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| SHORT STORY |

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"She Was Beautiful, Yes"

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By Shawn Mitchell 

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The Montréal Review, April 2011

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Nu (Portrait, Photo, 76x100, 1999) by Rebecca Bournigault

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The man was browsing for a bottle of wine for his dinner date with the woman he was sleeping with when his fiancé called. She was feeling lightheaded and was walking north away from Houston on Broadway and was afraid that if she stopped moving she would have a seizure. He told her to stay on the phone, he would come and meet her, and he walked out of the store and headed south on Broadway, moving faster than the businessmen and women in their tennis shoes, it being around six in the evening and the sun already low and shining down the streets from the west and painting stripes on the buildings to the man's left as he pictured his fiancé coming to a crosswalk sign that said to stop and her walking partway into the intersection before realizing what she'd done and pausing long enough that she seized and fell and the taxis ground to a halt, or didn't, and the man couldn't have it either way so he loosened his tie and broke into a jog and weaved through the other pedestrians who glared at him or moved out of the way or would not part so he had to push through them, too breathless to excuse himself, all while gasping into the phone that he was coming to meet her and to keep moving, to walk in circles at intersections if she had to, until the air was gone from him and he only gasped but he was sure she understood even though she said nothing. He came to a stop at the intersection of 4th and Broadway where the Don't Walk sign was orange and he saw her on the other side, his fiancé listing in a circle and holding her large purse loosely down where it bounced against her knee and mumbling as a bag woman stared at her, until she came around and saw him and their eyes met and hers did not look afraid, only blank, and the light changed and he went to her and placed his hand on her elbow gently and said this way. She suggested all the ways they could get home, by taking the NQRW up to Union Square and a transfer to the L or walking up to the L at 14th or taking the 6 up to the L or hailing a taxi, and the man pictured her shaking tensely and quietly in the back of a yellow cab, her head in his lap, or her head hitting a pole on the subway as she thrashed on the floor sticky with soda, so the man said no, we should get you an ambulance so they can run the tests and she said no , she only needed to lie down and the man said no no this way, we'll take the train at 8th, and he guided her by the elbow and smiled at the confused passersby and when they reached 8th and she stumbled toward the subway stairs he said hey, no, this way, why don't we catch the L at 14th and she said sure, why not, I love a banana in the morning , and when they reached 14th and she again pulled toward the stairs he said hey, no, this way, why don't we catch it at 6th instead, and she looked a little more suspicious and asked if he had heard the news about the falafel stands uptown and he said no, he hadn't, and she said olive is a horrid color on a toddler, and when they reached 5th Avenue and she tried to continue toward the subway entrance at 6th he said hey, no, this way, let's head up to my office and she looked at him and said you've been lying to me, haven't you and he said yes, but for a good cause, and when they reached his office he guided her past the doorman who looked concerned and the man assured him she was alright, she was his fiancé, and he walked her up the stairs, his hand on her back and her almost stumbling back into him twice, and he let them into his office and guided her to the couch, where he lay her down gently as he sometimes did when they slept together and how he still planned to do on their honeymoon and he arranged the pillow under her head and she was asleep upon impact.

The man took a book that was poking out of her bag that was clearly for him, a novel narrated by a chameleon, which they had joked was his spirit animal. He sat down and tried to read, but couldn't focus, distracted as he was by her occasional twitching, so he pulled the coffee table away from the couch and waited. He looked at the time on his phone. He would be late and without wine. He hated himself for his cliché fear of the ceremony in two weeks, for his affair. The doctors could not say what exactly his fiancé's illness was, could only treat the symptoms, the seizures, the migraines, the depression, and this scared him more than anything. She had a way of falling to pieces at the right time, but he loved her. The way she drooled on her pillow, how she swore when the wind blew her hair into her mouth or she stubbed her toe or burned her finger on a pan or a taxi splashed her, her ability with the silhouette in graphic design. She could be dead by forty. He sent a message to his date, said that something came up, asked for a rain check. He would not see her again.

When his fiancé woke up she rubbed her eyes and looked around the office. She said you've always wanted to get me here, haven't you? He didn't deny it. She rolled onto her side, arched her back, and asked him to tell her a story. He told her the one about the other girl he had saved the previous Tuesday on his morning commute on the subway-he had been sitting and trying to read when he noticed in front of him, just past his book, a woman's feet in flats turning at a pigeon-toed angle in front of him and he looked up to see her eyes closed and mouth slack and her head bouncing back and forth like she was falling asleep and her forearm grasping the bar hard, and he had stood up and asked her if she needed a seat, and just then she fainted and he caught her in his arms and lowered her to the ground, and when they came in to Union Square someone ran to grab the conductor and someone else talked into the emergency comm and the man held her head as she blinked and looked up at him, and then she got up and sat in the seat and then suddenly got up again and said that she only needed to get off the train and get some air and she galloped up the stairs without saying so much as thank you, never to be seen again. He left out the parts about the coffee and the drinks and the morning light filtering through her hair. The man's fiancé smiled, cocked her head, narrowed her eyes, and asked she's beautiful, isn't she? The man said that she was, yes.

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Shawn Andrew Mitchell is currently pursuing his MFA in fiction at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale where he teaches composition and creative writing. He is a contributor to the Fiction Writers Review, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Torpedo, NANO Fiction, Prime Mincer, and Crafty Magazine. His short story "It's Not the Heat So Much As the Jelly" was anthologized in Torpedo Greatest Hits, available from Hunter Publishers in Australia. 

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Rebecca Bournigault was born in Colmar, France in 1970. She studied at the École Supérieure des Beaux- Arts in Bourges. In 2000 she was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Price and in 2002 for the Jalouse/Ricard Price. She works with a number of different media such as watercolours, video, photography and installation. In her watercolours portraits predominate. Bournigault chooses her subjects from magazines, newspapers and posters and then transposes them to a new context between fiction and reality. She lives and works in Paris.

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