by Molly McQuade

Lucent, he glided the hospital corridors, sweeping nurses with his perfect elan. His hands were gossamer--he felt their lace dangle. The fingers poured down glowing in noon sunlight, a brazen local solstice. Tonight he would butter those hands.

He would butter them with Lulu. Or with Nuar. With Malika, or Mabel. Above all, maybe with Mary Jo. As he would butter them, and butter him, so he would sustain himself: a small French man in a country not his own, circling and curing women.

He decided to filch and collect each and every one of them, his favorites.

Inside the bright, still bulb of his bay window, Doctor Binoculars watched people sidle and delay on the street. He studied with scruple and insight the wife of tax attorney Max Blumberger, sometimes while gripping his field-glasses, for her swarming green dress twisted, livid, about her ample hourglass. He puzzled over Jane Kubica, once a Dinkytown club straggler, now a beaming dope with huge sunglasses. In good weather he glanced at Elsie, eleven, a hopskotch hoyden with reverberating insteps. He loved her inhibition in retrieving chalk, with a slight limp, from her juicy sidewalk fresco of a lopsided gray Popsicle.

But he loved Heidi the most.

Her vivacious laugh was a broad red ribbon of strangeness. Her flaring skirt resented her flagrant tossing of it. Her boot heels shook under her strong knack for delight.

Once, just once, he cajoles her in with a glass of purple depth. Dizzily ambivalent, Heidi lets her guard drop. It is late at night, the city a northern gilt, and Heidi grimly lanky, pushing back her black bangs, baring her teeth.

By and by, she and he have nothing more to say, until his hand skitters forth beneath her plaid pleated skirt, until she springs toward the china cabinet like a splendid Labrador. (Heidi sought a different glass, one with a longer stem.)

And he explains, in apologetic layman's terms, the extent of his oncology research, summarizing it within the seemly bounds of a specific and benighted color range. The cells loom, curvaceous. They seem to share little with her, with him. But still, he is the doctor, and she must be the patient.

Maybe she can even feel her cells yelling at his.