The transformation itself was easy enough; what he had not anticipated was the guilt…the pain. Having become her shadow, he discovered that he was still of his own mind, which created insoluble problems. Her betrayals, for example, made him hesitant, stubborn with anger to the point of refusing to be one with her as she paced on a sun-lit corner or a secluded beach, or even at night in the harsh light of some cheap bar. There were other, better times, usually in the privacy of her room where she sat in the glare of a lamp, staring at herself in the mirror, touching her face and sometimes her naked breasts as she talked softly to the glass image. Once, he watched her draw, with her hand cupped palm-down, the imaginary roundness of the abdomen as it might appear in the eighth or ninth month of pregnancy. Then she sat motionless, lovelier than he ever remembered as he forgot himself and moved slightly towards her. It gave her such a scare that he froze and could hardly bring himself to follow when she rose suddenly and left the room, rushing down a flight of stairs, stumbling so he thought surely she would fall head first, dead at the bottom. After more than one such incident he soon grew weary of his pointless ruse. One evening as she walked due west, he lingered, slowing his pace, stretching like a thread of dark syrup until he detached himself forever. She was going to meet the last of her lovers, a slick-haired, sick Bulgarian poet who had lured her with his erotic poems and what, to her, would always be a mysterious flow of Swiss francs.

The Power of Speech

The fox jumped over the fence and the dog ran away with the gun.
     Pissed, the hunter squatted and drank from a bottle of Jim Beam to keep the chill at bay. Suddenly a shot resounded from far out, down by the creek. Pretty soon the dog came running back, panting so hard he could hardly talk. When he finally got his breath he explained how the fox had tried to cross the creek at the low spot where the tree roots hang exposed by erosion.
     The hunter shook his head yes, he knew the spot. As a kid he had piled the very rocks the fox had tried to cross.
     "That's where I shot him," the dog said, "dead in the water."
     "But why," the hunter asked, "why did you do such a thing? In all of our years together you've never done such a thing."
     At first the dog acted as if he might not answer, gazing instead at the ground and then out towards the creek where the fox lay bleeding in the muddy water.
     "It was something you said this morning as we started out," the dog said.
     "Something I said?" The hunter looked puzzled and tried to think back four hours, more or less.
     Neither one spoke for a moment as crows talked to each other in the sky above, then the dog walked over and nuzzled the bottle. The hunter cupped his left hand and poured a few drops. The dog lapped it up.
     "Remember now?" the dog asked softly.
     "Yes, now I remember," the hunter said as he began to laugh, joined by the dog, until the two of them were rolling over the frozen ground.
     Moments later, having regained the power of speech, the hunter asked the dog what he had done with the gun.
     "Forget the fucking gun," the dog said, and the hunter fell back again convulsed with laughter, holding his face as if it might split.
     That evening, when they tried to tell their story to the hunter's mother, she refused to believe them and turned the TV on instead, though not before scolding the two of them for wasting her time with such an outrageous fabrication.
     "Foxes are not that dumb," she said. "The truth is you lost your gun, didn't you. The two of you out there drinking in the woods when you should've been hunting and you left that damn gun god only knows where. I work all day, come home at night, and this is what I have to put up with. Well, no more! If you can't put a little meat on the table—and obviously you can't now that you've lost your gun—then you'd damn well better start looking for a job—a real job that pays real money in a real world!"

Two years ago, at age 57, Roger Pfingston retired from teaching English and photography and now has more time to write poems and make photographs. He's received an NEA Fellowship for poetry, two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards, and a Teacher Creativity Fellowship from the Lilly Endowment to explore alternative processes in black and white photography. His poems and photographs have appeared in New Letters, Orion, The Laurel Review, American Photo, Shots, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Sun and Ontario Review. New poems are scheduled to appear in 5 AM, Southern Poetry Review, WordWrights, Rhino and Chiron Review.

 Roger

 Pfingston