contralateration

by aaron hellem

    It requires us to agree on something.  She thinks it’s enough to concur that we are both breathing, are both hungry, and both of us like rum.  Both of us enjoy a good laugh, she says.  One from the belly.

   

    Yes, both of us do enjoy a good hearty belly laugh, especially if it’s hearty and happens during a rainy day, and both of us do enjoy rum on occasion, but I’m searching for symmetry, a sameness in the way everyone sees us when they see us walking down the street.

   

    I’m trying to perfect a limp.  Somehow men with limps appear distinguished, command an unconditional respect from strangers as I might have been wounded at war and have a limp and a Purple Heart to show for it.  A way to differentiate my right side from my left.  There’s a very good reason why my right arm sways when I step with my left leg, I say.

   

    You’d fall down otherwise, she says.  Her explanations are always elegantly compact and beautiful in their succinct simplicity. 

    When we walk down the street, you’re always on my right, I say.

   

    On the left side of the street, she says.

    The right side of her face should look identical to the left side of her face and it does generally insofar as she has an eye on each side and high cheekbones on both sides, eyebrows and ears, equal points of smile planes, but more closely, there is slight variance, a constellary patch of tiny freckles on her left cheek, a small precious nevus next to her nose on the right side, a slight curl in her lips when she smiles in response to sarcasm.  Up close, her right eye is offset from her left, a miniscule amount that gives her the appearance of constantly day dreaming, the drunk expression of somebody deeply and hopelessly in love. 

    I wonder, limping down the street on her left, if my face lacks perfect symmetry, if there are impurities that endear my visage to her.  If there are minor imperfections that separated me from all the other available suitors for she had many available suitors what come calling, serenading her from the rose bushes, buying her drinks at the local public house, following her home after work.  Salt, for instance, I say, looks exactly the same from six different perspectives.  Six different points of view.

   

    There are those who have accused me of acting like a pillar of salt, she says. 

    If I could change my body into a cubic crystal, I think I would.  Down grocery store aisles with enough symmetry to make me crave random patterns again.

    Are you limping? she says.

    There’s elegant symmetry in a pair of eyeglasses.  In a pair of eyes, too.

Aaron Hellem lives with his wife in Leverett, Massachusetts and attends the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  His short stories have recently appeared in Fourth River, Xavier Review, Ellipsis, Phantasmagoria, Amoskeag, Quay Journal, Menda City Review, Mississippi Crow, 13th Warrior, and Beloit Fiction Journal; also, works of his are forthcoming in Lake Effect, Oklahoma Review, Parting Gifts, Crate, and Confluence.