I.    THE RAIDO BLARES louder than lyrics.  Taxis swerve and brake.  The guys pound windows—thighs—dashboard.  Bachelor Party.  The last time the checkbook’s only in your name, my man.  They pull into the pay parking lot.  Back pocket leather wallets.  They take turns at the ATM.  My man hunches into his coat.  Lake Michigan biting his jaws.  His fiancée is asleep on their bed—drool on the pillowcase.  One screams CHIX.  They file by the red velvet rope to the bouncer.  The bouncer knows these aren’t the troublemakers.  They’re the boys he roughed up in grade school and later the sons of mothers who led him into bedrooms with picture frames turned over.  The group removes leather jackets.  Silence cell phones.  Orders a round.  Out back there’s a fight.  One of the girls’ boyfriend’s drunk and marking territory.  Blood and bone.  It’s a solo show.  The girl stomps stilettos.  Her breasts—her belly—her thighs.  She’s the real deal, my man.  My man’s talking about the soon-to-be old lady and wedding cake.  Red light.  The girl smiles and dips low.  Green light.  She backbends.  Her body around a pole.  How many hands have been on that pole—just like the subway poles you grab to keep from falling.  She finishes on her knees at the stage’s edge, her eyes somehow looking at everyone.  She holds her g-string with a thumb for the dirty Washingtons.  Someone punches the change machine.  Someone raises his hips and shakes.  Someone pulls back a sleeve to reveal the price of a gym membership.  The girl’s called over.  A lap dance for our main man.  Our main man pulls out his wallet.  His friend pushes it down.  It’s on me, man. On me.  But he’s not looking for money.  He needs to see a picture of his girl.  The ticket stub for his tuxedo falls out.  His girl smiles up at him.  He’d rigged the camera to snap her picture right when he popped the ring box.  He sees the girl in the g-string.  The girl behind her eyes.  He works his way outside—hand to mouth.  The girl leans against his empty chair.  Raised eyebrow—hand to hip.  What can I do ya?  Her accent is new.  Too much Chicago in the sound.  The best man she talks at turns red like the times in grade school when he had to do board work but not red like when he walked in on his sleeping mother and the high school prick trying on his father’s trousers.  The best man wants this girl.  She rattles off prices—tapping finger per favor.  He wants to sculpt her back at his apartment—skyline glittering across her calves.  No matter if his apartment is up on Jarvis and his only window faces a brick wall.  He’ll make her breakfast—her legs crossed under his bathrobe.  She goes down the list.  What he can’t do.  No hands—got it.  Then she’s on his thighs, clutching his jeans.  Her breath is an upset stomach.  He waits for her to touch his hair—wink.  She doesn’t.  He pulls his wallet again.  He will sculpt her.  She rubs around him.  She twists his eyes and collar.  He dreams her in marble—clay.

II.  Don’t matter where.  Off the dark interstate on the edge of a sleeping town of 3,000 or in the Gold Coast smacked between a pizza shop and a camera store—all the same.  They stand behind shelves.  They lift magazines.  They touch the pictures like their grandmothers’ chandelier tears.  Unless a woman walks in.  Then they duck.  Still in their work clothes—coats—ties.  Some take trips to the back.  They love with a love for these glossy women and their come-and-massage me eyes.  Their mouths that don’t nag about paychecks—anniversaries—the tramp they found out about years ago.

III. The best man visits the club every night that week.  His main man is across the ocean in a hot tub.  All the other guys said Poor sap—she got him—she yanked him and he got blinded.  They stood in a circle at the reception and knocked glasses.  He didn’t say anything.  He left early.  He went to her but didn’t pay.  He sat in the back.  Afternoons at the Jiffy Lube are a real pain in the.  He stakes her out on lunch breaks.  She lives off the brown line behind beige curtains.  He wakes from wet dreams.  He buys a block of clay.  Carving a body out.  He stops sleeping.  Paces from bathroom to bedroom.  Still in his pajama bottoms.  Oily coffee.  Stale doughnuts with sprinkles.  He takes his table at the back.  He watches her move from table to table.  When it’s slow, and it’s always slow on Wednesday afternoons, he knows what she’s thinking.  He has sisters.  He heard what they said growing up.  Some pay her to listen about dead wives or kids who won’t call.  They show her billfold pictures with dedications scribbled without care on the backs—To Daddy—To Gramps—With Love.  They buy her what-will-be pawnshop bracelets.  Pet her hand.  They remind her of church.  The men holding wives by purses into pews.  Praying for salvation—envelopes in the offering plates.  Holding her hand too long after the service while wives and widows peeled foil from casseroles in the basement kitchen.  Old Spice aftershave.  He thinks he’s not like the others and she knows it—sees how his eyes light if she wanders close.  She doesn’t.  She never comes to the back.  She stays up front because that’s where her utility bill—her laundry detergent—her rent sits.  He wants her to pose for him.  Swim with him in the summer at Oak Street Beach.  She climbs back on stage like she’s getting out of a pool.  She dips low.

