Pomegranate Seeds

Irrefragable: I Am No Sylvia Plath

2011-10-19T14:23:00.005-04:00

“I have my jeans special made for me now,” he said.

I looked down at the dark blue color and back up at him. “Really? They don’t look so special to me.”

“Remember Jesse?”

“From Boston?”

“Well, yeah, but he lives in San Francisco now. He’s a designer and he makes my jeans to fit me perfectly… my boots are Marc Jacobs, too.”

I laughed. “I know,” I said, “You’ve had them forever.”

“But they have a hole. See? Right here.” And he bent over and pressed at where the leather should meet the sole, but didn’t. “I have new tattoos, too,” he continued; then he did this shrug thing where he darts his eyes to the right and shrugs again. He’d been doing since we first met under the fluorescent lights in my on-campus college apartment. Those lights were unforgiving.

“I’ve written songs about you,” he said.

“I’ve written stories about you,” I responded. He smiled and pushed the chair back against the wall away from the desk piled with money, mostly ones, from his long night at the bar. It was 6am, the bar was closed and we were the only two who remained.

“Why don’t you come by to see me more?” he asked, not making eye contact, but instead, focusing on the end of his burning cigarette. But before I could answer him, he went on: “I changed my shirt when I knew you were coming back. I didn’t look good in the other one; this one is better—don’t you think?”

The shirt was a pale grey button down, nothing extraordinary or noteworthy, but a step up from the t-shirt he had on earlier. “And you put on a tie,” I said.

“I did!” he said excitedly, and he pulled at it. “I love it. You bought me a tie once.”

“Timothy, I bought you a lot of things once.”

“You know, you’ll always be my girl, right?” I let out a loud laugh. “I love your laugh,” he said; then again, he shrugged, darted his eyes to the right and shrugged again like a kid unsure of what he just said or meant, or even why he was in the room.

“In some ways, yes.”

***

My friend Briana and I had gone to dinner. We had talked about music, politics and Occupy Wall Street. She had told me about her trip to Italy from where she had just returned, and I told her how I saw Drive and was confused by it. When we finished the last bit of the pitcher of beer, we headed north to the east village for another drink. As we walked past the dark bar, the one that descends into the ground beneath the Japanese restaurant, Timothy was outside smoking a cigarette. He put the cigarette out and moved toward me; he wrapped his arms around me, kissed my cheek and held on, his fingertips somewhere between my shoulder blades, his smoky breath in my ear.

When he stepped back, he looked down at his shirt: “I look so bad,” he said. He pressed his hand against his mouth to hide what had become of his teeth since I loved him in college: they were broken and soft; they were deteriorated from drugs and everything else. Soft teeth do that, I am told.

We agreed we’d come back shortly, and we did. After Briana left around 4am, Timothy and I closed the bar; we sat ourselves on two barstools.

“I got this scar when I fell off my bike,” he said and he showed me the back of his hand, the left one and he pressed on it for a second. “I broke my leg last year, too… but you didn’t know that, did you?”

“I did,” I said.

“But you never came to visit…”

“I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t remember my birthday this year either.”

“Yes, I did,” I laughed, “I just pretended I didn’t.”

“I remembered yours.”

“I know you did. You always do.”

“I do, don’t I? Why is that?”

“Because I ingrained it into your skull like a broken record. I forced you to remember it until your dying day—that’s why.”

“You always made me feel brave,” he said.

“You always made me feel safe,” I responded, and he reached for my leg. I let his hand sit there, admiring the specks of paint imbedded around his cuticles, splashed across his fingertips.

“I’ve been painting a lot. I painted earlier today before work.”

“Good,” I said as I hopped off the stool. “Don’t you have to count that wad of cash piled up over there?” I pointed at the end of the bar.

“I do, I do. Come with me?”

I nodded and walked along next to him to the backroom. He reached for my hand, and I pulled away.

So there I was, in the middle of the night, in a backroom on Avenue A with the first boy I ever loved. The lights were same fluorescent as my apartment where we first met, and it made me let out a slight sigh.

He offered me the chair, but I chose to lean my back against the wall, feeling the paper calendar shuffle against my shirt. His eyes were a paler blue than they had been years before, the freckle on his lower lip was less pronounced than when I used to kiss his mouth on the dark street outside his apartment in Boston, in the elevator in my apartment building in Durham, New Hampshire—he was faded.

When he pushed the chair back against the wall, he grabbed my wrist and pulled me into him. I was standing up, and dropped to my knees. I rested my head on his lap and looked up at him as he messed with my hair.

“I always preferred your hair short,” he said.

“I know.”

From the main part of the bar, “Earth Angel” came on, and he leapt up. “This is my jam!” he said, and again grabbed my wrist.

“I can’t believe you have this on your iPod,” I laughed as he twirled me into him.

“How can I not?” he asked. He pulled me close to him as we danced in the dully lit bar, against the black and white tile that smelled of bleach from being cleaned just shortly after closing time. “Remember that night I came to your parents' house after we hadn’t spoken in three years? I drove all the way from New York that night to see you…”

“I do,” I said, “it was Christmas and we sat on the couch and watched A Christmas Story.”

“I was so nervous that night.” And he twirled me out and dipped me back. Before he could pull me back up, he kissed the base of my throat. I walked away before the song was over and headed to the backroom.

“You know,” I said, “if you actually get this money counted we could probably go somewhere and get food since you said you’re so hungry.”

“Right… the money.”

I stood in the doorway with my hand on my hip in a way that was more authoritative than my nature. As he approached, I noticed he had something on his tie, and reached for it. Like a mother or like someone who knew someone too long, I licked my finger and blotted it away. When I realized what I had done, I looked up at him and apologized. “I guess I’m anal in my old age,” I explained.

“I love it…” and before he could even breathe in between his sentences, he said: “you know, we’ll probably get married.”

“Ha! That’s sort of hard when you’re already engaged to someone else, isn’t it?”

“Maybe. But when we’re old we should get married—we always had so much fun together. You were the most fun of every girl I ever dated.” He sat back down on chair in front of the desk and, again, I took my place on the floor and put my head on his lap.

“You say that to all the girls, I’m sure, Timothy.”

“I don’t! You were always so… crazy.”

“Oh, here we go… I’m the crazy the one. I’m always the crazy one,” I said it like I thought it was funny, but it was mostly just hurtful. “That’s why I’m not the married one, right? That’s why every boy I’ve ever dated married someone else?”

“No,” he said, “That’s not it. You’re not simple; you’re complicated and want too much for people… not so much from them but for them. You wanted me to be a successful painter more than I did. I just wanted to get high and have fun.”

“Is that wrong?” I asked.

“No! Not at all! It just took me awhile to realize it and when I did, you were gone.”

“I couldn’t watch,” I said; then I got angry. “You dropped out of art school!”

“I don’t think I would have if we stayed together… there’s no fucking way you would have allowed it.”

He was right. He had wanted to be the next Jean-Michel Basquiat; I was going to be the next Sylvia Plath. In some ways, we both succeeded: like Basquiat, Timothy fell victim to drugs; and like Plath, I fell victim to my depression.

I looked at the time, it was almost 8am, and the sun was beginning to make its presence known through the blinds of the bar window. I rolled my head from one side to the other and sighed. “It’s late… or early rather. I should go.” I stood up from where I was sitting on the floor, and reached for my bag.

“Not yet,” he said, “stay a little longer.”

I turned to face him and his faded freckle on his lower lip, the dullness of his eyes, the way the scar, the one next to his right eye, had become less apparent. His hair was still a light ginger, and his skin, that I once in too many poetry classes compared to tissue paper, was still pale and almost transparent—just like tissue paper.

I put my hands on his flat stomach as I stood between his legs. “One last time,” he said. Again, I let out a loud laugh.

“How about you come back to me when you’re the next Basquiat like you had planned?”

“Then you’ll marry me?” he said as he smiled and slid his fingers between mine.

“Sure.” I rolled my eyes.

“Seriously!”

“Yeah, seriously…” I slung my canvas bag over my shoulder.

“Did I get you that bag?” he asked hopeful.

“No,” I said.

“It looks like something I gave you.”

“You never gave me a bag…”

“But everything I did—”

I continued the sentence for him: “Yes, everything you did give me I still have tucked away.”

“Good. Me, too.”

“I know.” I kissed his cheek, as he pulled at my skirt hem and started to slide his hand up the inside of my leg. I turned around and started walking toward the door.

“You know, if any of them break your heart, I’ll kill them, right?” he called out.

“I know, Timothy.” I didn’t turn around; I just unlocked the door and slipped into the morning. It was almost 9am, and I was hungry.

I walked the three blocks home, poured myself into my pajamas and ordered an omelet from the diner around the corner. After two bites, I was too exhausted to eat. It’s exhausting to revisit your past, and even more exhausting to admit to yourself the timing was perfect, but the people in the equation were wrong. Timothy is never going to be Jean-Michel Basquiat and I’m never going to be Sylvia Plath, and although I mourn the silliness of it all, I think it’s better this way.

Ersatz: A Burned Out Light Bulb

2011-10-14T13:44:00.003-04:00

I put down the book and rolled onto my side. The window was dirty, and the lights from the streets below, the ones to the south that I had memorized, were hazy and blurry. Had I needed a clearer view, I would have reached for a rag, a substance full of ammonia or bleach; but I preferred it that way: disguising the truth.

The truth is hard to tell. I think I’ve obscured it so far off from its original form, that had it been made of clay, a perfect figure with all its limbs attached, it would now be a torso that lacked the necessary parts to escape my reconfiguring of it all. I have this way of altering things to my whim, to the way I need them to be; it is not a gift.

He sat in the window and stared into the sky as if trying to take it down with his gaze—that’s how I would write him; but the truth is, he was just leaning against the wall and there was no window in sight. And when I wrote that he looked at me, smiled, and ran the back of his hand against his cheek as if trying to wipe away food, the truth was there was no smile at all, just a straight look, a blankness, a lack of recognition. It would be as though we had never met, as if we’d just bumped shoulders one night in a bar.

I find my version of him in the protagonist of my favorite books, and I, somehow, draw myself into the mix. I’m the table beneath his flat palm, the whiskey he drinks, and the moisture from his bottom lip that is left on the rim of a glass. I’m the streets on which he walks; I’m the burned out light bulb in his bedroom, the one he can’t quite reach to replace. No one wants to be a burned out light bulb.

I use him. I make no apologies for this, nor will I ever write the ending as it will actually be. He’ll be taller or shorter, his skin will be darker or lighter, the scars will find themselves to other parts of his body, and he’ll be wearing a red sweater—this part I’ve already decided. There will be a sidewalk involved, but I won’t be in the makeup of it; I will not be locked down in gravel and dirt. I will probably wear something extravagant, like a gown I can’t afford and have no reason to be wearing at all. And the music, the song that will play during the credits, during the acknowledgements, during the endless thank yous that won’t bear his name, will be something only he will understand.

The chosen font of the words will have no meaning; the time of day will not serve as a backdrop that hints at a sequel. But the front window of the store, the one that will be just off to the left of this finale, will be smudged with fingerprints; and the fluorescent lights just on the other side will be brighter than necessary. Yes, I think that will do.

Harmartia: Geronimo’s Trampoline

2011-09-20T00:41:00.002-04:00

Geronimo was in need of a haircut. His curly white bouffant hung like a white cloud over his eyes, and although I’m sure he could see quite fine, it must have been quite hazy under there.

I had just pulled into the driveway when I saw the tiny white furball running around the backyard shaking a stuffed animal twice his size. When I heard a woman yell his name, I again checked the address. I seemed to be at the right place.

“Geronimo! Stop being so insolent! If you don’t behave, you won’t be able to watch Days of Our Lives later!” yelled the elderly woman. Had she just said it once, I would have thought it was my ears playing tricks on me, but she threw out the threat a second and third time, so there really was no doubt. The small dog was running the risk of missing out on Days of Our Lives, and had I known anything about soap operas, I would have understood just how dire the threat was—it was about to start.

Geronimo, who couldn’t have weighed more than five pounds, dropped what pieces of stuffed animal remained and made a beeline into the house. The woman, decked out in pink gabardine pants and a yellow t-shirt that read “York, Maine” with a smiling lighthouse on it, and having realized she was being watched, turned around and looked at me.

“I’m Amanda,” I said. “I’m here to work with David and Sean.” My initial response was to tell her I wasn’t selling anything, that I wasn’t there to do her any harm, all normal things a possible bad egg might say in defense of their creepy behavior, but for once the truth came out, and I said it again: “I’m here to work with David and Sean.”

“Oh,” was her response. It came out flatly as if she had already decided she did not care for me. She pushed her hair that was equally white and puffy as Geronimo’s off her forehead. “I’m Annie. I’m Helen’s sister. I come by to check on her everyday.”

At that moment I knew two things: Helen owned the small house just on the outskirts of downtown Portsmouth, and her nephew, David, had somehow finagled his way into using her dining room for his startup company. His reason being, as he told me over the phone: “Helen didn’t need it anyway.”

Sean had been a one-night stand of my friend Holly. They had met at the Coat of Arms one night in Portsmouth where most people in town met for one-night stands, and somewhere during mid-coitus he said that he was starting a company with his friend David and they needed someone to edit their marketing material. Having been unemployed since graduation and my degree on my parents’ wall mocking me on a daily basis, Holly immediately thought of me. Then, as she explained it, she came.

