Flawed lovers meet and learn of secrets and reasons for fitting together
Fernando
My girlfriend, Liza, doesn’t care that I only have one hand. She kisses me anyway. Liza doesn’t care about my weird toes. I never went barefoot when I was a kid because everyone in the neighborhood always made fun of my toes. I was born without toenails. My toes always seemed normal to me. I asked my mother, “What do you use your toenails for, anyway?”
She never really answered me but just turned away and painted hers bright shiny red. I met Liza by accident, not like a car accident but like when you decide to go to the movies instead of the park and when you come out of the movie you discovered that it rained cats and dogs the last two hours. I was out at the seaport, scanning the horizon for whales, along with a couple of Japanese girls, and this skinny girl bumped into me. She said, “Whoops, excuse me, I’m so blind.”
I chuckled and said, “It’s okay, it was probably my fault, and accidents usually are.”
I looked at her face and noticed that she was too attractive to be interested in me, the geek mole-man artist. She had wide-set green eyes and a nose that was covered in a spattering of large freckles. Her long dark hair whipped around in the wind and slapped me in the face. She seemed not to notice and grabbed both my arms. She searched my face with those pale green eyes that reminded me of being lost in a swirling raging sea. Her hands slipped down my arms as she giggled and then she stopped when she discovered that my left hand was missing. She stopped smiling and said, “I’m sorry…it really is my fault.”
I touched her face with my right hand and replied, “No way, I was born clumsy. My name is Dusty. Glad to bump into you. What’s yours?”
She stepped back slowly and almost whispered, “Liza.”
That’s how we met. She soon found out why I only had one hand and later she found out about the toes without nails. I knew she was a perfect girlfriend when she finally found out about Fernando.
I was an artist and spent most days sealed up in a dirty loft studio. I usually wore the same old pair of coveralls each day and continued to add to the exotic shades of splashed paint on them. I painted large canvases while listening to bizarre music and smelling the many fat candles burning in the studio. My bed was propped against one wall and my kitchen consisted of a microwave on a shelf and a small refrigerator with enough room for a dozen beers and shelves for week old fruit: kiwis, oranges, and seedless grapes. I had painted here for the last few years, barely selling enough of my realistic surrealism to stay fed and alive. I don’t regret it because I tried to work ‘real’ jobs and not paint. The real jobs paid better in living conditions but took a heavy toll on my emotional being. I found enough courage to create dreams instead of succumbing to using a pipe wrench or a hammer eight hours a day. During these years I had few steady friends and even fewer real ones but I did have Fernando.
A fisherman down at the seaport was arrested and he asked me to take care of Fernando until he could get out of jail. That was years ago. I never heard from the guy again and doubted that I ever would. I think I just happened to be in the right place and the right time. The same way I was in the right place and time to meet Liza. I sometimes had to help sell newspapers with Hank at the corner stand to raise a little more cash to keep Fernando and myself fed. The first time I kissed Liza I felt weak and powerful at the same time. Losing my hand didn’t make me feel as weak as I felt when that sweet girl kissed me. We went for long walks everyday along the rocky coast and I always held her hand. She would tell me, “You know you don’t have to hold my hand.”
I would smile and kiss her on the cheek, saying, “I love holding your hand, never let go.”
She would laugh like a wind chime and reply, “If you ever get tired of holding my hand I’m still not getting a dog. I had one once and I never really liked dogs. Maybe I can get a trained cat?”
I laughed, saying, “A cat? Cats are too independent. You know you can’t trust them.”
She hugged me tightly, kissed my neck and said, “Like Fernando?”
The wind pushed her long hair behind her like the trail of a comet. The surf crashed on the rocks along the coast and we walked in a private silence, happy together, holding hands, each step sure and relaxed.
Fernando was as black as the darkest night, as black as the depths of a cavern, as black as the shadow that lies beneath the hood of the Grim Reaper. Fernando loved me but there were times when he didn’t like anybody. I took care of him. I fed him and cleaned his huge steel cage that the man had left to me. His cage took up the other half of my studio and he usually watched me paint, his square head on his large fat paws. It had been my fault that Fernando had attacked me. Fernando took my hand. If he had taken my right hand I might have ended up hating him or just taking my pistol and shooting him. I should never have trusted Fernando. It is not his fault he lives in a cage. He does love me. I sometimes go inside the cage and lay on his back. I have even fallen asleep with my head resting on his black side. It was when I had first started taking care of Fernando when he bit down upon my wrist. I remember how the bones sounded when they snapped.
Liza didn’t have to tell me she was blind. I knew it when she looked at me that first time. I knew she didn’t mind my one handed, toenail-less feet. She didn’t mind that I was a geek, mole-man white skinned-bizarre artist because she couldn’t see what I looked like. She could only see into my heart. She accepted me and understood why I kept Fernando. She liked to hear him growl. She liked that low rumbling sound that came from deep within his wild throat. She would snuggle with me and purr like a big cat. Liza told me, “I had a seeing-eye dog once. He left me in the middle of an intersection. He ran off, barking, and all I could hear were horns honking and brakes squealing. Maybe you could train Fernando to be a seeing-eye panther?”
My studio was like a big cage, until I met Liza. Fernando seems happy but I know he dreams of the jungle, at night, leaping down from a tree onto the back of an unsuspecting impala. I can hear him growling and grinding his teeth when he dreams, asleep in his cage. Liza makes wild love to me in my loft studio and she growls like a panther, biting playfully on my neck. In the dark, in a cage, it doesn’t matter if you are blind.
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Fernando
