The Apostrophe 1: as a mark of omission He wears Jamison’s shirt. He wears Jamison’s shorts, and Jamison’s boxers underneath; the sandals on his feet are his own, and at Jamison’s playful insistence, he does not wear them with black socks, not even the ones with the Nike logo emblazoned across the toes. The city, Pávöl thinks, does not recognize him now. There is an indolent crowd in the cobblestoned labyrinth of Old Town: a garble of tourists speaking in opaque and impermeable languages of outlandish pedigree. They might hurt if Pávöl allows his ears to interrogate them for meaning. He understands English—well enough—and Russian. His ears may hold a phrase or two of his grandmother’s Czech. But nothing more, as far as foreign languages go. Now—in Jamison’s shirt and Jamison’s expensive denim shorts—he is a stranger on Znín Street: the city, it seems, has mistaken him for a tourist. It can only read clothing, Pávöl thinks, and not the beard-stubbled flesh of his face or the flesh of his arms, his legs, or the flagrant exposure of his toes. The city, he realizes, is a fashionista and not a fetishist. Pávöl has known Jamison for six months but has never worn the arousing intimacy of his clothing. He wades into depths of this realization as he turns from Znín Street onto the wide, winding expanse of Krýmskaya Prospekt and spies his reflection in a storefront window. He walks for a dozen or so steps, through irregular clots of window-shopping tourists, and enters the convenience of a small store with the glaring compound-declaration NON-STOP emblazoned (in universal English) above the door in sputtering, vermilion neon. The air inside is still: it smells of sausage, chocolate, and tobacco. Music wafts from hidden overhead speakers, Adelle’s “Rolling in the Deep”. It swaggers and shadow-boxes like the ambiguous source code of some future James Bond soundtrack. Adelle has a top-ten spot on Rädio Príma, and a grudging place in Jamison’s affections. They speak English on Rädio Príma: Jamison listens to it when his ears are hungry for familiar sounds. Pávöl likes to watch Jamison, especially when he’s listening to something, at rest and with his eyes closed. As he listened, last night, on the Ikea-standard sofa, while Pávöl read—aloud and untranslated—from The Adventures of Pipee, the Astonishing Dog. He read, reclined, with his feet resting in Jamison’s lap and with Jamison’s dark fingers making occasional, playful intrusions into the warm spaces between his toes. And after reading, he lay in the darkness of their unlit bedroom with only a whiff of sodium-orange streetlight, breathing in through the open window veiled by white, lacy sheers. “What is it like when you hear the language that we speak?” Jamison’s shrug was a disturbance in the darkness. “It’s like hearing half of a secret, like hearing something but not understanding why it’s a secret.” Another shrug, another gentle disturbance in the darkness: like the rocking of a boat. “There are times when I think that the mind learns a language, long before the body can understand what’s happening. It’s why you know the ‘th’ sound, but have such a hard time making it. And the same goes for me. I know the ‘Ř’, but if I wore dentures, I’d probably spit them out every time I tried to pronounce that bizarre, fluttering noise. No one else even makes that sound, except for Czechs, and they only make half of it.” Pávöl smiled, he felt it and knew that the expression was lost in the darkness, and so he flattened his palm to the warmth of Jamison’s chest, and smiled with his fingers. “My body does not know English, but maybe it can learn.” “Yeah?” “Maybe.” “How?” A shrug. “Tomorrow, I will try.” And now, he has purchased a bottle of černý vödá. Black water: vodka infused with the astringent, spicy bite of black peppercorns. He leavens the purchase with two packs of cigarettes. He is friends with the cashier, and she knows him all-too-well. She smiles. “Oh, Pávlek…you’d better hurry back,” she says with a wink and a smirk, “Your boyfriend might need his shorts.” And as Pávöl accepts the change she’s made from the 500-Kröny note, he smothers in the cloying depths of an embarrassing epiphany. From the way that she smiles, Pávöl knows that she recognizes Jamison’s expensive, American shorts and has seen the outline of the denim-constrained