A Lady Under Siege

3

Voices outside woke Meghan. She looked around uncertainly—after nearly seven weeks she still wasn’t used to waking up in this bedroom, in this house. She hated this place, a drab little townhouse sardined between unkempt neighbours, just around the corner from a stretch of Queen Street East littered with greasy spoons, dollar stores, Money Marts and Laundromats. Seven weeks since she had separated from her husband, and it felt like she had traded lives along with addresses—she had left behind a leafy, upscale suburb, exchanged it for being woken up almost every night, at two, three, or even four in the morning, by that.

Do drunks not realize how stupid they sound to others? Of course they don’t, they’re drunk, she thought wearily. It’s the second time tonight that idiot has woken me up. But as she came to fuller consciousness and listened more carefully, she began to realize there was more than just the usual drunken banter going on. They weren’t talking. The noises made her think of the word rutting. Grunts and slaps and a wet sound like suction. Like animals do it, a stag and a doe. Outdoors, in nature. Oh my God, are they really doing it outside?

From her window she could see that the candles were extinguished. A giant black slug squirmed on top of the picnic table—a sleeping bag with two bodies inside. Not twenty feet away from where she watched, they were copulating.

She shrunk back discreetly to the edge of the window, peeking like a kid from behind a tree. I can’t believe I’m watching this, she thought, but she didn’t turn away. I have to watch, to tell people how it ends, she told herself, straining to hear the grunts and exhortations coming from below, and fighting an urge to open the window to catch more. A tingle passed through her—the unavoidable titillation in being an accidental voyeur.

The giant slug suddenly rolled off the table onto the wooden plank of the bench seat, and a female screamed, or maybe laughed, Meghan couldn’t be sure, as the bag kept tumbling downward to the ground. The girl Kaitlin wriggled free from the slug’s mouth, and stood naked in the moonlight. She covered her breasts with a forearm, and let her other arm dangle down, hiding her sex from the gaze of the moon Goddesses. To Meghan’s eyes there was no sense of shame in that gesture, it was modest, reflexive, and beautiful. Then she saw her neighbour Derek emerge, looking like Pan, the horny old Satyr, Pan the half-goat, with an erection slapping comically against his belly as he chased his giggling nymph into the house. Meghan watched them disappear, and heard silence give way to the faint and constant electrical hum of the city. She turned away from the window and climbed back under the covers of her bed, wondering if she had really seen steam coming off their bodies. Or had she only imagined that part?