the ceremony. Into the toilet and pissed on (the wrapper though, still beside the bed, on the floor).

    
He looks too closely at people on the streets.
A glove, or gloves, hanging out of their coat pocket.
One or two?

    
Maybe you should come to my office...

    
They had all been used at some time. It was obvious. Some were even worn out to nearly nothing. But he could never throw them away. All sizes. Hands warm inside them.
Now cold.
Where were they?

    
A thick telephone book is split open on his desk. He is looking under Amputee. He finds a number for amputee assistance. He thinks he is clever.
A genius, a saint.
He pictures the smiling faces as they try on each glove
(Merry Christmas).
 
He talks to an older-sounding woman for a few minutes on the phone. Her voice is dry, shaky, like someone sitting on a vibrating bed. She says something he doesn't understand, a question. He begins to shout at the telephone. He doesn't know what to do.
Be patient. Learn some manners.
He says the wrong thing and she hangs up on him. He feels angry for a moment and then thinks of her- an old lady with no hands holding a telephone with her curved stump. He feels ashamed.

    
There was one week he collected over thirty gloves. Every time he went out.
Sometimes for no reason.
Eyes staring at the sidewalk.
And if someone walked by, it startled him, and he stopped in his tracks and watched the stranger's hands.

    
He feels like something unfair is happening to him. He wants to find out who is responsible. He has never seen anyone actually drop a glove before. Gum wrappers.
Cigarettes.
Maybe it was a trick.
Magic.
Presto-Change-o!

    
If he knew how to set up surveillance cameras he probably would.
Especially by the library steps.
At least one every day there.
Why didn't anyone else pick them up?

    
He is at his desk. A cup of coffee sits by the telephone. Steam rises from it. He is arranging all the gloves in different orders: size, fabric, color, left-hand, right-hand. A woman is standing outside the window, looking in. Her breath is thick, like fog. Covering her face,
then
clearing away... Another breath- covering, clearing... like a winter game. Maybe she is the one looking for the white glove. It is dirty. He self-consciously pulls the glove from the pile and sets it aside, so she can see it through the window. He imagines her eating dinner, the gloves hanging out of her coat pocket.
Teasing everyone.

    
She comes inside. Her hand comes at him, holding a cigarette. She wants a light. It's cold outside, she says. His eyes point at the gloves. He has noticed her naked frozen hands. She picks up two that don't match.
One purple, one dark blue.
She tries them on and he wants to cry.

    
He offers her coffee. It's hot, he says, his back speaking to her.

    
She takes a cup and sips.
Too loud (She is not the one).

    
She looks at the clock. Her hands touch the gloves on the desk. All these from outside, she says. Not a question.

    
He suddenly wants to put the gloves away.

    
She has hers. She's made her choice.

    
Now go, he thinks.

    
That night, walking home from work, he thinks he sees her. But it is someone else, a much taller female. Homeless, he guesses. She is wearing a large pair of gloves. He has never seen this kind before. He watches her for a long time as she eats something from a carry-out box. The gloves are strong, thick,
tight
. He tries to memorize what they look like, and then he prays he never sees one again.

Donna
Basinki
(1970-2004): A Case Study

(2004)

“I only like to do it if they haven’t done it to anyone before. I like to be the only one,” said Donna. “If they’ve done it before, I’m not interested. I want to be remembered.”

    
Jason, her best friend and gay roommate, sucked from a fresh cigarette and winced at her. “There are better ways,” he tried to tell her.

    
“There’s just something about the face. It’s seems too sacred to all these people. I don’t think it’s a big deal. It’s good for the skin, plus I’ve got a good face for it,” she said. When she first met Jason she thought he would be a perfect roommate, but now she thought he was too uptight. Not flaming enough.

    
“A good face for it?”

    
“Yeah,” she smiled, “I think it’s sexy.”

(1989)

What Donna liked to do was sleep with her spider. She’d have her covers pulled down and her nightshirt pulled up. Leroy, her pet arachnid, would rest on top of her belly button, sometimes slipping into it, like a cave. Her roommate kept her door shut on these nights, with a towel stuffed underneath in case the insect decided to go exploring. But it never did. It was trained surprisingly well. Her friends wondered what would happen if the spider laid eggs in her belly button. On top of her umbilicus—the doctor had done a good job with hers. She wasn’t an
outie
. It was smooth there, like a seashell. She slept on her back and never shifted. She never worried about the spider getting
smushed
. She liked to wake up half-way sometimes, the sky outside her closed window splattered with stars, and felt the legs of her pet moving up her chest—two, four, six, eight—getting ready to rest between her soft breasts, watching her face, guarding her.

(1975)

Donna didn’t like teddy bears. She decided to poison them. She said to her mom one morning in a serious tone: “I want the bears out of my room. They’ve been dead for a week now.”