“That’s the part of the evening I didn’t need to hear,” I told her over the phone the next morning.

“But it was so weird,” she said, “I said your name and pop! Maybe I’m a lesbian.”

“Well that will suck for you, because you’re not my type.”

She gave me Sean’s contact information, and he and I agreed I’d start the following Monday. It was also during that conversation that Sean put David on the phone with me to explain that Helen, his aunt and owner of the house who was so kind as to hand over that dining room was “sick.” He didn’t explain in what matter or form she was “sick,” she just was and I should be aware of it. I assumed cancer; I figured she was probably bald and for some reason he felt the need to prepare me as if I had never seen a cancer patient before.

After giving me the once over, Annie let me into the house and showed me where the boys were staked out. The dining room table, which had been pushed out of the way so this business could get up and off the ground, was against the wall and the accompanying chairs had been piled on top of it. I noticed the cheap chandelier was resting on the top chair along with several broken light bulb shards.

“We didn’t need it,” said David.

“It was too girly,” continued Sean.

I rolled my eyes. So that’s how this is going to be.

Both of the boys were 22 years old, I was 23; and while I had an exact idea of what I wanted to do with my life, they did not. They had both been sports management majors, and since the Red Sox had not called to hire either one of them in some capacity since graduation, this was the next best thing. They couldn’t pay me except for lunch—which actually translated to whatever I could find in Helen’s fridge—but eventually there would be stock options.

“Stock options?” I asked. I thought David was joking.

“Yeah,” he said quite seriously, “stock options.”

“And what is it you guys do again?”

“We’re a business that decides the net worth of other businesses’ computer hardware,” he explained in a way that seemed as though he were trying to convince his parents for some sort of startup cash. He also explained that no other company of its kind had existed, so “we’re getting in at the best time—we’ll be loaded by spring.” I knew by spring, I’d be in New York City; I also knew if these two bumbling idiots were millionaires by then, I’d cut off my right arm and throw in the towel on everything.

There was a loud knock at the door. Annie was on the other side of the glass pane pointing to the doorknob to be unlocked. “We have to lock it or Geronimo will push his way through,” explained David, “it doesn’t latch otherwise.”

I opened the door for her as Geronimo raced over my foot and into the piles of paper on the floor.

“David!” she snapped. “Did you tell Amanda about Helen yet?”

“Yes,” he said coldly trying to grab Geronimo who weaved in and out of his legs at the speed of the jackrabbit. “Annie get this fucking dog out of here! We’re about to have a business meeting!”

Annie rolled her eyes, pushed past me and snatched up the troublemaking dog. Then she turned to me and pointed her wrinkled finger that badly needed a manicure in my face. “The Kit-Kats are off limits! But you can have anything else you want! Kit-Kats are Helen’s favorite…” she said.

I was struck by her seriousness. I was also struck by David’s seriousness when he asked me to take the “minutes” for our business meeting that was mostly about how many slices of pizza they ate the night before at Sal’s, and how the cashier had “awesome jugs.”

But I kept going back to “work.” Not because I thought I’d learn anything, but because it was something to do and I couldn’t find a job anyway.

After about three weeks, Annie cornered me just when I was getting out of my car. I had barely shut the door behind me when I turned to see her coming right at me, clearly on a mission.

“Helen says she hasn’t met you yet,” she said, mildly suspicious. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at, or why she felt it necessary to approach me in such an aggressive manner. I wasn’t sure what she thought I was up to, but if I was overdoing my welcome on the pudding pops, I would cut back to three a day if need be.

“I’m only here a couple days a week for a few hours,” I explained, “so no, I haven’t met her yet.”

“Well you should,” snapped Annie, “it’s her house you’re using.” She wasn’t being mean or rude, but instead curt. It was the New Englander way of being curt; the way people from Maine are suspect of those from New Hampshire, and the New Hampshire folk are suspicious of the Massachusetts crowd and all of them are mildly confused by Connecticut.

It was true that I should meet Helen at some point, but I wasn’t about to barge into her bedroom and have a good ole’ fashion sit down. This was something I kindly explained to Annie in as few words as possible: “Yes. I should meet Helen.”

The thing was I had heard Helen. The bathroom was right next to her bedroom, and although I had never heard any talking, I had heard deep breaths that were similar to a yoga class. I had also heard the bed squeak on several occasions. Since I was consuming all the free diet Coke I possibly could, I spent a good amount of time in the bathroom peeing, so I had also spent a good amount of time wondering what the hell the deal was with this Helen woman.

I said it out loud again, “Yes. I should meet Helen.”

“She’s up today,” said Annie pointing to the side door, “she’s in there watching Wheel of Fortune.” What it is with old people and Wheel of Fortune, I’ll never understand, but it seems to be some sort of staple for their kind.

Although I was timid about meeting this woman who was dying, by what I wasn’t told but was able to deduce with my quick-thinking brain, I knew that since she was “up” I really couldn’t avoid it.

I was somewhat terrified. Such a big deal had been made out of Helen, that I was sure I’d walk into the room, the room that I had no chance of walking around to get to the dining room, and see a horribly deformed woman; that I was walking into a remake of The Elephant Man, but that no one had the guts to formulate the exact words. I hesitantly stood next to Annie unsure of what I should do. I scratched the nape of my neck, so my fingers would have a purpose while I stood there wondering why it was so dire that I scurry in there immediately and present myself to the woman.

From inside the house I could hear a gruff voice that scolded Geronimo. “Get off me!” it yelled, and then the voice yelled out for Annie.

“I don’t know why that dog insists on jumping on Helen every chance he gets,” she said. “He’s lucky Days Our Lives is over.” Annie didn’t say that sentence at me, but rather in my presence, and it made me feel a little uneasy.

I followed the petite woman, who was yet again sporting pink gabardine pants, inside the house…

When I told people the story later, the part about how I didn’t initially see Helen, they were confused. I chalk it up to the fact that I’m sort of a space cadet, I’m too often unaware of my surroundings and mostly it’s this sorry attempt at self-preservation. I have this ability to totally turn off, if I need to; I think that’s what I did.

Helen was seated on the couch to my left when I walked into the room. My focus was on Annie’s back, which was right in front of me, so it wasn’t until the gruff voice asked if I was Amanda that I turned around to face the direction from which it was coming. When I saw the elusive Helen, I immediately bit my tongue to prevent my jaw from dropping. I bit it so hard that I could taste the blood as it oozed into the rest of my mouth.

To call Helen fat, would be wrong; to call her obese, even by American standards, would be a far understatement. I was unsure what the adjective was for a woman that size. Besides What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? I had never in all my life seen such a large person.

Helen lounged on the navy blue couch; across her mid-section was the quilt that normally sat folded on the armrest. The quilt, of basic size and made of pastel pieces of fabric that Annie had made for Helen—probably long ago—looked like a misplaced piece of eccentric wallpaper amongst an orange landscape for which it was too small. The orange fabric was, for lack of a better word, a sheet that seemed to be fastened around Helen with what looked like safety pins.

“If I had known this was one of the days you’d be coming to work, I would have worn my festive cape,” she said laughing. I smirked. I couldn’t tell if she was acknowledging the elephant in the room, or if she dabbled in witchcraft.

Her face was very oval and long, and despite her body weight, it wasn’t as fat as one would assume. She wore completely out of date glasses, that were large and tinted brown, and her hair was a natural salt-and-pepper, had been swept up under a plastic headband—the kind you’d find in the kiddie aisle at a drug store.

Although it was quite comfortable in the room, her skin, even that of her forearm, was covered in a thin layer of droplets, that I assumed was sweat; and on her left ring finger was a gold band that had the skin not grown around it over time, probably would have immediately cut the circulation off of anyone else forced to wear such an obscenely small piece of jewelry. Her presence made the room smell like sweat and rose oil, the kind you’d pour over a potpourri dish.

I wanted to ask her how her day was so as to appear normal and civil, but I couldn’t look her in the eye. I could only scan her, take her all in as a whole then shift my glance upward, past her head and at the generic acrylic painting on the wall. It also didn’t help that she was eating a tuna fish sandwich and Geronimo was perched on her shoulder like a parrot waiting for the leftovers.

“I have to get to work,” I said. “But it was nice meeting you, Helen.” As I walked into the “office”—the boys had insisted that’s what it should be called—I heard Annie ask Helen if she wanted another sandwich.

And so the story went like this, according to David when we decided to blow off work and head downtown later to the decks for beer:

Helen had been in love a long time ago. Helen had not always been this way. Helen wanted to be a writer, but failed at it. Helen got depressed. Helen ate herself into a monstrosity. Helen’s husband left her. Helen just kept getting bigger, and based on the food in her house, Helen had no intentions of getting the scale to move backward.

“That’s what happens when you don’t fulfill you destiny, man,” said David as he took a sip of his beer. “You get fat and your husband leaves you.”

I pulled at my stomach under my dress and quickly tried to do the math as to how many pudding pops I had consumed over the last few weeks. I also thought about my own hopes to be a writer, the five pages I was into my “novel,” and how then, at 23, I had given myself until I was 25 years old to make it in the writing world. I did not want to be Helen. I did not have enough skin on my body to stretch so far so as to be Helen.

A couple weeks went by and I only heard Helen in her bedroom. I realized that what sounded like a yoga class, was a breathing machine and it was absolutely necessary for her to survive when she slept. I continued to “work” with the boys, eat too many pudding pops and, when I got home at night, I stared at the five pages of my novel before typing the word “fuck” and closing the file. I was up to well over 100 “fucks;” all other words had been used far less.

One afternoon I showed up at the house to find a fire engine in the driveway. I parked on the side of the road and my thoughts almost immediately went to Helen having dropped dead of a heart attack. I opened the back door to a room of chaos.

Helen was lying in the middle of the floor; her perfectly fastened sheet was around her waist revealing the largest pair of beige granny panties I had ever seen. Around her stood six firefighters as well as Annie, Sean and David. Helen was squealing at the top of her lungs as she rolled back and forth in a sorry attempt at getting back to a standing position.

The look on my face said it all as one of the fire fighters touched my arm and told me “it happens all the time;” it being Helen falling and the fire department needing to be called. Although the six men stood there ready to save the day, as all firemen do, Helen refused to comply. The fireman holding a wooden board was leaning on it as if he’d been there for hours and was officially done with the situation, while the chief was trying to calmly speak to Helen.

“Helen, you know how this is going to go down,” he said. “We’re going to roll you onto the board and prop you back up.”

“No!” She shrieked. “There have to be more of you! There have to be eight of you to lift me!” Although she was quite defiant in the fact that she wouldn’t roll onto the board, she also wouldn’t stop flopping back and forth on the floor as if she had no control, as if her body was so desperate to get back onto sturdy ground that it would stop at nothing. I looked at David and Sean, who walked away and headed into the office. As for me, I was stuck on the other side of Helen; there was no way I was going to make it into the office until she was picked back up and put either on the couch or in her walker.

As Helen fought with the firemen, Annie was in the kitchen making them snacks, and Geronimo, who must have gotten into some sort of mud outside, was darting back and forth over Helen’s massive stomach. Every time he stopped to enjoy a bounce, as if she were his own private trampoline, Helen would call out for him to get off of her.

I looked around at the faces in the room. I wanted someone to crack a smile over what was going on, someone to break the awkwardness of this woman who was probably pushing 500 pounds rolling on a living room floor, while her sister made snacks for firemen, a dirty miniature poodle ran around in circles as if it were his birthday party, and I, stared in horror, selfishly thinking that was my future. Helen was my future.

Suddenly David came out of the office. “Helen, if you’re going to be there all day you’re going to have to at least have them move the couch so Amanda can get in here in work.” He said it so dryly, so unaffected, that I was even more embarrassed than I had been just minutes before. The firemen nodded, moved the couch, and I walked around Helen, who was now calling out for Annie to make her a sandwich, too.

I couldn’t say a word. David handed me a packet of marketing material to go over, and I immediately noticed that the word “convenience” had been misspelled in the very first sentence. As I glanced further down, it was misspelled the whole way down the page. There was nothing “convenient” about those two sitting in that dining room in their mesh shorts talking about the Celtics and drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee; there was nothing convenient about the fact that I was driving an hour to a pretend job in which I was being paid in pudding pops.

In the other room I could hear Helen as she continued to yell while the firemen tried to talk sense into her, but she refused to listen. Geronimo began to bark, and David yelled for everyone to shut up. Although I was sitting behind them, and neither of the boys could see my face, Sean suddenly said: “It will be fine. They’ll send in the extra firemen and the get her back on her feet eventually.” I looked over my shoulder at the chairs piled on the dining room table, and the window just to the right of it. I decided I would not be staying; I decided I would not be coming back.

Through the glass paned door I could see the same scenario in the living room that I just left behind—there was no way I was walking through that again.

I got up and leaned my hips into the table. I was unsure how to proceed, so instead of over-analyzing it, I just climbed onto it, apologized to Helen in my head for putting my dirty sneakers on her table, and reached over to unlock the window. When I pushed it up, it made a loud snap and I feared I had broken something, but everything seemed to still be intact. David and Sean turned around.

“What the fuck are you doing?” asked David. “If we open a window we’ll be wasting the air conditioning.”

