Dove of the Back Streets

On the morning of her fifty-fifth birthday Katrina Webern woke to the voices. She had endured a long silence, long enough to despair of ever hearing them again. One loses the voices as she ages, my dear, she imagined her mother saying, tapping her daughter’s forearm with a fat finger of admonition. If her mother had lived long enough to instruct her in such matters. Katrina’s seven dogs and nine cats fretted around the house, wanting food and attention. Never mind. She lay on her back on top of her big brass bed, listening to the voices. Thank God, she had oiled the ceiling fan. It stirred the stifling humid air of January with quiet efficiency. Though she sweated she was not tremendously uncomfortable, and nothing distracted her from the perfect pleasure of the voices. The normal sex hunger of morning was there, as constant as money was short. But neither the name nor the face of Douglas Fairbanks Rodriguez occurred, just then, to torment her. She luxuriated in the voices.

As was her custom, she converted what she heard into a story: A family was traveling by sleigh through the Black Forest. The tinkle of the sleigh bells was muffled, the horses snorted in the cold, the runners sliced the crisp snow. Dr. Webern, good soul, was on his way to attend to a medical emergency in a remote village. Because it was Christmas Eve, he took his family along. When he was done with his business, they would stop at an inn he frequented and drink mulled wine with cinnamon, toasting the birth of their savior and the vanquishing of evil. Swaddled in wool in the sleigh, in awe of the untinctured black surrounding them, a young girl rode in her mother’s lap. There was no difference in what the girl saw eyes open, eyes closed. Around her the voices ran like water, the individual words blurred to sounds of comfort and reassurance, bass and baritone and soprano noises in patterned harmony such as the quiet gods made among themselves talking over the shape of the universe they were about to create. There was no end to the ride through the dark woods, no end to the river of sound or to the girl’s acute delight.