LADY GODIVA SHOWERS IN THE DARK

by

Emily Gaskin

He perches on the showerhead, a camera eye penetrating a gap in rough tile. He wants to take a picture of the galaxy that he's in, but he's afraid of steam fogging up the lens.

He has already envisioned her: the Milky Way, a perfect spiral -- slender, symmetrical, arms like delicate white scarves wind-milling through black liquid space. He wonders if his flash will work.

The woman showers without a light. Black steam licks her naked body as her hands, silken with soap, work over her muscles and folds. She opens her lips to the water, and fire drowns her throat. It overflows her mouth, cascading down her body, snaking around her navel and down the insides of her thighs to collect in a pool at her feet, which are large and cover the drain.

He wonders why she showers alone, without him, in the dark. The camera noses further into the shadows, twisting in focus with a faint, mechanical hiss. Why enforce his ignorance? Why bind his perspective to the inside, a helpless view outward through a veil of astral dust?

Dim, watery stars drip from her lashes. The glassy walls of her eyes meet the darkness -- reflecting, oblivious. Delighting in the acoustics of inner spaces, she sings a wordless aria, the intimate lore of her body. It rings out too high, interrupted, repeating -- the idiosyncratic Doppler shifting chirps of galactic song. In the labyrinthine bones of his inner ear, her music rebounds like an infinite aural signature.

She massages balsam into her hair, twisting the lengths in her fingers. Each unfurled curl, it seems to him, measures the fate of one more world in her assembly of satellites and luminous haze. One more spinning, fetal ball clinging to a deterministic orbit in a dance beyond its comprehension.

He commits to the guesswork of focus in darkness and takes his picture -- of what, he is not sure. The flash strobes in steam and water. The camera's pupil widens.

She whirls. Her hair flares out in strands of phosphorescent pearls, and she collapses. Her song dissolving into a wail, she spirals down the drain -- a trail of foam and steam. The madness of the black hole, then silence.

The camera eye falls back. He climbs down, sweaty and satisfied. In the solitude of his darkroom, the picture develops nicely -- a map and hymn of the slender, the symmetrical, the perfect spiral. He congratulates himself, reveling in the triumph of rendering the impossible. In his hands he holds the world outside the womb.

He enlarges the photograph and frames it on the wall above their empty bed. He shrinks it down to pocket size and carries it in his wallet, thinking to show it to friends, colleagues, strangers at the bus stop -- anyone who would dare to look.

Later, exhausted, he tries to take a shower -- cold, this time, and with the light on. Water rises to his ankles. He stoops and finds the drain clogged with long, twisting hair.

§ § §

Emily Gaskin wishes she took better astrophotographs, but will settle instead for consistently good personal hygiene. Her most recent work can be found in Strange Horizons, Ideomancer, and the upcoming Dust Devil anthology.

She can be reached via email at:mleg23@hotmail.com .

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