IV. Roxy was 17 the first time she kissed a girl on the lips.  She had wondered a long time.  Naked mothers in dressing rooms.  Cleavage.  Late at night—door closed—window open—smoking cigarettes in front of internet lesbians.  She tried dating.  Holding hands.  Sucking off.  The girls said it was just skin.  She spread her legs in the back of Eric Harris’s 442—knees bent—one foot out the window.  Roxy met the girl after a Mother-Daughter banquet.  They left their mothers inside the church—trading pictures and divorce recipes.  The kiss was outside.  Gum wrappers in asphalt cracks.  Her lips were soft.  A banana ripe for baking.  The next week it rained.  Roxy met her at her apartment but wouldn’t go inside.  She called Roxy a flirt.  Tease.  Roxy shrugged and opened her mouth.  Rain flicked off her teeth.  She turned away.  The girl followed.  Roxy let her slip her fingers down her belly—under the thin elastic waistband.  The girl wanted to be kissed.  Roxy called her a whore.  Roxy didn’t wonder anymore.

V.  He carried his laundry onto the redline.  The brownline.  He waited at her laundromat.  She was there.  He took her out.  Down to Clark & Division to one of the restaurants on Rush Street with white tableclothed tables on the sidewalk.  He asked her questions.  She laughed and watched people pass.  It was one of those January days when Lake Michigan leaves the city alone just long enough for everyone to unbutton and look up like tourists.  She didn’t recognize him.  Not even the wallet when the bill was dropped off by a waiter who knew from first glance the tip would be nothing.  The waiter laughing in the kitchen with the other waiters—all of them high on the rush of pretending they lived in the condos on Astor instead of down the block from the couple who won’t know how much to tip.

VI. Roxy told him about the stripping—knew he’d give up.  He didn’t.  Not even when summer arrived and she refused to swim in the lake.  Or when she made love like every other girl—back flat—knees bent—mock moans—face to wall.  She told him she always wanted to dance.  Maybe longer than staring at cleavage.  A thrill, she said.  A great buzz.  She left out the needles—tapping the vein.  When she got home she threw the money on his dead grandmother’s bedspread.  She counted it in front of him.  Showed how they reached for her.  On her knees.  He’d leave her there and walk up and down the stairs.  Up and down halls of never-home neighbors.  She had already agreed to his art proposal.  A sculpture.  He’d walk until he could focus.  Then he’d come back.  He always did.  She helped him forget.  He cried her name in his dreams.  She stuffed her head in the pillow.  She punished him in the mornings. Tell him how if he took her to meet the parents she’d screw his kid sister who had just started college and wanted options.  He’d turn away.  She’d unfold naked before him.  Arms raised—nipples pointing at him.  Sculpt me, baby.  Make us a fortune.  She thought all artists eventually made money.  Why else all the museums?  He’d taken her to one.  Walked her up the spreading stairs to Seurat’s picnickers.  Right here, he’d said.  Right at the top.  He made a red rope out of his hands so she’d see how no one would touch her.

VII.           She took the test while he wiped oil off his hands at the Jiffy Lube.  She stared at the linoleum until the glitter turned to pictures.  She brushed her teeth until she spat blood.  They found her on the fourteenth floor in the stairwell of a condo she didn’t live in.  911.  They saved the baby.  Ultrasound.  Cricket heartbeat.  Her mother drove up I-57 in a car without insurance.  Roxy was safe.  Her father wrote a check that would bounce.  She refused to stop the club.

VIII.          He took out the materials.  Mixed them in a bucket.  Roxy be still.  She laughed up at him.  I was, she said.  Everything was.  Please, he said.  She laughed again.  The sound shut her up.  The laugh echoing the same flat way that she’d heard when she moved to Shytown and answered an art-modeling ad.  The photographer had said move.  He said open your mouth slow.  Oh yeah.  Camera pointed.  His black socks and boxer shorts.  Picture your boyfriend.  Or a rock star.  He wants you bad, but you won’t give in will you baby doll.  She promised herself she’d never go back to his flat words or his mother’s portrait on the wall.  But here she was with that man’s laugh echoing around her and her lover boy.  Her dear artist spreading cold cloths over her breasts—belly—thighs.  His tongue between teeth to focus.  Just like that.  This will be the mold for the sculpture that goes in the museum where I showed you.  You’ll be art.  And then you won’t have to strip anymore and radiator fluid won’t blow up in my face.  It’ll be just you and me and the child.  Be still now.

