Rhoda Janzen

A recipe for lamb tagine demands a mysterious ingredient: raz el hanout. Animal, vegetable, compound of kings like myrrh? I decide not to look it up, to wait and see. At first it is everything we seek but can’t express. Then it reverses: everything thrust upon us—think fast!— by the universe, like the leg my friend Tom caught when a cyclist got clipped by a car, the driver stinking drunk at 9:00 AM. Severed above the knee, the leg flung itself into the air, a javelin. Tom, always quick, reached up and caught it. But the story has a twist. After the cyclist died in an ambulance, the widow inexplicably came on to Tom. Not that Tom is unattractive. Indeed he is the sort of man I’d throw myself at if I were a leg. It’s hard to imagine the sex that Tom and this woman would have had there in the hotel room with the blackout curtains pulled. I’ve never had sex with Tom myself, but if I had been that leg or that woman I might have whispered, “What fine reflexes you have, Sir!” “Sir, say something tender!” “Cradle me against the guttural gasp from your solar plexus.” “Oh, Sir, I sense the tip of bone on skin, a surge of déjà vu.” “I am coming, I am about to come, your shuddering lover, your raz el hanout.”