“I need air,” I replied as I pushed up the screen. Then for reasons I’ll never really understand I jumped out the window. It wasn’t even a jump as much as I let myself fall. If I had jumped that would insinuate some sort of momentum on my part, but I didn’t have room for momentum; I only had room to dangle and drop. I landed in the shrubbery and laid there for what seemed like forever trying to figure out why I had thought that leaping out the window was a sane move. Sean got to the window first and stared down at me. My legs were badly scratched and although I had fallen less than six feet, my back hurt, too.

“What did David tell you about the air conditioning?” he asked.

The sunburnt grass felt scratchy against my shoulder blades, and my mangled legs that were perfectly tanned from the summer were now straddling a green bush that looked like some sort of dwarf Christmas tree. I had my bag in one hand and my car keys in the other; and sadly all I kept thinking was why I didn’t grab a pudding pop for the road.

I put my hand over my eyes to block out the sun and said to Sean, “he said it would be wasted if I opened the window.” I got back up just as I saw the firemen coming into the dining room to see what the noise had been. I couldn’t tell if I was embarrassed or shocked or just plain out of mind. I limped across the street to my car, put it in drive and drove in completely the wrong direction for almost 20 minutes.

Although I never saw any of them again, Holly would still occasionally run into Sean. He did ask her once if she knew why I left so strangely out the window that day, but Holly, having known me since 4^th grade, explained that sometimes I’m too impulsive for my own good. It’s true, I am impulsive, but I wasn’t being impulsive that day. That day, I was acting on one of my other negative traits: selfishness. As I listened to the commotion in the house that day, as I sat in the dining room trying to block it out as I watched the indentation my sneakers made against the plush brown carpet, I had to jump. I knew two things in that moment: Annie would be in pink gabardine pants the next day; and although Helen and Geronimo might not be able to escape, I could.

Elegiac: A Story About Near Escapes

2011-09-13T03:38:00.001-04:00

I turned my back on you. That’s what I did. I sort of spun on my heel, as if introducing a dance that I had no intention of finishing. That’s what I did. Had we been in a movie, I would have looked over my shoulder to see you watching me walk away. This was not a movie; you never watch me walk away. I turned on my heel, dramatically, for nothing. I felt the grinding of the sidewalk against the bottom of my shoes for no good reason. The sensation felt empty. I shrugged. I shrug at facts.

There was this haziness over head, a golden reverberation against an already dimly lit sky, and I took it as a notice; I took it as my gunshot against the sound of us shuffling along on the ground; earth bound for the moment. And when I knew you were out of sight, I ran. I ran as fast as I could, and when I stumbled, I laughed; and when my legs gave out and I tumbled to the ground ripping a hole in my flesh, I got up and kept moving. I couldn’t tell you my intention; I couldn’t even tell myself. All I knew was I was trying to out run you; I was trying to beat you at the game you had been winning for too long.

The length of Houston is longer than it looks on a map, and I was out of breath before I reached Broadway; I was out of gumption before I woke up that morning. My shoes were not made for this; my heart was not prepared for this tactic, but still I brought my knees up with each inhale and let them pound against the cement with each exhale; and the balls of my feet ached before I reached Sullivan.

And I couldn’t tell you if you asked me why; and I couldn’t draw it on a map if you begged for a sketch, and if you asked what these scars meant, I’d probably lie, and the places in which I stash you for safe keeping are these parts of me of which I hate best (I hate best)… and I’d lie about them, too.

It was somewhere around Sixth Avenue where I noticed the sky was no longer golden, but more pink – the west side glows pink. It was somewhere around Greenwich that I realized I was bleeding from parts of me that were not bleeding when I started. I was somewhere around the West Side Highway when I seriously considered making a break for it. And the parked cars were louder than the ones that moved, the people who stood on the pier in silence were louder than my breath that gasped for recognition.

The problem was this: I had had an emotional morning is all. I had not woken up on the right side of the bed; I had forgotten to set my alarm clock; I had realized too much before noon, and it was easier to blame you for it all than stab at the parts of me I love best and condemn them for having existed in the first place.

If only I could terminate you on command; if only I could bring you back from the dead when I was done; if only I knew the way to implant myself inside you like a mad scientist, the kind you see in old movies, the kind covered in ketchup for effect and the ones who are full of heart but half of a brain… yes, that would do.

I don’t have ketchup in my refrigerator; and that mad scientist apron, well, I left it on the hanger in New Hampshire. But I remember the way you feel inside me, and I remember the way it felt to rest my fingertips against your spin in a makeshift tent for the hiding. However, had I been a mad scientist, this would not be an issue, the reason to run, that is…

I would have stood over a caldron knee-deep in sewage and magic; I would have contrived, as the best scientists do, a reason, or at the very least an excerpt from a foreign text that only 2 of us understand. That’s what I would have done.

I lost you somewhere between 11pm and next year; I lost you in the cushions that have long stopped being comfortable… cushions are sometimes replaced with worn down broken springs, the ones I used to love, and the ones that now leave me bruised with every turn. We don’t put couches out to pasture, but maybe we should.

I turned my back on you. That’s what I did. I was tired, you see; and my morning, well it was not something not worth mentioning. Instead, I did this thing where I spun on my heel as if introducing a dance, I had no intention of finishing… but you stopped leading me months ago, so there was no point anyway. And I looked up at the sky, that was some sort of golden, as if ripped from a comic book, where I’m not the heroine, and I knew… it was the parts of me I hate best.

At least now I’ve confirmed the importance of parked cars, the way they stand there and reflect life, as I heard them making sounds the entire way west. I am not a parked car, and neither are you, and that is the problem.

Indite: A Story About Pretending

2011-08-31T02:00:00.002-04:00

Bjorn Borg.

That was the name that was scribbled on the cotton underwear that snuggly pressed against his body. In comparison to his usual boxers that hung from his hipbones, he now looked like a kid in Underoos. Part of me wished he had a cape to match. His left leg was straight, and his right knee slightly bent as he stood looking at me waiting for me to leave. And although my blood boiled and something inside me raged, I stared back at him as if penning every detail along the folds in my brain, the ones that waver, the ones that encompass my flawed limbic system. I had yet to find a cure for suppressing my memory.

I had not slept enough, and my veins were still full of alcohol. When I breathed out I could taste beer, and my throat, too parched to scream, seemed to be on its own mission to strangle me, but my mouth always won that race. He had a large bottle of whiskey in his hands, the one I had tried not once or twice, but three times to throw out the window. I was unsure of the point I was trying to make; I just knew I wanted to hear glass break. Christoffer held on to it for dear life, of course, as if it were a baby that he was saving for later, a prized possession he’d show off to his friends who would all swoon, pinch its cheeks and remark on how much it looked just like him: unwashed and bottled for further consumption.

Although I wanted to reach for the bottle again, and probably did in my absence of focus, I mostly thought of a photo on my father’s desk. It was a picture of my sister and I in our matching Underoos and wellies standing under a sprinkler in the backyard. It must have been 1984. I had stared at the photo so many times, I had thought I could remember that day, but the truth was I was mistaken. I could pretend I remembered the way the sun created a glare against the sprinkler that darted around in a circular motion, and I could pretend that was the day my sister stepped on a bee, but I’d be wrong. Just like I’d be wrong when I would later think back to him in his Bjorn Borg underwear. I’d choose to be wrong for the sake of self-preservation or literary license or simply because I could.

The weekend before we had wandered Brooklyn. I remember my shins began to sweat as they do on days that are achingly humid. It’s hard to imagine shins sweating, but there’s a breaking point for everything. We went from bar to bar, not on a mission, not with a purpose, but instead a slovenly attempt as soaking up the Saturday. We found ourselves in Greenpoint, we took a seat at one of those long communal tables, the sort you’d find in a German beer hall, or a bar in Brooklyn that likes to pretend it’s a German beer hall. It was supposed to have rained, but there wasn’t a cloud in sight. I reached down to touch my lower legs and pushed the beads of sweat toward my ankles as he opened his umbrella and looked toward the sky. He looked like a Disney character that an illustrator had forgotten to give song, but he twirled his umbrella over his shoulder anyway. I felt bad for not fearing he’d injury someone walking by us.

“If we sit here long enough like this, then those ugly people will go away,” was how he justified his decision. The people, whom he defined as ugly, those who were most likely not from the neighborhood, not from Brooklyn, and perhaps not even from Manhattan, looked at us with glances that could only be surmised as annoyance. But it didn’t matter, he explained, because we had been there first.

When he closed the umbrella to focus on his beer, he put his hands flat on the table and pointed at the white lines that ran from east to west across his nails. He told me that since he’d given up pushing his cuticles down, the lines had started to go away.

I rolled my eyes at what he thought was an epiphany in regards to nail aesthetics. I told him it was in his head. I tried to push at his overgrown cuticles, and he pulled away.

“But I can’t see the half moons,” I said. I looked at my own nails, covered in chipped mint green polish and realized he would have had to be a girl to understand my reference. His fingernails no longer showcased half moons.

A friend of mine and her fiancé came to join us, and less than 20 minutes in we knew that the social situation was failing. As we walked along behind them toward another bar, Christoffer grabbed my arm and whispered: “We need to go to Chinatown and find trouble. We need to shake them.” I looked at his smile, his widening eyes as if a revelation had set in and agreed to one more drink, then we’d head out. We were looking for scary things: opium dens and massage parlors that gave happy endings, maybe the Chinese mob, too. It’s easy to pretend you’re the star of your own film noir in Chinatown if the nighttime lighting is just right.

And when we left not much longer having feigned other social obligations, we hobbled along Bedford Avenue. I stopped to look at a menu at a bar, and he called out: “That’s how the story will start!” I stopped and turned around to face him. “We went to Chinatown looking for opium dens and massage parlors.”

I walked toward him and tucked my arm in his. “You can’t lock your arm in Jackson’s, can you?” he asked. It was true. Two-year-old nephews are too short for such things. The feel of his shirt in the crook of my inner elbow, and his quick pace made me rush to catch up. I remember thinking how my pen could never keep up with this. I remember thinking I should have just washed his dishes and left the towel on the floor. There should have been at least something for him to pick up; I shouldn’t have to be the only one with a reminder.

We found the cheesiest place in Chinatown we could for dinner: pink linens and matching cloth napkins. I put my chin in the fattest part of my palm and watched him order the creepiest thing on the menu. I opted for rice; it seemed safe. We both ordered a Chinese beer. We needed fuel for our adventure. When his fish arrived, the kind that still has its face intact, I watched him pull bones from his mouth with each bite, and I looked away. I feared I’d gag, I feared I’d throw up. But it wasn’t about the fish. I had ingested too much of something else.

I focused on the buttons of his shirt to stabilize myself; the way my hot pink watch he wore contrasted against his tan skin. I looked away again. I was stuck in repeat mode. I was a record that skipped. I had yet to find a cure for suppressing my memory.

We paid the check. We walked down a side street off Canal. We wanted to find something unnerving, a stairwell that headed into another world. Perhaps even with appropriate lighting a film noir is only relegated to Hollywood sets and Jack Nicholson pictures.

The karaoke bar was a bust. The alleys that reeked of fish and slippery with aquatic intestines came up empty. I rubbed my arm that was moist with humidity as he eyed a massage parlor and announced again: “That’s how the story will start!”

I looked up at the neon sign. I was exhausted, and although I should have been feeding off of his excitement, I just wanted to shower. I wanted to rest my body against my bed, or against him, or against anything that would provide a temporary spine for my back. I agreed to the massage knowing full well it would require some effort to stay awake.

There would be no happy ending to either of our massages. Instead, my slight dozing off abruptly came to an end when he called out my last name to see how I liked it. With a final push against my lower back that almost made me moan as if I were coming, I thanked the masseuse, and gathered my things. In the waiting area Christoffer stood, arms flailing as he tried to get directions to a bar where we’d find trouble. But we were in Chinatown, not Thailand and we didn’t have the energy to fight the Staten Island crowds at whatever the massage parlor owner deemed “hip.”

Instead we bought ingredients for omelets the next morning and headed to my apartment. My skin was still damp with humidity.

A week later, with Hurricane Irene having created a mass hysteria that New York hadn’t seen since the Christmas before, he stood before me in his Bjorn Borg underwear. My fingertips were slightly ripped from the ribbed cap of the whiskey bottle I had tried to destroy, the whiskey he bottle he clutched like a baby. I wanted to tell him I was scared to be alone, that I was scared to sit in the dark should the lights go out and my flashlight, the one I had had since college, failed me. It didn’t matter; he had made other plans and I was not part of them. I was not his concern.

Before I could leave I unleashed my fury; before I could smack myself into silence, I let the alcohol, the fucking alcohol that would eventually be the death of me, unravel like a torn ribbon that has no place in a performance, unwrap itself against him. In that moment, I loved him less.

As he opened the door, he tucked a jar in my bag and said “just in case.” I was not his concern.

I could have waited until I got outside to stand under the overcast skies to see what that jar was, or I could have, out of dramatic habit thrown it against the floor and made a run for it. Instead three stairs down, I saw it was almond butter and brought it back to him. I wasn’t sure how to word it, but I knew he needed it more than I did. I could pretend I never gave it back to him, I could pretend I never tried to throw the whiskey; I could pretend I couldn’t recall the way he looked in his underwear that morning, or the smell of Mott Street in August, or the comparison of his arm in mine to that of a child… I could pretend. Because as he told me himself, I’m far from stable and in some ways that saves me.

