Whenever Miranda tries to remember Elkin’s face, it isn’t his face she sees. A face comes to her, but it’s the one she saw peering over his shoulder the last time she saw him, before his shape shifted into her memory. That shimmering disk, turned slightly away, head cocked, shining its light onto the Gulf of Mexico, that’s the image that stays with her, and she’s grateful, because she knows that once a month she’ll be able to step outside, the way she has tonight, to revisit it, hanging perfectly round, smiling at her in a way Elkin never did. She has no trouble admitting to herself that she prefers it’s face to his.

:::::

Science sucked Miranda in. The idea of it, physics, an abstraction made her fool herself into believing what she didn’t understand would somehow have an element of magic to it. The coming together of science and art. Speed up those particles. Propel them into space. Heat, then light, then boom! What did Elkin call it? The confluence of something or other.

“I’m not a theoretical,” he’d said, “Those are the guys who win the Nobel. The best us experimentals can hope for is a paper published here and there in some obscure journal in Japan or the Netherlands.”

She didn’t give much thought then to the cartons of empties stacked by his kitchen door or the chaos of crumpled papers, unopened mail and beer cans littering the inside of his truck. Since the Christmas party, two years ago, since the night when he just walked up to her, the ultimate oxymoron, a nerd with presence, a stranger with a shock of dark hair hanging over his wire rims, and said,” Eight o’clock. Monday night. Wear something nice”, she always came when he called.

“Meet me here. Pick me up there. Call A, B, C, and D. Invite them for dinner Friday night. Make the Sante Fe roast turkey.”

Elkin had been an easy trap to fall into. Someone who, for once, always seemed to know what he wanted and wasn’t afraid to ask for it. But the truth of it was, Elkin never actually asked. He gave commands. Hastily mumbled, they were a peculiar combination of ravings, part bumbling idiot and part Marine staff sergeant. It was a refreshing change, Miranda tried to tell herself, to have someone else take control.

It was the distance he kept between them that made Elkin bearable, always jetting off somewhere, to a conference in Beijing or Copenhagen. He’d never let her pack for him, preferring to shove his clothes into a suitcase, throwing his books in on top of them. “My God.” she thought at first, “The man will look like an unmade bed.”

Triple tenure, BU, MIT, FSU, that was his real passion. Other men still looked at her, she had always had a look; a cloud of strawberry blonde hair, cheekbones, legs, but she wasn’t tempted even though sex with Elkin was always rushed, or that he was dismissive when she wanted to try this or that. Physics was what turned Elkin on. Something to do with magnets. Double degrees, both PHD’s.

She continued to live up north on a spit of coastline with a view. He spent most of the year in the Florida panhandle in a house built on pilings, thirty feet above the flood plain, Apalachicola, south of Tallahassee. There was poetry in those names. Miranda liked that. She liked going back and forth between the steely green of the Atlantic and the screaming turquoise of the Gulf.

With Elkin it had been different, something else, a different kind of energy, something more than a little mean. She’d willingly given up expecting physical attraction to be the thing to carry them. Like Elkin’s magnets, they pushed away from each other, always pointing in the wrong directions. He was as smart as she was, her equal for once, or at least that was how she chose to perceive him, until she chose not to perceive him at all. After all, she had allowed him to choose her, had perpetuated an illusion, had let him think he had plucked her out of some sort of black hole, had brought her back into the light. But what was real was this: she stayed with him because she knew, when the time came, he would be painless to give up.

:::::

Now all she has left are his dogs. She snatched them the last morning after Elkin left for the laboratory, two Australian Blue Heelers, the bitch still limping from the night Elkin forgot to latch the back of the truck and drove off, leaving the poor thing tumbled out onto the highway.

3 a.m., he woke her up, crying into the phone, “I lost one of the dogs. Come now. Fly down tonight. You can’t? Then fly down tomorrow. I need you. I need you here now.”

It wasn’t the dog shit, or the dirty sheets or the goo congealed on the kitchen counters when she got there. It wasn’t the blackout drunks or the night he showed up wearing a bathrobe and nothing else. It wasn’t the Mardi Gras party, in a grove of trees hung with Spanish moss, when he fell off the dock then clung to her, soaking wet, for the rest of the night like some sort of baby fixated on it’s mother. It was the suitcase.

