Shaped Like Swans
The sad little dictator’s father dies unexpectedly. The sad little dictator is unprepared for such responsibility. He lives alone in the castle on the hill. The barricade is concrete and eight inches thick. The sad little dictator looks out from the highest window over the barricade. He smokes stubby cigars that smell like burnt banana peels. His footsteps echo on the hardwood floors. He orders expensive rugs and walks on them barefoot. He listens to Elvis Presley on the turntable while he smokes his stubby cigars. When his advisors come to him with news, he tells them you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, taps ashes into the weave of the expensive rugs, and they back out of the room, nodding and nodding and nodding.
The sad little dictator begins an affair with a woman from town. She is beautiful in the way that women from town are. Her hair is thick like thunderclouds. The sad little dictator’s mother was a woman from town and beautiful in this same way. He remembers how her eyes would narrow and blink when his father brought him to see her, how she would say my boy.
Do you love me, the sad little dictator says to his lover. He is smoking one of his cigars, pensively puffing the smoke out the window. He meets his lover in a hotel room every other Thursday afternoon. The hotel lays chocolates on both pillows, folds the hand towels into the shape of a swan.
What would you do, says the sad little dictator’s lover from under a pile of white sheets, if I said I didn’t love you?
I would have you killed, says the sad little dictator.
His lover says nothing. She has three children and a husband with large hands. Sometimes she bakes bread with the window open; she listens to sparrow song.
The sad little dictator says: Well?
I love you, his lover says.
The sad little dictator doesn’t like washing his hands, but he likes the hand towels folded like swans. He unwinds them while his lover dresses, drapes them over the edge of the rumpled bed. Outside, a car is waiting — two cars, one for her and one for him. The sad little dictator watches his lover go to the first car from the hotel room window. She never looks back wistfully; he would like for her to look back wistfully.
When the sad little dictator returns to the castle on the hill, he orders his advisors to order the head of housekeeping to order the bathroom maids to fold all the hand towels in all of the sixteen bathrooms into the shapes of swans. He orders them to have a pair of high-heeled shoes delivered to his lover’s home.
He puts a Dean Martin record on the turntable, he listens to Sway. He wipes his hands on the lap of his wool pants.
The sad little dictator receives a message that his lover has run away with her husband and three children. The message uses a code known only to the sad little dictator and his ancestors and the codewriters themselves. The sad little dictator has never met any of them; the sad little dictator never will. The message says, in code, fled. The message offers to hunt down the fleeing lover and her family; the message offers to make examples of them all. The sad little dictator lights a cigar, listens to Frank Sinatra.
His advisors ask what he would like, outside of swan-shaped towels and high-heeled shoes sitting toppled outside the door of an empty cottage.
Fly me to the moon, says the sad little dictator, and his advisors nod, nod, nod.
The record skips on the turntable, and the sad little dictator holds the coded message in his hands, thinks of the fluttering of his mother’s small feet as she dangled above his head, how his mother’s feet were, he thought, like birds, how he and his father watched until the fluttering slowed and slowed and finally stopped.
When Cathy Ulrich was a maid, she folded the toilet paper to a point, but the towels just went on the racks. Her work has been published in various journals, including Rabid Oak, Adroit and Puerto del Sol.