Entelechy: A Story About Urban Legends

2011-08-11T01:41:00.008-04:00

“I was sunburned… as if a boiled lobster…” I paused to gather my thoughts. I cleared my throat and started again:

“I was perfectly tanned… against Paulo who was also perfectly tanned. We had been hiking in the outskirts of Rio. We had made love underneath a… big fern, a fern so luscious and dripping with moisture from the rains, it was like the dampness of our sweaty skin that dripped with aching desire… a desire so intense that…”

“Why don’t you let me know when you want to be honest,” said my therapist. I looked at the back of my hand that was blazing red from just two days before, and shifted my attention to a small coffee stain on my skirt. I did not want to start over. I was happier with Paulo in Rio. I was more content being perfectly tanned.

“I was sunburned… as if a boiled lobster…” I sighed at the fact, and pushed my hair behind my ear. I continued, and tried not to get lost in a tropical rainforest. “And having wanted too many beers after the sun beat down on my pale skin, I opted for Williamsburg.”

“Williamsburg?” asked my therapist.

“Yes… is that so hard to imagine?” She shrugged. “So…

I walked into the dully lit bar on Broadway, a bar just underneath the J train. I had been there before and did not care for it. It was just a couple blocks away from my friend Lilit’s place, and lacking energy to hold my own in a conversation, she was the perfect choice for a drinking buddy. She tends to talk more than I, and I just wanted to listen that night. I told her about the vibrators I had received from Trojan at work on Friday; she told me about her upcoming trip to Australia. I pushed at the skin on my arm as if to insure that the red was permanent at least for the time being, and she ran her fingers over her porcelain skin and looked at me. I really should have learned about the wonders of SPF by now.

To the left of us sat a gentleman, of sorts, sporting a bandage on his head and a band t-shirt of which I would normally dismiss had it not been a dully lit bar. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him show interest in our conversation – vibrator talk will do that. When he inquired, and I couldn’t hear him, I asked him to join us. Four beers in, I’m a saint.

His bandage? A bicycle accident. His name? Steve Miller. Like the band? Yes. We asked for I.D. He was tall; taller than any fella I had met in awhile – 6’3” to be exact. Something else we learned from his I.D. He was not my type…

“He was not my type,” I said aloud to my therapist.

“In what way?” she asked.

“In the way that he was alive and not my type sort of way… in the way that I did not care for the band on his shirt, or the fact that he told me he loved the Beatles,” I paused to give her space to comment. But she didn’t, so I continued, “And I felt his shorts should have been a different shade of navy, and that he should not have been drinking the beer he was…”

“What beer was he drinking?”

“I don’t know. Whatever kind I wasn’t drinking… and never would.”

“How can you say that, if you don’t even know?” was her question as she squinted at me with a look the reminded me of my mother’s expression of disbelief.

“I don’t know,” I said again. “But it’s the same way I knew that when I took him home, I would not approve of his boxer choice… and I didn’t.”

“What was wrong with them?”

“They were just not anything that I felt was respectable… they were cotton knit, as opposed to that thin cotton, the type of cotton that boxers should be with an elastic top that is covered in ruched fabric that’s only ruched because of the elastic. There was no fabric to be ruched on his boxers’ top… just elastic. It made me think it was something a poor boy would wear. And I was scared to look too close in case I came across a hole to prove my assumption. It was safer to take his boxers off…”

“So you took him home?”

Had I had balls, I would have scratched and shifted them, swept my sweaty brow like John Wayne and pointed out the obvious: I didn’t just take him home, I fucked him.

“Yeah… and it was awful,” I said. Saying the word out loud crippled me. It was just admitting to the fact that I can’t have sex with strangers. It does nothing for me. I’d be more content eating pizza and watching a bad movie in a language I couldn’t understand.

“How was it so awful?” she asked.

“So…

I had heard of jackrabbit sex. The kind of sex where it’s pump, pump, pump, pump, pump at the rapid speed of a jack rabbit on cocaine trying to get to the finish line in some sort astronomical attempt at breaking a Guinness Book of World Record, but I had never experienced it myself. Until that night, I had assumed such behavior was an urban legend, a term that women used at brunch to describe a bad lay. I had not known that it actually existed, that there were real live guys doing such horrible things with their pelvises to women. It was bad enough that I stupidly thought I could take him home without feeling shitty about it the next day, but now I was being humped at a rate that should not be used unless the man in the equation is about to die and the last chance for the survival of the species is for him to blow his load into the woman’s vagina before he drops dead and all hope for mankind is lost. Then, and only then, is jackrabbit sex permitted – for the survival of the species.

I thought about this, of course, as I lay there staring up at the ceiling and focusing on the spots I had missed when I painted my bedroom wall a few years before. I thought about urban legends, too. Not just the one that was being disproved as I lay there, legs spread eagle, writing sci-fi stories in my head, but all the others you hear growing up. Like the driver behind you in his car who chases you down, to tell you that you have an axe murderer in your back seat – you know, because he, the other driver, can see the silhouette of the axe murderer, whereas you, the driver of your own car who is looking forward, can not.

I also thought of the one about how if you ate Pop Rocks and drank Coke at the same time, your head would explode. I was still fearful of that outcome, but had someone offered me the duo at that moment, I would have tried them… or at least suggested Steve Miller ingest some.

In between my walk down urban legend boulevard and my thoughts to write a bestselling novel about men who die after they come, I debated my own fate. Was I going to have to give in and fake it so he would stop? Was that really how things were going to go down?

I had not faked it in quite some time. I had, of course, faked it several times in my life, but it had been awhile. I tried to recall what sort of production it would entail. I weighed the pros and cons of combining screaming and scratching up his back with my nails. Would that stop this madness? From experience, I knew that his drunken state would probably not allow him to climax, or if it did, we’d be looking at too many hours of this thrusting motion that already had me slamming my head against the wall. He either did not notice, or did not care. My head could take it; my vagina and hips were less than thrilled.

I opted for little moans that would escalate into louder moans that would be sprinkled with “oh yes!” I briefly considered saying, “don’t stop,” but since that was the last thing I wanted, I concluded that “oh yes,” would show that I was still alive and hopefully, wouldn’t prolong the fucking assault on my soul…

“Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” asked my therapist.

I wasn’t going to answer her with a sentence. I was going to answer her with a question. “Have you ever had jackrabbit sex?”

“Point taken,” she said.

“So…

I’m moaning “oh yes,” and my phone is ringing and I’m trying to see who it see while Steve Miller is calling out “oh baby,” and I’m thinking to myself that this must be punishment for one of the many evil things I’ve done in this calendar year alone. And my head is knocking into the wall, and I’m pretty sure my neighbors can hear this insanity that’s going on. All the while I’m trying to focus on reaching an imaginary climax, but I’m still trying to remember all the urban legend tales from my youth, and I can’t decide where I want to commit my attention: on my fake orgasm, or my fun trip down memory lane.

I imagine that had it been brighter in my room, he would have seen the perplexed look on my face, as I tried to decide between the two possible thought processes. I settled on getting this guy off me as soon as possible, so I took the volume up to a notch that’s just below screaming, and he starts yelling “come with me, baby!” and I’m actually starting to blush and I have a leg cramp. And since my acting skills are the equivalent to his fucking skills, I figure I should just get to the point and I whisper “I’m coming,” in his ear while I roll my eyes and bite my tongue so I don’t yawn.

Finally, after who-fucking-knows how long, he collapsed on me, out of breath, only to tell me he’s too drunk to come. Oh really? If he had addressed this however long ago, he could have been out the door and I could have been eating pizza and painting my fucking nails hot pink or some equally obnoxious color. But no. Instead I’m dripping in his sweat, and his latex-wrapped dick is shriveling back up and out of me; and my phone is still ringing, I still can’t reach it, and he’s too rude to get up.

I finally roll him off of me, throw on the light, sigh loudly, grab my phone and march to the bathroom with the type of purpose you only see in movies about really important people; movies that, because of him and his suckage of life from me, I can’t even recall at the moment. I grab at my crotch to make sure it’s still there and am quite shocked it’s not covered in bruises and blood and looks like the star of some slasher movie. I suddenly feel the urge to apologize to my vagina, but I don’t because that might be too crazy, and I’m really trying to work on not being too crazy after behavior from recent weeks that may have just put me in the sub-category of ‘crazy but not yet too crazy.’

“And the missed calls?” asked my therapist.

“Christoffer, my sister and Bess… I didn’t call anyone back. I was too ashamed. I knew it was going to take at least the next 12 hours to come to grips with the jackrabbit sex, before I could vocalize what had happened,” I explained.

“Where was Steve Miller while you were in the bathroom?”

“In my room, I’m assuming,” I said, “although after several minutes he asked if he could come in… where he peed in front of me before I could get out of the room fast enough… seriously? And I actually asked him that.”

“What did he say?”

“He held his cock in his hand and said, ‘he’s nice looking, right?’”

“He did not,” said my therapist the exact way my friends had the day after the incident.

“He did,” I said.

“And what did you tell him?”

“So…

I stared at the wonky looking thing. It wasn’t wonky because there was anything particularly off about it, but simply because penises are wonky looking by definition. How does one answer that? Was all I could think.

The bathroom light was the only light on in my apartment, and I stood in the darkness of the kitchen staring in shock at the guy before me who had actually asked me a question I had hoped I would never be asked. It was average – everything about it. It wasn’t big or small, or this or that. It was so average and plain that even when I walked away after giving him my answer I had already forgotten what it looked like. I had wished the question had been that easy to forget, too.

“It’s OK for lacking foreskin,” I said, and turned the light out on him and went to bed. He didn’t ask me the meaning, nor did he offer to leave. He came into my bedroom and curled himself up against me. I couldn’t tell if it was out of obligation – as the rumor is that women have to be held after sex – or if he truly wanted to. Not having any major desire to spoon with someone I didn’t know, I told him that it was a complete lie, the whole thing about women needing to be cuddled after sex, and if he felt the need to do such a thing, it would be best if he left, picked up someone else, fucked her and then snuggled up on her. I, however, would need him to roll to the other side of the bed, if he intended to stay. He kissed the back of my neck and rolled away. A part of me died when I realized the lights from my window were illuminating the outline of his boxers on my bedroom floor. I wondered how wrong it would be to hurl them out the window. But I fell asleep before I could act on it.

“You wanna know how I woke up the next morning?” I asked my therapist.

“We may have to save it for your next session,” she suggested, “we’re running low on time.”

“Oh no, I have to share this painful detail… I’ll pay you extra if need be…. So…

I woke up to Steve Miller kissing my hip and telling me he wants to recite me some of his poetry. Why? I don’t know. I’m lying there cringing as he tries to reach around and touch me in some sorry attempt at having sex again, but having used up my only good line, and being just moments away from giving in and apologizing to my vagina, I immediately shut him down. I tell him my friend Lyndsay is on her way over, that there’s a wedding emergency, and he better scram because she’s really conservative and will judge me for being so scandalous. He dresses slowly in front of me, as if trying to tantalize me so I’ll tell him to stay, to take me now, to fuck me like only a true jackrabbit can, but I don’t. I looked out the window instead and wondered how hot it was going to be.

We exchanged numbers just before he left, and I waited a whole five minutes before I deleted his. I went back to my room, stripped my bed of my sheets, ran them to the cleaners and came home to drown my body and apartment in bleach and Pine-Sol. I wondered if there was something stronger than bleach.

“Do you think it would have been a bad idea to have taken a bleach bath?” I asked my therapist.

“Yes,” she said, “but more importantly, why did you feel the need to rid yourself of him so quickly?”

I paused. I knew I could give her a thousand reasons: the Beatles, the wrong navy colored shorts, the fact that he was from the west coast, the way he sounded like my brother-in-law, or how he had a beard, but he wasn’t Zach Galifianakis so I felt betrayed. The list could have been endless had I wanted it to be.

“It’s the tan line,” I said. “The cross between untouched and scathed; the sun’s work, is what it was. It was the insertion of his shoulder blades against the air. I define it as permeating, like a vulgar task that hangs too low, too broken; unresolved in its absolution.”

“What’s that from?” she asked.

“I wrote it a couple weeks ago,” I explained. We both said nothing. I coughed so as to puncture the room with sound. “I guess the point is, I didn’t write that about Steve Miller. I’m never going to write like that about Steve Miller. I can’t justify it or understand it, but I do know this: Steve Miller’s shoulder blades mean nothing to me.”

Enervate: A Story About Donald Trump

2011-07-04T08:04:00.002-04:00

“Do you even know how lucky you are that I’m even here?” he yelled from the kitchen. I lay on my bed, on my left side and could see him as he shook the head of raw broccoli in my direction. “Lucky!” he yelled again. And again he shook the broccoli and I watched bits of it, the flower parts, shake off and onto the floor.

He had called just 20 minutes before:

“Hello?”

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’m drunk.”

“Clearly,” I said. I sat myself up on my elbow and craned my neck to see the clock. It was 330am. “It’s 330am.”

“You wanna get a drink?” he asked.

“No,” I snapped. “I’m an adult and have to work tomorrow. Why are you out on a Monday night?”

“Because I’m an adult, too. What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to sleep.”

“Wanna get a drink?” he asked again.

“No! Besides I thought we were in a fight.”

“Because you think you’re Donald Trump? Yeah we are.” And he hung up.

Two minutes later he called again.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Christoffer, I already told you.”

“Oh.”

