Teresa LeoNarcissists Anonymous
A jackal among hedgehogs. At the meeting, N. looked around, not sure why him, why he was forced to occupy a room with these almost-but-not-quite paragons of beauty, all magnificently groomed, but whacked in a way he knew he was not. And N. knew their grooming was the artifice of grooming, the way some animals lick their paws clean after stepping in shit. But they visually appealed and he didn't mind looking at them, one in particular, the more-and-better of her elongated neck, the kind men sculpt statues to immortalize, in the row before him. When her neck moved, the woman's shirt moved, lifted to show the black line of a G-string and the tip of an angel tattoo. N. liked the way the wing's veins etched low on the woman's hip, the dark lines that arced in and out of view. He liked imagining the tattoo's complexity, the pain it must have caused her, and began thinking of ways he'd follow the neck, from curve to hip, cast the angel earthward before the night was through. Then, N. got distracted by the pristine condition of his own hands, the length and width of his delicate fingers. He thought of how the woman would notice his hands first, the way all women did, and how she'd be unable to stop herself from thinking about what those fingers would feel like inside her, which would force her to shift in her seat, which would raise her shirt, expose the G-string, and play in N.'s mind like the opening of a sonata, which in turn would thunderbolt down his torso to the backs of his knees, and, for a second, feel something like shame. It passed. The meeting broke. The woman stood and turned. He was already thinking of the beautiful and various ways he could leave her.
Teresa Leo's work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, New Orleans Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Painted Bride Quarterly, Xconnect, and elsewhere. She has received grants from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Leeway Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She works at the University of Pennsylvania.
