“He had an art; his art was to lure you into his opera. So you would obsess all day about him. Oh, I just wanted so bad to make jazz with my feet!”
She began to bang the wall above the bed with her knuckles. She stood up, the palms of her hands flat on the stucco in poundings, claps, claps, claps, the claps that hard soul flamenco knows about in guitar strums, in seated respect to the rough seas inside a thorax and larynx and windpipe. She howled large hair-charged notes. She pounded more flat palms on the wall. “That,” she said. “With my feet.”
She went to the gauze curtain, looked out on the late afternoon waning of the Mediterranean sunshine. Turning to face Johnny on the bed, she said, “He knew he had to ruin my legs. He knew he had to come after my lower body.
“They like to do it