“You sound really drunk. Why don’t you just come over instead of trying to get back to Brooklyn? Where are you?”

“I don’t know. Do you want me to bring a turkey sandwich?”

“No thank you,” I told him.

“But you love turkey sandwiches!” he squealed as if he was just remembering or if I should also be delighted in my love for them. It’s true, I do love turkey sandwiches, but since it was a 330am on a Tuesday morning and I was stone sober, I would pass.

Ten minutes later he was leaning on the buzzer.

I unlocked the door and crawled back into bed. He let himself into my apartment and swung around his bags of food. Normal people bought drunk person food at that hour. Christoffer’s idea of drunk person food is raw broccoli, kale and spinach.

So there he stood in my kitchen at 4am shaking his raw broccoli at me telling me I should be lucky and grateful for him forgiving me for saying the things that I said about him and his new gutter trash, hipster friends. I had apologized later, but I didn’t mean a word of my apology. They were gutter trash. The type to pull bloody tampons from trashcans, fling them against a brick wall and call it art. And you know what becomes of those people? They surround themselves with their version of creativity, with people who will pat them and each other on the back for being so innovative and individual in how they see the world. And they might even get an exhibit at a downtown gallery once before they die. But before they know it they’re 30, then 35 and 40, and then where are they? People like that don’t make art worth remembering, they don’t write words people will ever read and while they’ll support each other until there’s nothing left but a shell of the hipster they used to be, they’ll never realize they weren’t so individual after all. None of us are.

From my bed I watched him as he bit into the broccoli, then the bunch of kale, then back to the broccoli again.

“Then why are you here?” I asked.

“Because I was too drunk to get home.”

“Well don’t try to have sex with me later, if that’s how you feel.”

“I would never try to have sex with Donald Trump.”

I sighed. I rolled over to face the window as he proceeded to yell more craziness from the other room, his mouth full of raw vegetables.

The only part about the other night when we had fought that I was sorry for, the fight where he yelled at me that we shouldn’t sleep together anymore because it “confused” me, was the part where I said I knew I was about to grow him. The problem was I regretted it because I hated that the words were out there and words have a habit of fulfilling themselves when they’re unleashed.

I heard him walking toward my bedroom. He threw on the overhead light and walked over to the side I was facing. This time he shook his kale at me. “You’re a brat,” he said. This was true. But it was always nice when he thought he was telling me something I didn’t already know. “And Donald Trump.” However, this one was a mystery to me.

After he had consumed all of his kale, dropping half of it on my bedroom floor, he headed back to the kitchen. “I’m not impressed with Donald Trump so I’m not impressed with you!” he yelled.

I looked at the clock. It was then getting close to 430am and I wondered how much longer he was going to eat greenery and chastise me.

“I love that you come over here, drop your food all over the place, consume half my fridge at 330 in the morning and lecture me on manners and niceties,” I said.

“I’m a good person,” he said.

“Whatever helps you sleep at night, Christoffer.”

Although our fights when we were both drunk ended up in fiery explosions that really didn’t make sense, we were at least on the same page. When one of us was sober, it was far more difficult.

He shut off the kitchen light, locked the door and came into the bedroom. He looked at me. “You’re a pathetic brat,” he said.

By the time I could respond, his jeans were around his ankles and he was struggling to get out of them without falling. “You’re a pathetic brat,” I said back.

When his jeans were off and he was still standing, he took off his shirt and threw it on the floor. Instead of walking around to the other side of the bed, he crawled over me, kneeing me in the boob in the process. He lay on his back and sighed loudly. “Why am I even here?” he called out. “Because I’m pathetic,” he said answering his own question.

“Then be pathetically silent and let me go to sleep,” I said. I rolled away from him.

“You’re not a good person,” he said. “But me, I’m a good person. No, I’m a great person.”

“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to list out all your indiscretions that will suggest otherwise.” He rolled toward me and started pulling at my shoulder. “Stop touching me,” I said.

“I’m not,” he said as he continued to pull at me. I smacked his hand. “Stop touching me,” he mocked. He pulled himself against me, fitting perfectly in the bends and curves of my body that was in the fetal position. He put his hand on my hip and pulled at me again, then slipped his fingers slightly under the thin fabric of my underwear.

“Quit it,” I said.

“I’m not even touching you,” he said.

It was amazing that a 33-year-old woman and 29-year-old boy were having the stupid bickering we were having at 5am in the morning.

“I would never touch, Donald Trump,” he said. Then he rolled away, only to roll back over less than a minute later. He draped his arm over my chest and let his fingers fall over my breast as he dropped his leg over my hip and locking it securely around and in between my legs. I was trapped, for sake of argument. And while he passed out and breathed deeply in my ear, his breath heavy with whiskey and beer, I lay awake for the next hour having to pee and being unable to break free. It was the first time that he had slung himself over me in three years that I had wanted to push him away. I was not Donald Trump. I was just not gutter trash with a penchant for bloody tampons fastened to empty canvases with duct tape.

When he finally rolled over. He talked in his sleep. “Fuck yeah,” he said. Christoffer is not a “fuck yeah” person. And I was sure that was the first time I had ever heard him say that.

I got up and went to the bathroom. I put on the light and looked at myself in the mirror. I ran the side of my index finger under my right eye, the one that had acquired some mystery mascara between the time I went to sleep and then.

When I got back to my bed, he had rolled into my space, as he tends to do when he sleeps over; and a move to which my dog, Hubbell was accustomed. I lifted his leg in a vain attempt to move him to the side. It wasn’t happening. So I proceeded to push on his shoulder to roll him. With ease, he rolled to the other side of the bed, but not before saying “fuck yeah,” again in his sleep.

I could only assume in his dream he had either been approached by a busty brunette who had offered him a blowjob or that a bartender asked him if he wanted another round of shots.

I crawled in beside him. I’m not sure if it was the weight of me entering the bed, but he again rolled back over, flung his leg over me, again saying “fuck yeah,” for a third time.

“Shut up,” I said to him.

I don’t know if he was a sleep or awake when he responded, but he quietly said, “Don’t be wonkum.”

I awoke a couple hours later to his hand on my wrist as he was trying to get it down his boxers.

“Leave me alone,” I said. He pulled himself against me, his groin against my lower back, his hand again on my hip for just a second, before he started to slide my underwear down my leg. “I thought you decided there would no longer be sex between us because you claimed it confused me.” I made sure to over emphasize the words “you” and “confused.”

“When did I say that?” he asked.

“The other night.”

“Well, it does.”

“No,” I said, “it confuses you because you can’t decide if you love me or hate me.” Honestly, I couldn’t decide either. Although it was more that I hated to love him and loved to hate him.

He didn’t answer me. Instead he struggled to get my underwear off of me, but I wasn’t lifting my hip to make it easy. He pushed his fingertips between my clenched thighs, trying to get inside. I reached behind me and put my hand at the base of his uneven hairline. He needed a haircut.

As his fingers got deeper, my heartbeat sped up. I rolled over to face him so I could slide his boxers off. I looked down at his hips to see they were already around his ankles.

“Really?” I asked.

“I’m classy like that,” he said. Then he did that thing he does where he pushes on my head instead of just saying that he wants a blowjob.

“Use your words,” I said; a phrase my sister was constantly saying to my nephews.

“Let me fingerbang you,” he whispered, with his eyes shut. Christoffer was one for getting to the heart of the matter in bed. He continued to push on my head with one hand, while the other was buried inside me.

“No,” I said, “Donald Trump will not be giving head this morning.” He wasn’t listening and just kept pushing. He opened his eyes and looked at me with this sleepy sort of glazed-over stare.

“Yes, he will,” he said.

“No, he won’t,” I said again. I looked at the bit of sleep in the corner of right eye, the flatness of the bridge of his nose and the brown speckle in his eye with which I had fallen in love. He shut his eyes again.

I slithered my body toward the end of the bed, burrowed my head in his lower stomach and gave in anyway. I knew I’d give in the second he slipped his fingers under the fabric of my underwear when he first crawled into bed hours before.

He ran his hands through my hair. I found that the shorter my hair was, the more likely he was to run his fingers through it, although he said he liked it longer. These were the details I remember, these are the things I notice. Like how his breathing became irregular right before he came, how his other hand would reach to touch a part of my bare skin, usually my hand or back, and would slightly apply pressure just before the release of a slight gasp. I had not come. It’s hard to come when you envision you look like Donald Trump.

He sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands and grumbled about how hungover he was. He grabbed a pillow and blanket and went out the window to the fire escape. He would not be going to work that day.

When I got out of the shower, he was still there, laying on the fire escape, cuddled up under the blue blanket with just his head and feet exposed. His greasy hair was sticking up in all directions. I reached for my camera to take a photo of my wonky, hungover friend and his makeshift bed on my fire escape. I did not know then that that would be the last photo of him I would take. Or that I would leave it on there for long afterward, scared to remove it; and in being terrified to erase it, I stopped using my camera for long after the fact.

He turned his head toward me when he heard the click of the shutter. He looked at me for a minute then back out at First Street. “I’m not going to work today,” he said.

“I’m working from home,” I responded.

He looked back at me again. “Fucking Donald Trump,” he said. And he meant it.

“Shut up.”

I pulled out the chair from under my desk and opened my computer. He crawled back inside the window.

“Did I eat all my food?” he asked. I didn’t answer. He went to the kitchen, found more broccoli, brought it back to my bedroom and proceeded to eat it in front of me. “I’m going home.”

“Good,” I said, “you smell like a fucking bar.”

“You smell all the time,” was his comeback.

“I’m going home,” he said again.

“Then go,” I said.

“You don’t even have any dip for my food!” he yelled in my direction as he made his way back out to the kitchen. “Do you think Cholula will taste bad on this?”

“Yes,” I said. I knew that if I were to peek around the corner, he’d have the fridge open, his hands on his knees staring blankly at my mostly empty shelves looking for something, anything.

“Why do you have mayonnaise? You know I hate mayonnaise,” he mumbled.

I heard the refrigerator door shut, him reach for a glass, turn on the faucet, drink loudly and pound the glass on the counter. He said goodbye and shut the apartment door behind him.

There was a dusting of greenery that had settled on my floors that I was too lazy to immediately sweep or vacuum. I Googled a photo of Donald Trump; I didn’t see the resemblance at all. I pulled at my face, blew my cheeks out and pushed my hair down over my forehead. Still, nothing.

Truth be told, I have since lost my taste for broccoli. There’s some things that can’t be unseen and a drunken Swede scornfully shaking a raw head of broccoli at you at 330am is one of them. I’m just glad there wasn’t any music playing. The list of songs I can’t listen to is long enough as it is, thanks to him. Broccoli I can give up, music and the weight of his long leg draped over my hip, will require more effort.

Physiognomy: A Story About Shoulder and Chin

2011-06-05T12:17:00.008-04:00

It must have been 90 degrees. I didn’t know for sure. There wasn’t a thermometer in his kitchen. My skin was still cold from the air conditioning of his bedroom. When I rubbed my chin against my shoulder as my face started to sweat, it immediately cooled from my still-cold skin. From my chin, along my jawline to my ear, I rubbed against my shoulder. I closed my eyes. It was a cooling effect. Had I long hair, I would have blown upward, my lower lip extended to create the movement. I do not have long hair. No. It’s dyke short. He said so.

His kitchen, the one he shares with two others, was consumed in a disgusting mayhem that I could not recognize. It was not him. The dishes were piled sloppily against the silver inner walls of his sink, and the floor, the floor… that was slippery with pieces of raw onions and the type of trash that should have been discarded days, if not weeks, ago. I remember thinking how when I fell apart time after time again, it was the floor that knocked me down with its grime. I had let the grime consume not only my insides, but the floor beneath my dirty feet; the floor beneath my step too weak for a proper stance.

The night before he had called. The night before I had come to his aid like a nurse who should have known better. But instead of a portable medicine cabinet, all I could offer was a Diet Coke. It was per his request, and I only had one in my refrigerator. I did not want to risk him falling back to sleep as I scoured the Lower East Side for another. I’m not sure why I needed him to be awake when I arrived. I had something to tell him. I had spelled it out. I had written out the details, word for word, the night before on a napkin. But the napkin, like my pride, got tossed in front of the first subway that came my way.

On his back, that’s how he was; drunk and spread eagle like a victim of a war who had been shot from a distance… that’s how his roommate had found him. She questioned his safety and health. Open doors will do that. When I got there, he was able to let me in, but his keys were still missing. I found them. They were on the table in the kitchen… the most obvious place in the world.

He took his place back on the floor like a wounded soldier who had been dragged through the horrors of atrocity and made it out alive. I wanted to tell him he didn’t know horrors. Neither did I, but that wasn’t the point.

He smelled sour. He never smells bad. He smells like him: an equal combination between his skin and whatever deodorant he might be using. But that night, he smelled like something I couldn’t place: halfway between sweat and something else… something toxic… something that has yet to be defined by scientists.

I handed him the Diet Coke. He pulled himself to a sitting position, drank it, and wondered aloud why I did not bring him another. I placed my hand at the base of my neck as I tend to do when I don’t have an answer and exhaled: that’s all I had.

And I remember thinking:

I’ve heard this in a song too many times. I’ve written about it too many times. I’ve just never confronted it head on: my arteries exposed, my intellect subtracted.