It was the suitcase he’d brought back from Berlin. It was the tidily folded pants and shirts. It was the perfectly paired socks. It was the underwear, whiter than it had ever been. It was the whiff of perfume on the monogrammed hankie she’d never seen before. She rented a car, stole the dogs and drove north the morning after one last night of smiling sweetly and winking over his shoulder at the man in the moon.

:::::

“Where the fuck are my dogs?”

“Taking a permanent vacation,” was all she said before hanging up on him.

:::::

At the supermarket Miranda bought three tins, all peas. Carefully she steamed the labels off, admiring the look of the naked cans, the way the ribbed silvery metal caught the light. She was selective in her choice of typeface; Bauer Bodoni, so elegant with it’s hairline thins and bold thicks. Her choice of colors; orange, lavender and fuchsia bordered by dusty green. When the three new labels rolled out of the laser printer, looking as professional as if they’d been printed in the thousands, they read:

Matter
Anti-matter
It Really Doesn’t Matter

Miranda knew they would make Elkin laugh.

She waited another week before she sent the water, three bottles packed in Styrofoam peanuts. The labels were brilliant:

Water
Heavy Water
Water Over the Dam

She knew Elkin would be sure he was home free. By now the cans and the bottles she had FedExed to him would be prominently displayed on his desk at FSU or behind it on his credenza.

“Full professors,” Elkin had told her proudly, “rate credenzas to match their desks.”

:::::

By the time the third package arrives Miranda knows Elkin will smile when one of his students wrestles the unwieldy box into his office. He’ll be wearing his khaki shorts, a plaid shirt and sandals when he calls them all in; the secretaries, the graduate assistants, maybe even the Russian Nobel prize winner next door.

He’ll pull out his pocketknife, the one she gave him for his birthday last year, a big red Swiss Army number with its built in scissors and imbedded toothpick. She can envision his hand as he draws the knife blade across the layers of packing tape until the corrugated flaps spring open.

She can almost hear him saying, “Gather around everyone. It’s another peace offering from Miranda.”

:::::

Miranda stands on the deck of her tidy house, looking out over water bisected by a shimmering trail of moonlight. When people ask she tells them she lives on an island, although that’s not exactly true. The nob of topsoil surrounded by marsh is really a drumlin, a geographic feature more accurately described as a streamlined hill or ridge of glacial drift.

So tonight Miranda is standing on her deck at the outer edge of a glacial drift grasping the railing with both hands. She tilts her head back and, for an instant, gets lost in the constellations splattered across the sky. The moon is staring at her, full face, again. It’s mid-June, hot, but not unbearable.

I’ll bet it’s sweltering in Tallahassee, she thinks, then is distracted by one of the dogs streaking by with something trailing out of his mouth.

“Come here you,” she calls out and the dog slinks back to her, “What the hell have you got there.”

She plays tug-of -war with him before he lets go of the twisted length of plastic wrap.

“Shit,” Miranda says, her fingers slip-sliding on the dog’s slobber mixed with mullet.

Elkin had caught six of them and brought them up from Florida. They’d been in her freezer for months. The one she’d fried up for dinner had been delicious, maybe a little bony, but there was plenty of meat on it.

The dogs sniff around her. The bitch sits, leaning her full weight against Miranda’s leg.

“Good girl,” she says stroking the dog’s bristly head.

It’s time, Miranda knows, to head inside to clean up. She’s left the packing tape and the bubble wrap on the coffee table in the living room. She used up most of it, wrapping it around and around and around again until it filled the inside of the box. The package will go book rate this time, a nice long ride in the summer heat. There are those who will say, it’s not enough. But Miranda knows better. She knows Elkin will know how carefully she calibrated the gesture.

She glances at the moon again. It’s grinning at her, closemouthed, inscrutable, one eye half closed. When she reaches up to brush the hair off her forehead, she pulls back from the unmistakable smell on her hand. Pressing her fingerstips to her nostrils she smiles to herself as she inhales deeply, trying to imagine the full effect it will have, the fetid odor of the five spoiled fish.

####

Joan Wilking lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Her short fiction has appeared previously in The Mississippi Review, The Harvard Summer Review, In Posse Review, The Barcelona Review, Altantic Unbound, and the Salt River Review.

She can be reached at joanwilking@mediaone.net.