DICEY BROWN MAGAZINE

February 3, 2008

LITTLE BABIES SPEAKING FRENCH by Catherine Lacey

A man was speaking into a cell phone, but absently staring at Anne's scarf as they walked towards each other on a stretch of sidewalk. She could tell he was leaving a voicemail from the way he was moving his lips. She couldn't hear him yet.

No one else was standing or walking or loitering along the side of this un-widowed warehouse where this stretch of sidewalk was stretching. There weren't any pigeons milling around or homeless people snoring or teenagers blithely gliding on skateboards. There was only Anne, moving slowly east and this man on his cell phone, moving west.

The man was leaving a voicemail for his cousin, a software engineer living in Iowa who had been threatening suicide. The man, still approaching Anne, was not yet close enough to her to see the color of her eyes. Anne was frowning but she didn't know it.

When Anne had crossed 1st avenue a few blocks ago, a van driven by a plumber had honked at her, intending for the honk to somehow say, "hey baby!" Anne had interpreted it as "get the fuck out of my way," and this had reconfirmed a fear that she was always in someone's way.

Anne was close enough to the man to hear what he was saying ("…ope you arre feeling appier…") just as the man noted her eye-color (a milky green.) As they each reached opposite corners of the block he thought abstractly about the shade of her eyes, which reminded most people of melted mint chocolate chip ice cream but without the chocolate chips.

She thought about how his French-tongue had left the H's out. She wondered what he was doing with all those un-used H's, those brand new H's still in the plastic.

She thought about turning around and running after him. She would drop her purse on the sprint down the block. The wind would whip around her head and flip off her little hat and unfurl her scarf and she wouldn't care. She would grab him by the shoulders and say, "Stop. Let's just stop. Can we stop now? Do we have to keep going?"

And then he would have to say, "Ow did your eyes become this color?"

They would have curious, blond, bilingual children in a few years. These children would not grow up. They would always say "Would you please pass the Haricot Verts, please. Thank you." They would kiss their parents on both cheeks. They would win spelling bees.

Anne crossed another street and another van, maybe the same one, honked at her again, and she thought about how there were men and women in Paris having sex to avoid being bored and there would be men and women having sex to avoid boredom until the world melted or got hit by an asteroid.