erection. The city, he thinks, cannot recognize him, because he has shaped himself—in some insignificant, existential way, to the constraints of Jamison’s status as a resident alien. It has shunned him from its narrative. It has turned away. But Maríáná, in her tight, Kenvolo jeans and pink cashier’s smock, reads a prodigious intimacy in the space centered just south of Pávöl’s waist. “We should go drinking,” Maríáná says, still smiling. “If you and Jashek aren’t too busy tonight. I’ll text you.” Pávöl nods. He smiles. “I’ll tell him.” “And wear your own shorts,” she says. “You walk funny in his.” There is cunning, all-too-knowing laughter embedded in the cockles of her voice. * 2: as a mark of possession “Did it work?” Jamison asks, as Pávöl places the unopened bottle of peppery vodka on the kitchen table in a lozenge of sunlight. It is a strange compliment to the sprig of lilac poked into a Perrier bottle with its label scrubbed off. Each pack of cigarettes stands on end. Bottles, blossoms, and cigarettes bathed in late-day sunlight: components of an unambitious still-life. The scent of toast lingers in the air. “I don’t know,” Pávöl admits. “The city didn’t recognize me; it was as if the streets ignored me or didn’t know I was there. There are always beggars on Znín Street, asking me for kopečkis that they’ll only spend on liquor. No one asked me for coins. No one even noticed me. There were only tourists, piles and piles of them. And when I went into the shop, Maríáná was there; she saw that I am horny. She says I should give you your shorts back. She says we should sit together tonight, and drink.” He shrugs. “But my body doesn’t know anything more than it did yesterday.” Jamison moves behind Pávöl and places his hands squarely on his shoulders. “She’s right,” he says, a grin shaping itself to the lean cast of his features. His eyes are dark, a shade browner than his hair, and his skin—like coffee, cream, and a blush of cinnamon—gleams in the diffuse sunlight slanting through the veil of white sheers, billowing. “I’d like my shorts back. Later. But it might be a good idea to take them off. And my shirt, too.” As he speaks, he fold’s Pávöl into an embrace and licks a kiss across Pávöl’s lips before turning him to face the sunlight. His hands find their way across Pávöl’s chest and down his sides, until fingertips snag the metal buckle of his belt, opening and un-cinching, and pulling the shirt un-tucked. Pávöl yields to the quiet and playful ministrations, his own fingers finding snaps and zippers and buttons: all of them hold variations of Jamison’s warmth. Pávöl clears the table and scoots onto the wooden face of it, legs wrapped around Jamison’s waist as he sucks the searing spark of deep and hungry kisses from the meat of Jamison’s tongue— * —and an hour into sunset, they bask in an aftermath of sweat, tumescence, and exhaustion. A breeze whispers through the open bedroom window. Traffic noise growls outside. Whole streets away, music blasts from a sausage vendor’s kiosk, but Pávöl can only hear hints and whispers: vague snippets of 80’s pop in the sustained, smoky key of Tina Turner. “I smell like you,” Pávöl says, unsure if the words have come in English or the language of his birth. “I’m not going to take a shower until tomorrow.” * 3: as a mark of plurality for written items that are not words And the shower, when it comes, is a release from the smoke of cigarettes and cellar-bar sweat from the expensive catacomb depths of Insane Octopus, because Maríáná wasn’t in the mood to go very far from the flat she shared with two other girls. She maintains that they’re artists. Lesbians. Just like you two: only girls. Her flat-mates had been the ones to suggest Insane Octopus, Maríáná maintained, because it wasn’t on the tour-guide maps: it wasn’t EU-enough for that, because it still allowed smoke in at least two flavors, one of which was legal. Pávöl has escaped the day’s promised hangover: a breakfast of eggs, dumplings, and Jamison’s shredded potatoes has helped. The taste of black, unsweetened coffee hangs just behind Pávöl’s tongue, bunted by a scour of smoke. He wears only a green terrycloth towel, knotted at the waist. He sits on the broad windowsill, a gentle breath of a breeze whispering across naked skin. As with all local windows, there a double panes: something