Excerpt from YOU'RE A DESPERATE WOMAN, SHIBBY MAGEE:
“I’ll be back presently,” says Moochie.
He flicks on a torch and leaves a trail of light as he makes his way across the yard, and Shibby follows his progress. Watching him return with a V-shaped barrow, which is stacked high with chopped wood. Uniform, milk-colored blocks that he packs, neatly, on the inside ledge.
Benny holds out his gloved hands. “Pass me a few over,” he says to Moochie. Then he proceeds to layer the wood inside the oven. Crisscrossed and neat. And he presses newspaper all around, and soon it’s burning, and as it shrivels into grey fragments, Shibby sees tongues of fire begin to spread, and then reach up to lick the dome of the oven’s belly.
Tongues of fire that reflect, in miniature, in Shibby’s green eyes. Tongues of fire that turn the blanched skin of her face and forearms amber as they toast her with fizzling heat.
Soothing, mollifying, gently unraveling the tangle of anguish and confusion that occupies her poor mixed-up head.
She makes a study of Moochie shoveling flour into a trough with a shuck-shuck-shuck. And watches him add a frothy liquid from a jug, which smells like Benny’s favorite ale. Then she sees how Moochie stirs, and, digs, and pummels with a paddle until he has a great slug of what he tells Shibby is sourdough. Which is so heavy, it demands four hands to heave and to slap it onto the table. Benny’s hands. Moochie’s hands.
Shibby lets go of the table—her anchor in defiance of Benny—upon Moochie’s invitation to, “Come on, Shibbs! I could do with some help here.”
With a bench knife, Moochie cleaves the dough into pieces. A cut down the middle, the sides, and divided again and again.
And Shibby sinks her fists into her weighed portion and pinches it, mushes it, and stretches it smooth. Following Moochie’s lead. Flicking flour like he does, folding and shaping like he does. Cutting a cross in her very own loaf like he does, with a lame, to ward off the devil.
And never minding the result being lopsided, Moochie declares it a victory...