My therapist is the first one to point out the math of it all: intellectually you’re there, emotionally… emotionally…. emotionally… you probably never will be. She extends the word “emotionally” as if to make a point, as if I don’t know any better, as if I had not predicted this months ago.

Like a gorgeous plague, that’s how he looked as he squinted his eyes against the light and justified his state. His unwashed hair slightly bounced against his forehead like a bridge that was missing the other half, a bridge that was missing the necessary girders to keep it from falling. I had to bite my lip from crying. I had to look away.

On his new record player, Bob Dylan played. I pulled myself next to him. Although our heads were aligned, our feet were facing different directions. I did not think. I did not consider. I did not realize our feet until days later.

Against my hand, his hair was the softest hair I had ever touched. Softer than a newborn baby’s and perfectly broken… the way you’d hope your hair will be when you check into the afterlife, the grave or whatever in which one chooses to believe. I don’t believe in anything. That fact alone makes me realize that when I die, I will have had to relish in that moment. Because his hair, that softness against the insides of my fingers, I don’t get to take that with me.

And I cried. I fear this may be the greatest downfall of my existence. I can’t have a moment without already writing the words to it in my head. He says I’m a stalker. I try to explain I’m just observant. But the truth is that I’m always in my head looking for the next way to immortalize. That’s the difference between he and I. As much I want this physical body to die, I don’t want to die. I want to linger. I want to withstand. I want to define. I want to scream to him Napoleon quotes: “glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” Like a sixteen year old, I want to scrawl it on my skin as a reminder over and over and over and over and over and over… until breath is lost; until I’m dizzy and crashing into walls, until the sense I’ve lost comes back to me.

The worst part about being a writer is when someone quotes you back to you… and he did. I hate that. On the floor, my head against his, I slowly rubbed my warm chin against my cold shoulder, because sometimes that’s all you can do.

It must have been 90 degrees. There wasn’t a thermometer in his kitchen. My skin was still cold from the air conditioning of his bedroom. When I rubbed my chin against my shoulder as my face started to sweat, it immediately cooled from my still-cold skin. From my chin, along my jawline to my ear, I rubbed against my shoulder.

And it was the dirty dishes that I could erase. It was the kitchen floor I could scrub clean. It was with regular, unscented dish detergent, that I could try to make a dent in his room, in the boxes of bills, on his stinking body, in a life of which I used to be a part. He was once a person I could have drawn in the dark with my eyes closed, but I’ve realized that sometimes the people who know you most, are the ones you need to lose in the shuffle…. for your own sanity. It’s not personal or because you’ve misplaced them or love them any less. In my exhale, I want to tell him: “It’s easier to be fake with them, than be real with you.” And it’s true.

So I stood there and scrubbed dish after dish like a maid who had been sent in to fix a problem that wasn’t mine. Plates, pans, glasses, silverware, cutting boards… one after another I cleaned them, the whole time thinking that was all I had to offer. I did not want a “thank you” in the traditional sense, I didn’t want a pat on the head like a good puppy would get after obeying, nor did I want to secure myself as a fixture as some sort of homemaker I’d never be. I just wanted to clean.

“What do you mean you wanted to clean?” asked my mother when I told her a day later.

“I felt it was my duty, because that’s all I could give; that’s all I had,” I tried to explain. Even I didn’t understand what I meant.

I don’t use a brush to clean my own dishes; I use a sponge. But he had a brush and had he not, my hands would be beyond raw right now. All I kept thinking about was how every time I fell out of love and realized it, I’d take a shower and literally scrub myself to pieces. I’d walk out of the shower bright red, with skin peeling off my inner legs and stomach. I needed proof. Sometimes you need to bleed to prove resolution.

But his shower is sticky. While my downfall is crying unnecessarily, his is disgusting bathrooms. You cannot clean yourself of your past within your past… it’s like cloyingly sweet frosting on top of the same: good idea on birthday cake, but bad idea in life.

I don’t know how many chunks of food I threw out that day. I don’t know how many pieces of vegetables, I picked up of which I disposed. I just know when I was done, I exhaled and I had no words.

I went back into his bedroom. He was slumped over the side like a broken record that I would have once put on repeat; like a record I would have once found inspiring… like a rare EP that no one else gets to hear but me… but that was gone. Despite the record player in his room, the sound was gone. Or maybe, just maybe, I was deaf to it… but I refuse to believe that.

We had walked to the river’s side amongst hundreds of people and I saw him from faraway. It wasn’t his attire, or the way he sat, it was his profile. To me, someone who had memorized it by mistake, it stuck out in a way that words, to my knowledge, can’t define. I guess, it in its simplest terms one could equate it to familiarity. When I reached the water’s edge, I told him so. Like me, he rubbed his his chin against his shoulder and didn’t say a word.

The silence that comes without words is everything.

I pulled at my hem, as I tend to do. I tried to re-align my hair so it was intact with mediocrity. I covered my new tattoo with my hand and inhaled. I had cleaned his dishes, now all I could do was exhale.

And after we walked back from the East River, his dishes were clean. When we huddled down in his apartment free from the sun, I had already seen the movie. And when I stood on my toes to say goodbye to him, as I had always done, my calf muscles ached… they were over it. His nose between the pieces of his loft bed, his clothes scattered everywhere like an explosion without a purpose, and his phone vibrating alone on the chair’s arm… it was emptiness exemplified. And I tried to breathe; I did. I tried to exhale and back in I again, but I could not. Sometimes removing an important artery will do that. Sometimes there is no resolution. Sometimes the raw part, the one exposed in the palm of your hands from trying to fix something that is not yours, bleeds endlessly.

I rubbed my warm chin against my cold shoulder on my way home. I pulled at my hem, as I tend to do. And although I could give nothing else, I exhaled… and it almost killed me.

Foofaraw: A Story About Moments

2011-05-22T22:54:00.005-04:00

I slept on the floor beside him too many times. From my bedroom, where I removed my clothes slowly and unsteadily, I could hear the thud that would come with his drunken body hitting the couch, then the coffee table, then the floor – and always in that order. I’d stand over him, my legs on either side of his hips looking down at him, his arms crossed over his chest like a vampire who’d tucked himself into his coffin for the night. His lips were always slightly parted, and if he had overloaded on alcohol, even by his standards, he’d talk in his sleep. Always in English, his words would be as they rolled off his tongue, a language that was secondary to him, but far more perfect than most native speakers.

There was the night we laid on Second Avenue sharing his headphones from his iPod, and listening to a favorite band. It was a Sunday night. We should have been asleep by then, but 2am seems an appropriate time to do such things. When I had walked past the same spot a day later, the spot that once cradled our bodies as we sung along at the top of our lungs, it was dirty, embracing the grime of the city. I reached to touch my hair and figured I should wash it after all. We had laid there too long that night, or maybe not long enough. We had decided to get up when we realized we were between two piles of garbage bags and someone, one of those people in finance, the type we loathe tried to swipe my shoe. Men in finance don’t like people like he and I – they’re jealous on some level. Men in finance don’t lay on avenues in the East Village listening to bands, perfect bands with perfect lyrics. When he placed one of the headphones in my ear, I looked at him and smiled. I was having a moment. I remember thinking that if on the way home I had been hit by a bus or struck down by lightning, I’d survive. It would be unfair for the universe to have your final moment be so steeped in a memory you’d hang onto forever. Or maybe it would have been appropriate.

There was the night we bought the six pack of beer and jumped over the fence near Union Pool. The dog park was behind us, but where we were huddled we could only see trees and it was fun to pretend we were someone else, somewhere else – a place with more of a forest, a camping adventure of sorts. And each of us had an earphone that was attached to his iPod, and when he giggled as he tends to do, when he thinks he’s getting away with something, I giggled too. I sat with my legs pulled into my body, and his legs, as long as they were, were stretched out in front of him. The goosebumps crawled up my arms like a plague that hurts in that beautiful way that proves you’re alive. And I thought I could have loved him, if he knew me less, if I were more mysterious; I could have loved him if I didn’t know better, if I trusted him more, or saw him less of a threat to my sanity, less of a touchstone, less of an unattainable creature that I could both never tame nor want to tame. I have never believed in trapping – whether it was him or me or a bear. I put my head on his shoulder, and not because I wanted to, but because I needed too. I needed to touch him to know he was real, not something I made up one night when I was young and foolish. And when I looked at his profile, the one that mildly glowed from the faint lighting of the headlights that passed just on the other side of our hideaway, I was saddened that I could never love him how I wanted. I was saddened that I could have found someone so similar to me, and that I’d eventually have to let go. And although I found myself in a moment, I wished that night that I had never met him at all. Life would have been easier that way. Yes, less colorful and less dramatic, but I was 32 that summer, I was too old for drama. I was too old to be sitting in a park drinking beer and listening to bands that when I went to see them live, I was on the older side. I guess I had never received the memo, or the invitation to the grown-up party must have gotten lost in the mail.

There is a point in your life where you realize too much, and it kind of hurts. I was 22 years old when it first happened. I was truly in love for the first time, although these days, I second guess that sentiment. We were having a party, and as the music got louder and louder, I stepped out onto the deck that was five flights up. I could see fraternity row from where I stood. I smoked cigarettes back then. In one hand I held a cup of death punch and in the other, a Camel Light. My hair that I had shaved just months before after losing a bet and had grown into a pixie cut– the same one I have now, 11 years later.

I leaned on the railing. The fraternities were playing Dave Matthews and from my apartment Matt Pond PA’s “Measure One” had been on repeat for the last ten minutes. My guests sang along. We were DJs then, all of us, and to this day, we’re still just as pretentious as we were at 21 and 22. In New Hampshire, where I went to college, you can see far more stars than in New York. I looked up and I thought, for the first time in my life “I love my life.” Timothy came up behind me and kissed the back of my neck. I smiled and knew the end of us was near. I had wanted to stay up all night to prolong it, not just the moment, but the love I thought was there. I had wanted more for him than he wanted for himself. I think that may have been our downfall. You can’t change people, no matter how hard you try. I wish someone would try to change me, but I’ve yet to meet someone so invested in me to try.

Our relationship would be over less than three months later. I moved to New York two years later.

I knew the moment my lips first touched Christoffer’s that it was never going to be a love story. I don’t know how to write love stories, nor do I know how to live them. He was simply a boy with whom I once worked. Someone I’d write about more than any other person I’ve ever known, and someone whom I’d be able to say at the end of my life, I had loved best. I loved him best; yes, it was me who had. At one time, he and I were one moment after another: all the times we were the only ones dancing in a bar, the time we slow danced to Ryan Adams at last call, when we got our first Christmas tree, when we smashed a guitar that represented the first death of he and I, Atlantic City…

It doesn’t matter. It was my mistake for being too observant. It was my fault for hanging on too long. It was my fault for taking mediocrity and making it something else. Next time, I’ll know better.

Aspersion: A Story About A Hollowed Out Pomegranate

2011-04-24T19:30:00.003-04:00

I love the word gloaming. I love it just as much as I hate the gloaming of the day for reminding me of you. I keep the receipt from that day, the one before the last, in my pocket as proof. And the photos, the ones I swore I’d slice up into dust, I keep them, too, taped to the underneath of my desk next to your number written in permanent black marker. I call this safe keeping; I call this something I won’t remember in the morning. I label the air from this moment and that, and shove it into corners too small for an escape, in crevices that will not return the favor… the whole time stripping my pride from major organs that I blame for all of this in the first place.

It’s the gloaming of the day; the way it wraps in and out of a city street, in a dull shade of pink that seems too purposely created for someone to have not written this scenario a hundred times before, that makes me double over and catch myself choking on words I should have long ago learned to keep to myself. The sun does this thing, where it sets in slow motion, settling itself neatly on the west end of every street in this city, and I hate this, too. I dread this hour of everyday; somewhere in Brooklyn, somewhere downtown, a broken frame, a forgotten bar tab, a chin that wobbled too often in a vain attempt at ceasing the next step in the breakdown. And they tell me, the ones who know better, that I need this to breathe, I need this self-prescribed chaos in order to function; I need it to fill up my stomach, push it out my veins and pass through my limbs in order to feel alive. It’s all part of the process of dying and living, or dying again.

The gloaming, the fucking gloaming, is the indication of the darkness to come; the darkness that I used to look forward to when I once knew you. I welcomed the darkness then, and like a child who refused to share, I grabbed it and hid it under pillows, in parks without parameters, rules or tomorrow. It never stays put; like you, it never stays in one place too long. Next to me, your arm touching mine, and you’re gone; and I feel like a hollowed out pomegranate that never had a chance because how we’ve been built from the inside out. I spend so much time picking up the pieces, pulling at my skin that refuses to stay clean, stay free of blemishes, and ages too rapidly and it all leads to disgust I can’t undo. And I’m forced to relive my indiscretions at the lashings of your palate that needs a new way of speaking to me if you want me to understand you.

The gloaming is outside my window, and it’s taunting me with the way it refuses to just stop. And I don’t need the sun to rise, if it means having to watch it set, and I probably don’t need these photographs, if I really do the math, but I don’t do math. I weigh the pros and the cons and I go about this beautiful thing called denial, and before I know it, my head’s in the toilet again. And I’m chastising myself for being honest, being exactly me, and I’m catching my reflection in the silver handle of the flush: I am gorgeously warped. I lean in for a better look, and I don’t recognize myself and in that moment, I stop being sick. I straighten my back and breathe, like they tell me to do, although I’ve lost track of who they are or even were meant to be in this life I created, in this storybook without a storybook ending, where I was a princess and someone was supposed to come in to save me. It’s hard to be saved if you leave the door to the castle unlocked.