IV.          She went to the clinic.  Sat in the stuffy office of landscape paintings.  Every clinic and porn store the same no matter where.  She laughed.  Free condoms in glass cookie jars.  Young girls with truancy on their faces.  She put on the headphones he’d bought for the baby floating inside her.  For their kiddo.  They called her.  Last name first.  She stood.  Smoothed her skirt.  Ran a hand over the small bulge.  Too late now.

X.          She didn’t tell him.  Why for.  She hugged the electric pad with blue flowers to her waist.  Bills cluttered the card table.  The sculpture of her stood next to the TV.  She draped a sheet over its shoulders.  A Cubs hat on the head and sunglasses over those marble eyes.  Dead eyes.  Honey, I’m home, he called from the door.  His joke.  He touched her collarbone.  Expected her to pull away.  She didn’t.  He thanked her with a smile.  The way his eyes rested then darted dizzied her.  He saw the electric pad—Tylenol—Codeine.  He started pacing.  Shaking his head.  Bloody towels in the bathtub where she’d stood for the mold.  Gauze.  Stop it she muttered.  Blinking.  He slid down the wall in the corner like the man she’d seen shot outside the club last year.  His head slammed against the wall—hands clutching eyes.  All night.  Television seizuring on walls—her jutting hip—his ankles so thin where they poked from his trousers.  Roxy woke up tied to the bed.  Splayed across the sheets.  Fingers numbly curled.  He and the sculpture were gone.  She sighed.

XI.         He borrowed a dolly from work.  Strapped the marble Roxy to it.  Someone will buy it. Those shoulders—the smooth ride from breast to hip.  They’ll buy it because they’ll only see her—won’t hear her dirty words—her reused laugh.  He pushes then pulls it up and down Michigan.  Every art store.  Every window holding paintings.  No, sir.  We don’t buy outright.  Their tone exactly like the Gold-Coast waiter who took the bill and cash and said come again.  He hauls her up the museum steps.  He begs the woman in her blue starched suit standing behind the wraparound counter of glossy pamphlets.  She calls security.  You gotta understand—my girl—our baby.  Everyone shakes their heads and will tell the story tonight over dinner—so this guy comes in with a life-sized statue strapped with belts to a dolly—no, man, belts that you wear to keep your pants up—and—no kidding—he thinks we buy art like kids buy ice cream cones.  The marble dirties fast in the city.  Smudges like bruises under its eyes.  He stops at a corner to rest.  He props his elbow on her shoulder—one foot against a dolly wheel.  Somebody drops a quarter at his foot.  He takes off his hat.  A dollar.  Fifty cents.  A punk kid grabs the breast—squeezes the nipple—laughter.  A tourist poses for his wife’s camera—kissing cold lips.  Two dollars.  He unstraps the statue—holds its hand.  A crowd gathers.  He cracks jokes.  The perfect woman.  Watch how she doesn’t talk back.  He gets right in her face.  Calls her all the names he heard the real one called when she was on stage.  His hand in its face.  Waving.  Try it yourself.  People step forward.  A dollar a curse.  A rally.  They bitch about bosses.  Their wives.  They empathize with her about husbands who used to bring in a towel to wipe their thighs after sex.  They leave with a smile.  A spring to the step.  His pockets are stuffed.  He’ll return tomorrow.  He’ll make a sign.  He’ll tie a cape around her neck and ask her to pick a card any card with the old carnie laugh he’d practiced as a kid.  The crowd will love it.  He wheels her over to State to the redline.  The bus driver says no room.  The subway elevator is out of order.  Everyone’s off work—streaming up and down the stairs.  He struggles with the dolly.  Down the stairs.  No hands on the railing.  Get outta da way—That your girlfriend—Tell your girlfriend no handicaps on the goddamn stairs.  Someone trips him.  Whatta joke—Would ya look at this guy.  Someone elbows him.  He loses footing.  The dolly falls forward.  Sculpture heavier than the real thing.  Solid like death weight.  People crush beneath it.  People jam to the railings.  No one reaches to catch her.  There she goes.  Timber.  He chases.  Arms out.  The head explodes first.  Fingers scatter across the platform—under commuter feet.  He slides on his knees.  Palming the shards. 

ERIN PRINGLE's story "The Only Child" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and named a Best American Notable Non-Required Reading of 2007.  Short-listed for the 2007 Charles Pick Fellowship, her work is forthcoming in New York Tyrant, pacificREVIEW, and Dark Recesses.