    
Her mother tried to hide her shock, and said, “What do you mean by that?”

    
She took a bite of toast and said, “I poisoned them.” She swallowed and looked down. It seemed like she was about to cry or say she was sorry.

    
Her mother had all kinds of short jabbing questions she wanted to ask running in her head: Why? Who told you to do that? Don’t you like the bears? What’s wrong with you? Did your brothers tell you to do that?

    
Donna interrupted those thoughts. “They were bored with their life,” she said.

(2000)

She went to her boyfriend’s apartment on her lunch break. She had been thinking of him all morning. She kept sticking things into her mouth.

    
Blake answered the door in his underwear and a towel around his shoulder.

    
They had been going out for only a month but she knew it would probably end soon. She was the kind of person who would rather burn something down to nothing than let it end neatly and unscarred.

    
She had something planned. She was there for a reason. She even told Kelly, her competitive friend. Kelly was ten years younger than Donna, but they served all their secrets to each other like candy.

(1993)

Her mouth tasted like Band-aids. Johnny from her Economics class could taste it on his tongue. He felt like getting up to wash his mouth out but didn't want to interrupt the mood. Donna was sensitive that way. His composure was also distracted by a discovery he had made.
A small army of red hairs exiting the skin of her breasts.
She was a hairy girl.

    
When they first met she showed him photos of her family. There was the farm where they cut off chicken heads and dressed an array of brown meat and white meat. She talked fondly about how bloody she would get. He wondered if these events were what transformed her from a dusty little farmer's daughter to a fastidious medical student.

    
"My older brother said I should be careful with you," she told him. "He said I could end up tearing you in half."

    
They began kissing on his bed. He tried to lean her back, to make use of the pillows, but she wouldn't go for it. She was bigger than him by twenty pounds.
An inch taller too.
They stayed sitting up like high
schoolers
making out at a party.

(1996)

She went through a white sock phase. She would only make love to Robert if he wore his white socks pulled up to his knees. She kept hers on too.
Scrunched down.
Dirty on the bottom.
Bobbing in the air.

(1987)

Donna and her friends were celebrating the last day of school. They all met in the playground after the final bell and unpacked a duffel bag full of water guns. They chased each other in the hot sun. Most of the boys had the extra large kind that shot harder and further. One boy named Franz chased Donna down a shaded stairwell away from the others. She let him corner her and pretended she was out of water. He lifted his weapon and aimed it at her gut. She was two steps below him. He looked at her seriously and cranked the air pump. The water hit her hard in the gut. She gasped and he lifted his aim to her chest. Her red T-shirt turned maroon and then almost purple. She stuck her face out. He sprayed into her mouth and on her cheeks and then he started shaking uncontrollably. He set down his weapon and sat on the steps. She rubbed the water into her skin and went back into the sun.
    

(1979)

Donna went on a hike with her older brother Tim near a lake in
Oregon
. He told her there was a waterfall somewhere hidden in the woods. He didn’t want to admit that they were lost. Every once in a while he threw a rock into the wilderness and acted as if he didn’t do it. What was that, he would say, acting scared. She wasn’t afraid but she wished she had her gardening spade for protection.

He told her to wait on the trail while he climbed over to a little stream to pee in. Holy shit, she heard her brother say as he was making the sound in the water. He wasn’t supposed to swear in front of her. He was eighteen and always getting in trouble. Don’t look, he said. Of course she looked. Just down the stream she could see a naked woman
Her
brother zipped up and walked carefully up the wet rocks.

I
wanna
see, Donna said. She ran down the trail to get a better look. Her brother got there before her and told her to stay on the trail. The woman was dead and discolored.
The color of the sky above them.
Tim didn’t notice that Donna had climbed down until she was there, by his side. Should we help her? Donna asked.

We can’t, said Tim. It’s too late.

Can we look at her?
asked
Donna. It was the first grown-up woman she had ever seen naked. They crouched there, with long sticks in their hands, and looked at the body until the sky started to darken.

That night, she dreamed that they buried the body and somehow that brought her peace.
Though the hardest part was covering her face.

Someone else found the body three weeks later.

(2004)

She woke up in the hospital. Two of her brothers and her mother were there beside the bed, their eyes red and wet. They were talking, but it sounded like mumbling. A doctor came in and one of the brothers yelled at him. The doctor turned some knobs on the machine behind the bed.

The veins in her arms felt full of cement and then air, and then cement again.

The brothers moved to each side and held her hands. Her mother stood away from them, facing the window, not looking at anything.

    
“Donna,” said a voice. “What happened to your face?”

    
She squeezed each brother’s hand. She felt them lifting her. She turned her head as it was about to hit the light.