From the floor where I’m still not my own, the gloaming is there just out of view and I feel the cold of the tile against my shoulder blades, and I think of how my hand looks against the center of your back before I pull away and into myself again. And it’s in thinking of you that I recognize myself, although my reflection still remains scrambled and foreign, and I reach for my stomach – there will be more sickness.

In the Lower East Side, I sometimes see you although I know you’re someplace else, and behind you, like an ominous truth without an ending, I see that gloaming, illuminating as if joking, as if mocking, as if you were actually as heavenly as I would have portrayed you in the movie version. And I hate myself for seeing you, and I want to destroy the part of my brain where you’re swaddled in a protective blanket, I want to flirt with trepanation and come out the other side with you removed.

I remember June, against my will. I recall my birthday and mood of the room, although I’ve tried to stop. I have October in my wallet, and the Christmas before last, I’ve edited it to my liking and I’ve placed it between wax paper and stuck it in the pages of a book I’ll never read again. But the frame is still broken and there’s still blood on the floor, and sometimes there isn’t enough soap for imperfect skin or laminated hardwood.

My head toward the window, it’s the gloaming without you. I’m not sure where you’ve gone, or where I found you in the first place, or if you were something I made up to teach me a lesson I should have learned three or four lifetimes ago. Only one half of me is dying today, and the other half, the one that tried to make a point, is, if we were to be honest, on the mend because it stopped understanding language that was meant to murder and always did.

It was somewhere in Brooklyn, it was somewhere downtown, it was in the back of a cab, it was at the hand of someone who writes this shit for dime store displays, paperback novels that no one will ever read. And I’m up against the wall, and I’m pressed to my limit and every light bulb in the joint has blown, and I’m stuck reaching out into something I created but can’t see. I drop to the ground and I’m throwing up again, but this time it’s not you, it’s these pieces of me I can’t recognize and I wonder if this is how I look when I’m without you: dull and lifeless.

Someone bring me some water, someone supply the last line, someone close the window and pull the shade until it falls from above and forces me to accept the gloaming of the day. And my hand’s on my stomach again and I know what I am, I know I am not lifeless and dull; no, instead I am that hollowed out pomegranate, the one you left on the table, on a plate between us as if I were supposed to find meaning in the sentiment. However, you’re just words shot into the sky, an archery lesson gone awry and while I’ll be sick until the bitter end about it, I will remain staring straight ahead – my eyes will tear and I’ll blame it on wind or onions I don’t have, and the sky will shift in its appearance, and the blame of this equation will be removed, but only because I couldn’t remove you. It was my fault for leaving the door to the castle unlocked; it was my fault for not using the receipt to return that soap for a better one, a stronger one that would be more relentless in its efforts to clean.

Canorous: A Story About Batteries

2011-04-12T13:32:00.008-04:00

My father can no longer hear the Spring Peepers. They’re all I hear. I lie in bed and twist myself in the white sheets and quietly ask them to cease. I know I can close the window, but I won’t. I know I can wear headphones, but I will not reach for them.

I can’t hear the Spring Peepers in New York City; this bothers me. Their chorus from the tiny waterway behind my parents’ house has always signified rebirth. The winter has closed up shop, we made it through the snow, and now there’s a melody of proof that we’re still standing. I’m still standing.

I stand with wobbly knees. I wonder if it’s lack of calcium, lack of backbone, or misplaced strength. I’m not strong where I should be. I’m not a lot of things where I should be; and I have the mirror as proof. Someone I loved once called me broken. I never forgot it; and I think that day too much of me succumbed to his definition of me. He never knew me well enough to say for sure, but I held onto the adjective and the pain that was attached to it. I’ll always try to unremember it, but unremember isn’t a word, so by that standard, the action doesn’t exist.

From my broken bed in a city that I’ve loved and hated like no other, I hear, with broken ears, the thuds of trucks and cabs against the potholes on Houston that just get deeper with each winter; the hilarity of strangers as they wander from bar to bar on the Lower East Side, and the faint cooing of a saxophone. I have never cared for the saxophone; its pitch has always induced anxiety in me. But this one, the one somewhere outside my broken window that I’ve yet to find, is my Spring Peeper. Its sound is unbroken.

I once wanted to save the world; this was before I knew better. I was going to start with the animals of course. I would break for turtles, risking my own life as I jumped out of my car on any street to run to the aid of the only creature lucky enough to carry his home with him; it’s hard to feel misplaced when you can pull yourself away from the chaos at any moment. I almost lost a finger to a snapping turtle once. I was almost hit by a truck when I darted across a highway to grab a dog that was on the loose. I once sat on the edge of a back road with my father at the side of a bunny we couldn’t save, but we didn’t want him to be alone in his final moments. It’s hard to save the world one animal at a time.

There was construction a block away from our house the summer before fourth grade. We’d play on the knocked down trees mimicking the scenes from Dirty Dancing, and listening to Madonna from the purple radio my sister and I dragged everywhere. The cluster of frog eggs were in the shallow bits of marsh that had gotten trapped between the broken birches and cement foundations that would take all summer to evolve into homes. We knew their fate; we had to save them.

Bucket after bucket, we lugged every single one of those eggs home to our backyard. We set them up comfortably in the plastic pool that had been under the porch for years. We waited. Sometimes things are worth the wait if you know the result before you get there. We loved them; and we realized when they hatched that tadpoles don’t care for chicken.

Before too long they were tiny Peepers we couldn’t handle – hundreds living in the blue plastic pool decorated in green and pink seashells; a make shift home with no waterway to a stream or even a stagnant puddle. They kept us up all night, their singsong chorus that seemed to have been composed so perfectly that not a single one ever missed a beat. And when it was warm enough, we’d lie on the deck just feet away from them and fall asleep to their peeping, perfect peeping.

When we returned from the beach one day, the blazing sun had had its way with the backyard and the pool especially. The water had been sucked up and our Peepers, the ones we tried to feed chicken and garlic bread, were drying up before our eyes; life removed, life misplaced. My sister ran for the hose, I ran for the marsh and we soaked those who remained until the breath was put back in their tiny veins. It’s hard to save the world hundreds of tadpoles at a time. It’s hard to admit that sometimes we save selfishly in the hopes of really only saving ourselves; it’s broken is what it is.

We knew we had to let them go; even things not meant to fly should be given the chance to spread their proverbial wings. Just as we had done weeks before, bucket after bucket we lugged our Peepers off to the stream. We tried to name each one as it jumped off into the world, but they were in such a rush to get away from us; and it’s hard to discern between Harry and Fred and Willa when they’re all clamoring over each other in a slippery escape.

For the rest of the summer, we swore we could tell the difference between our Peepers and the rest; our Peepers were much more refined in their song, a perfectly scripted language all their own that was the result of something we had imparted upon them. Perhaps, an eventual craving for poultry, too.

My father was always the first to hear the Peepers. Early April he’d usher us out to the front porch to listen to them. Then he stopped being able to hear them, and we stopped standing on the porch waiting for them. It wasn’t that we forgot, but life had evolved past knocked over trees and juvenile attempts at solving problems bigger than ourselves. And time, the minutes that should be spent on something else, is no longer your own and you succumb to other people’s ideas and life’s expectations. My dad was broken for not being able to hear the Peepers anymore, and I was broken for thinking I could save something I could not.

It’s my mother now who holds the phone to the night sky through the spring months so I can hear the Peepers; but no matter how loud they are to her, I can’t hear them. I tell her that the phone is broken, that she should invest in another one. She assures me it isn’t, it just needs new batteries. However, it’s more than that; it’s always more than the obvious answer. Radio Shack didn’t have the ones she needed, they also didn’t carry the ones I needed. It’s hard to explain to a salesman that you’re sure you need new batteries without getting strange looks.

I come to New Hampshire and I lay in these white sheets, I twist my legs around the comforter, pull the pillows over my head to block out the Peepers. My father sleeps soundly down the hall and I know that on a mystery street somewhere in the city, a saxophone player is lulling a neighborhood to sleep. But it’s the Peepers I envy most, the perfect Peepers, who unlike you and I, and everyone we meet, will never need new batteries.

Halcyon: A Story About Waters

2011-04-07T12:31:00.004-04:00

I was seven the first time I almost drowned.

We were at my aunt Sylvia’s house. Her large white colonial sat back in the woods and was not far from the Rebecca Nurse home; a fact my father was always quick to point out. “These woods are haunted with witches who were wrongly executed,” he’d explain.

Sylvia’s house was one of the first to be built in Danvers, long ago when it was still known as Salem Village. It was three stories of large rooms that echoed under the racing feet of my sister and I, with ceilings so high that there was enough room for elaborate chandeliers, the type you’d usually only expect in a movie about Marie Antoinette or John Jacob Astor. Each floor was connected to the other by formal staircases with dark pine steps and thick white handrails that were always a bit darker at the end of the summer from our grubby paws. But the best part, the part we loved most, were the hidden staircases that intertwined through the walls and deposited you into musty closets or onto the dirt floor of the basement. The narrow corridors of these staircases were steep, lacked windows, and creaked with each step. The yellow and ivory wallpaper, having not been replaced in the last century, was not only pealing but missing strip after strip, or they dangled waiting to be pulled off and taken away; I could never resist – I always pulled. The center edge of each step was concave with time and wear of people who had made a difference in their day, but in mine, were lost ghosts that I’d never even covered in a history book; history is not all-inclusive. So many times my bare or socked feet would glide too easily over the dulled wood, and down I’d go, sliding the whole way to the bottom. It was only under the muted lighting of the old wiring of the lamp overhead that my impending bruises looked non-existent; sunlight had another interpretation.

We had been racing around the yard, climbing over the rock walls that had managed to withstand industry and development, and the new neighborhood that you could see over the tree line from the widow’s walk of the house. And when we stopped, covered in scratches from briars and simple childhood clumsiness, we decided it was time for a swim.

My father climbed the ladder of the slide with my sister in front of him. Her blonde hair was in a low messy braid at the nape of her neck, and her blue bathing suit, that matched mine, was missing a decorative pink button that had been lost somewhere in the yard…

And then I was under the water.

I don’t remember if I had slipped, or if I had the urge to jump and just did assuming my dad would catch me. But before I knew it, sound was muffled and everything in front of me wavered with bubbles and blurred splotches of color. I was not scared. I just watched the turquoise color of the cement tangle with the water that surrounded me as I floated fearlessly. I had never been so fearless. Then I breathed in deeply and choked.

It was my cousin Raymond who plunged into the water that day. I remember my head hit the side of the pool with a thud that made me cough water up all over my face. Someone’s lips were pressed to mine and I coughed again. There was no sound attached to the commotion of faces that dotted my view like a ViewMaster on high speed. I turned my head toward the water and noticed all the leaves that had landed since we had first arrived; then my memory stops.

I was twenty-one the first time I wanted to drown.

We had been drinking beer on the banks of Oyster River, tucked away from view of our fellow students, just off the path, just on the other side of Lee. There was a group of us, a group that dispersed quickly after college when we realized the only thing we ever had in common was the present, and the past was still something that’s a foreign concept. It was Tom who suggested we go skinny-dipping; it was James who agreed this was a great idea.

The fire we had built just as the sun started to set flickered weakly, and our shadows that extended across the width of the river made us look like a family of giants, giants with long limbs that were careless with each step. As everyone around me slowly removed their clothes, I pulled my summer dress over my head and stood, slightly embarrassed, with my back to the others. I would not be the first to take off my underwear. We all looked at each other as if we had never seen another naked person, with our arms awkwardly draped over our lower stomachs although everyone’s underwear was still in tact. Tom dropped his boxers first and ran for the overpass; we all followed.

We lined ourselves up on the side of the bridge that faced upriver. It was so dark you couldn’t even see where space stopped and water began. No one wanted to be the first, so I took a step forward…

I love the feeling of falling. There are no words for the sensation that comes with taking a step, and there not being something to catch you. I had half expected the ground to meet my foot, that the space was just a mirage, but it wasn’t; there was nothing. I heard my name and the “whooping” sound that comes with your friends egging you on to do something that part of you knows is dangerous, and another part of you is betting on a dramatic result. The drop seemed to take forever, as if I had enough time to read a chapter in a book, or make a long distance call to a friend… then I hit the water.

It was far colder than expected. I plummeted into the darkness, into waters that had it not been for the night, I would have avoided. I kept expecting to reach the bottom with every second that passed, so I could push myself back up, but the bottom never came. I imagined myself a broken buoy that had sunk through no fault of its own, but simply because it couldn’t escape the water. I didn’t want to escape the water.

Around me, bodies dropped, falling full speed into the river… and before I knew it, I was on my way back up, and my head was above the water. I looked around and everyone else was still underneath; there was nothing but the sound of my own breath gasping for air against the warm sky and cold waters. I remember thinking I could stay there forever if the sun promised to never appear again; I could stay there forever in that moment if it meant never having to touch the ground again.

Tom was the first one back up and he looked at me.

“I thought you were dead… didn’t think it was possible for anyone to hold their breath that long,” he said.

“Practice,” I answered.

“Ah yes… the girl who wants to be the ocean diver.”