of a novelty for Jamison who maintains that in America, you open windows by sliding them up and not opening them like glass and wooden books. He laughs at the idea of placing wine (or beer) on the wide window-sill between inner and outer panes: to keep them cool. And Pávöl thinks of that, smiling as smoke draws lazy, rococo arabesques from the tip of his cigarette. It is impossible, he thinks, to sit—this way, with his back against the window frame—in American windows, with the inner and outer panes opened inwardly and outwardly. He thinks that it is impossible for him to ever visit Jamison’s homeland, though Jamison says homeland is a different and irrelevant word for him now. “It’s strange that you say the city didn’t recognize you,” Jamison said, in the late-night/pre-dawn hours of silence. Pávöl’s ears rang with the aftershocks of tinnitus he’d always experienced after a night in the cellar bars beneath Kremlova Street. “I felt exactly the opposite as you; as if the whole city moved to make room for me.” Pávöl shrugged. “It recognizes me, but not when I wear your clothing.” Jamison nodded. Pávöl felt it. “There’s something to that.” “What?” “I don’t know.” Clothing is irrelevant, now: indoors, on the window-sill with a cigarette tweezered between two fingers. The street below is as still as any Sunday, as muffled as the aftermath of any Saturday night. Magpies announce themselves on rooftops across Hrežóva street. Sparrows quarrel. Trams glide along their tracks, dinging their brass bells at every intersection. Pávöl drags on the cigarette and hears the lisp of motion inside the apartment. He feels Jamison’s approach, and shifts to make room for him. He dives into the kiss that Jamison presses to his lips and licks onto the tip of his tongue. He yields the cigarette and watches as Jamison steals a deep drag and exhales past him, out of the window; the smoke—his breath—billows and shreds itself in the faint motion of a breeze. In a moment it is invisible. Gone. Nothing more than a memory. Jamison returns the cigarette and Pávöl extinguishes the remnant, flicks the filter-but out of the window (not his normal habit) and pulls Jamison into a spooning embrace. He makes room for him on the broad sill, cupping his chin in the hollow of Jamison’s shoulder, holding him close so that he can feel the warmth of Jamison’s back with the sun-warmed pallor of his own chest. Jamison’s hair brushing the side of Pávöl’s face feels like tight, wiry wool. It smells of conditioner. “I want to stay home tomorrow,” Jamison says. “So do I.” “But we can’t.” “No.” For a long while after that, they hover in a note of silence, as Pávöl stares at their dim, shadowy reflections in the panes of glass. The inner pane—opened into the apartment— reveals each of them, back-lit. The outer pane, opened into the air three stories above Hrežóva street; it is anchored to the side of the building by a thick, brass hook. It reveals sunlight on each of their faces in profile: skin in two different languages touched by the same sun and reflected by the same panes of glass. He wonders, for a moment, if there is a word in English, for what he sees, if there is a word—at least in English—for what he feels in seeing himself and Jamison, nestled together like drowsy gargoyle boyfriends, perched on a window ledge. END I didn’t expect to write this. I didn’t expect this to follow so closely on the heels of “Fragments of a Journey to Agara.” Pávöl stepped forward, however, revealing the correct spelling of his name, and an intriguing aspect of the Agaran language. This, I suspect, was due to a random ramble around the internet. For some reason, I was struck by the idea of using a punctuation mark as the title of a story. I abandoned that idea in favor of the actual name of the punctuation mark, as I realized that an apostrophe works on so many different levels; I found myself wondering if such a thing—a simple mark—might also function as the plot of a story. According to Pávöl, it does, it can, and has often done so in the hallowed annals of Agaran literature. I’ve never written a story in which the plot is a punctuation mark, but I have to admit that I had quite a lot of fun doing so, and hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading that effort. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.