Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Russian Roulette"

The vagaries of semi-transgression— I at least gave
myself credit for waiting until the semester ended.
Add this, I thought, to my scorecard of offenses
generated in the licentious Aughts. Who Julia was,
sprung from Glenside into Pine Street not unlike
myself, had an inner ache to write that itched
painfully, so that she took solace from a literary
lover who had been her teacher. Raven-haired
sitter-on-my-shoulder, she carried back to Glenside
even then who I was, had become. Narratives
from her own life made the ache burn into
full-out licentiousness, so that she threw what
she was at me in a cloud of turbulent cuteness,
drunken— drunkenly staged— but permanent.

She should’ve been a redhead, I thought,
as she drew the blinds, locked the red wine
in the cabinet, drained her glass, & bounced
into bed— not precisely the Don Juana of
her postures, more like a vision of Pre-Raphaelite
schizophrenia, as one reads in Victorian novels.
Writing this, after twenty years, it seems dulcet,
peaceful, rather than a plunge into a life or death
game of Russian Roulette, which is what it was
for us. The book I’d just published sat on the
living room sofa, as if there could be any other
reason for all this, the wine, the bullets; what I
put into her was another kind of book. The full
dome effect, for her, caused a thousand suicides.

© Adam Fieled 2018-2026

Russian Roulette II appeared originally in Otoliths 50 in 2018.