I don’t know what it is about the water that sucks me and enraptures me. Nor do I know the reason behind my urge to jump every time I’m near it, or the hope that a wave, when it knocks me to the sand, will pick me up and carry me off to sea. I just know that the rain will never be enough, and my favorite ground is one that does not exist.

Scintillate: “Judy and the Dream of Horses”

2011-03-23T03:12:00.010-04:00

I hung up the phone. Or rather I slammed it down on the small table, the one that wobbled in the kitchen. We had tried to even out the wobble too many times with napkins, paper towels, and once, an empty tube of toothpaste. The toothpaste was my idea. It was the night Julie and I had too much to drink. I had slipped on the puddle of the Blackberry Ridge flavored Boones, and down I went. I banged my head on the chair first, and ended up directly under the kitchen table; staring up at the Sharpie scrawls of bad poetry I had composed the last time I found myself under the that table. Julie had struggled to get me up off the floor when she heard my roommate, Bess, unlock the front door, but it was no use. I had the toothpaste tube in my hand, toothpaste on my face, in my hair and Julie stood over me to deal with what we called the Bess Situation.

Bess had been in Boston to see the Magnetic Fields; and Julie and I, not having scored tickets, had stayed behind with pizza, Boones and Stephen Merritt on the stereo instead. We were content; then I slipped.

“What is she doing on the floor?” asked Bess. She was dressed from head to toe in red, her signature color, and her wingtip Mary Jane heels were also a deep shade of crimson. She could have passed for the devil.

“She’s playing a fun game,” responded Julie. It was true, I was playing a fun game; and it was called being drunk under the table on a Friday night.

“When will you two grow up?” asked Bess. We were 22-years old.

“I’ll pick her up… I’ll pick…” Julie couldn’t finish her words before the vomit made its way into her throat, and seeped through the cracks between her closed hand with which she had covered her mouth. She ran to the bathroom, and made some guttural noise that was not of this world.

Bess sighed. She ducked her head under the kitchen table. “Happy, Chatel?” she asked.

“Very much so, Dunlevy.”

“I see you have some toothpaste there… you brushing your hair with it?”

“I squeezed it all out so I could fix the wobbly table,” I explained. In my head, both drunk and sober, the tube seemed like the best fit. The material of it was similar to clay but it wouldn’t harden and dry into dust, and it wouldn’t stick to the floor, my hands, or the table leg. Indeed, the empty tube lasted longer than any folded up paper towel, it was malleable and could wrap its plastic sides around the foot of the table better. It stayed there until the next time I was on the floor and grabbed it to throw it at Brian.

When I slammed the phone, it had been weeks since the removal of the empty tube of Colgate, and again the table wobbled. It had also been weeks since the break-up. James had called to set up a time to retrieve a record; that would not be happening. I had given him the limited edition EP, and would not be parting with it. I had declared it already lost to him, and my consolation prize for the last six months. It had been the fourth time he had called about the record, and the fourth time I had dramatically slammed the phone to make a point. It was before cell phones were commonplace, and the slamming of a landline phone still made an impact.

I stood in the doorway and stared at the dull walls of our living room. Halfway up, there was wood paneling that was painted an ugly shade of nude, as if old-lady pantyhose had been the inspiration. The upper half was covered in floral wallpaper that we had desperately tried to cover with band posters. There was a definite line of who had contributed what to the wall: the Miles Davis and Coltrane posters were from Bess; and mine were constantly on rotation of whomever I was listening to at the moment; and to prove their fleetingness in my life, I always hung them haphazardly at an angle, dangling by one tack.

I hated that wallpaper. It was burgundy with tiny blue flowers, and looked more as though it belonged as the pattern on a Mormon woman’s dress, and not on the wall of our Newmarket apartment. I had, on several occasions, slipped my finger underneath the seam that ran behind the couch and tried to lift it off, but Bess always stopped me. She didn’t want to do anything that would risk jeopardizing the return of the deposit. I only half understood.

It was Saturday. We were out of beer. I slipped on my Chucks and scuffed my way around the corner to the convenience store.

“We’re out of Newcastle,” said the register guy when I walked through the door.

“Really?” I asked, “how is that possible?”

“I don’t know. We’ve got this pint size girl who comes in here and buys it all up so other customers have to go without.”

“Are you suggesting I have a problem?” I asked.

“No,” he explained, “I’m suggesting you try another beer.” Newcastle had been the ex’s favorite; and I only drank it as some romantic notion of drowning and rinsing myself all at once. Vodka had stopped burning, even on open cuts. Gin had lost its sentimental meaning; and whiskey was less poetic than Hemingway had ever written. So I went for the Newcastle, and I was quite certain I could feel it pushing James out through my veins with each sip.

“We have Heineken,” he suggested.

“I don’t drink beer in green bottles,” I said. The selection in the fridge was small, and most of the bottled-beers were stacked on the shelves behind me, warm and needing a few hours to chill.

“What about Magic Hat?” he asked.

“Nah, it gives me a headache.” I squatted down to see what was hiding on the bottom shelf and saw a roll of aluminum foil. We had been without it for a while and had taken to covering leftovers with makeshift plastic bag concoctions. I grabbed the foil, a six-pack of Sierra Nevada, and headed home.

Bess had a record player. I put on the record James had been demanding for weeks, opened a beer and unrolled the aluminum foil on the floor. I loved the shimmer of it against the dull lighting from the ceiling chandelier, and the way it refused to stay wrinkle-free against my touch. It couldn’t help but be affected by even the smallest movement against it; it was completely at the whim at an outside source. Malleable. I got up and walked along the center of the foil, and stood there looking down at the contrast between my bare feet and the silver that ran crinkly underneath them. I looked up at the floral wallpaper and cringed; then I back down again. It was clear. There was no other place in the apartment that the foil belonged so perfectly. Wrapping up leftovers was a waste, as they hid in fridge away from view; the wall, on the other hand, was something one couldn’t avoid – it was necessary to the existence of the room, the apartment and the house that sat too close to the street. It was the only building on the block that was placed partially on the sidewalk, as if the original builders had no depth perception.

Strip by strip I started to hang the foil from where the wall met the ceiling and down to where the nude-colored wood started. Then cut, tape in place, and back up again. When one wall was done, I stood back and admired it. Its shininess reflected not only the muted lighting of the room, but the sun that streamed slightly between the curtains, and the candle that sat on the coffee table. It reminded me of one of those heart-shaped crystals that people hung from their rearview mirror that, although provided some sort of satisfaction for the owner, was just utter annoyance for everyone else the way it bounced rainbows of light in all directions. My new wall didn’t quite bounce rainbows of light, but I knew it would serve a purpose to annoy.

I opened another bottle, turned up the music, and continued. I was out of beer and aluminum foil at the same time and went around the corner for round two. Again the register guy joked about the Newcastle, again I reminded him I didn’t drink beer in green bottles and when I pushed two boxes of aluminum foil across the counter, he looked at me puzzled.

“Trying to prevent the aliens from reading your thoughts?” he asked. Although it had been decades before, people were still discussing the Betty and Barney Hill abduction by aliens because they were from the neighboring town of Portsmouth, and Betty, like me, had been a University of New Hampshire student back in the day. “You know, Betty Hill’s nephew lives near here,” he continued.

“I know,” I said, “he used to fuck around with my freshman year roommate… but mostly because she was hoping to be abducted, too, her second semester because she was failing.”

“Really?” the register guy asked, “and was she?”

“Was she what?” I asked impatiently, as I did have a project to get back to in my apartment.

“Abducted.”

“Not to my knowledge, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she claimed it years down the road… drugs do that,” I explained.

He bagged up my items and tossed in a grape Blow Pop for free because he knew they were my favorite and I scuffed my way back up the street.

By the time Bess came home, I was eight beers deep and had covered two and half walls in aluminum foil.

“Jesus, Chatel,” she said. “What the hell is wrong with you?” She had her hands on her hips surveying the room.

“I hated the wallpaper,” I said as I balanced myself on the arm of the couch.

“I really hope you didn’t use glue, because that’s going to make a mess and we’ll never get our deposit back…”

“Yes, Dunlevy, I’m aware. I used tape on the foil so it’s pretty much just attached to itself except for the corners of the room where I used tacks.”

“Are you drunk?” she asked.

“No.”

“Yes, you are,” she accused.

“Maybe a bit,” I said.

“Did you go to campus at all today?”

“I went to the radio station this morning to borrow albums… so, yes.”

“Okay, let me be more specific – did you go to your Saturday anthro study group?"

“It’s already safe to assume I’ll be failing it because I haven’t gone once, so… no.” Actually, I had gone once, but left ten minutes in to it.

“You can’t lock yourself in here forever listening to your depressing music and willing James back into your life,” she said as she handed me another piece of foil.

“I’m not willing anything. And if you were paying attention, you would hear the sweet lulls of Belle and Sebastian engrossing this room.”

“What time do you plan to be done with this insanity?” she asked. “Because you do realize we’re having people over later.”

“Oh are we?” I glared at her over my black-rimmed glasses. Bess always seemed to forget that it was actually I who was having people over, because by midnight she’d be telling us to be quiet so she could sleep. It was always at that point in the evening that the party moved into my bedroom and ended in some bizarre activities to break all the sexual tension in the room; behavior that would have Bess squirming in her seat the next morning over coffee with both disgust and mild jealousy.

It took four rolls total of aluminum foil to cover that living room. I replaced the posters when I was done, and like Andy Warhol before me, sat back to admire my own private Silver Factory. I rolled a joint, put my feet up on the coffee table that had been covered in profanity and sketches of genitals during the last party, and inhaled deeply. I had always loved silver. My prom dress was silver; my first car was silver, and the bra I had on at that moment was also silver to match my old school silver Saucony sneakers.

By nine people started showing up. Bess, as usual, had been in charge of the snacks; and since I had it down to a science, I made tray after tray of Jell-O shots – a college standard back in those days. And we danced, because that’s what we did then; and we were too loud, because we were good at it. And like clockwork, Bess would tell us to “settle down” at midnight.

In the haze of it all, we didn’t know that one of us would be dead within two years, that one of us would be sentenced to jail for 10 years on drug charges, that three of us would come out of the closet, that one of us would be raped, that two of us would survive suicide attempts, that between all of us, there’d be a half dozen abortions, there’d be two finders of God, a future writer for CNN’s AC360, a Harvard professor, and that despite our incestuous group, only two of us would end up together. As we danced in the darkness of the aluminum foiled living room, with just the candle to keep us from falling over our feet and the feet that moved around us on the dark blue rug in the center of the nude-colored wooden floor, we didn’t know what was to come.

Julie pulled the Sharpie from my back pocket, the one I always had on me so I could adorn whatever was around me with words, both original and stolen, and she began to write on the aluminum foil walls. We covered them that night, between the group of us. With markers, pens, pastels and even lipstick, we inundated that silver empty space with lyrics and poorly drawn sketches of ourselves, the shape of Jack’s Adam’s apple, Aaron’s beard, and my profile that I hated so much.

When we woke the following afternoon, the space above the couch read: “Judy and the dream of horses.” And the same line repeated itself all over the walls, every inch that could fit it, that’s what it said.

Julie rolled over in her sleeping bag and looked at the wall, too. “Hmm… and all night I thought I was writing the entire song. I guess I couldn’t remember the rest of the lyrics,” she said. She pulled the pillow over her head to block the sunlight. I ran my fingers through my hair and took my place on the couch, in the room I had covered in aluminum foil one Saturday afternoon; the same foil I refused to take down when it was time to move out of the apartment. It was the thought of it all being squished into crinkly spheres that kept me from it; malleable, sliver balls that were completely at the whim of outside forces, with a possibility of ending up in a landfill somewhere, with an open-ended storyline and reeking of nothing but uncertainty.

Clink: A Story About Public Relations

2011-02-18T03:00:00.001-05:00

*(temporarily deleted for legal purposes)*

Concupiscible: A Story About Redheads

2011-01-26T14:39:00.006-05:00

I heard him call my name from two aisles away. I was standing in the cheese section running my fingers along the tightly packed fresh mozzarella, when he called my name again. I looked up at the ceiling and sighed.

“What?” I asked.

“Come here!” he called back.

It was about 430 in the morning. We had been dancing at Cameo Gallery for the last couple hours, and having been sick the week before, the couple beers I had had were swimming in my brain like a school of fish that could have used a few life preservers. I walked over to where his voice seemed to be coming. His mouth was agape as he held packaged corn-on-the-cob in his hand.

“We should make that Mexican corn!” he said excitedly shaking the package with the hilarity of twenty school-age girls.

“I thought we were doing omelets?” I asked. I looked down at his basket and saw the eggs but nothing else.

“Mexican corn!” he yelled again. He shook the package with such fervor I expected one of the cobs to break free from the wrapping and land on the tiled floor between us.

“That actually might be good,” I said trying to figure out what that would involve. I pushed past him and made my way to the spicy sauce and picked up a bottle of Sriracha and a small jar of mayonnaise. “I think this is all we need.”

“But what about the powdery stuff?” he asked as he mocked how we would sprinkle the spice on the corn with his fingertips. He rubbed his fingers together longer than necessary as if lost in the sensation of his own skin.

“Oh, yeah… I’m not sure what that is…” I paused looking around.

“I went home with a redhead last night,” he said suddenly.

I paused longer to see if he was making a joke. I didn’t immediately look at him, I just continued to stare straight ahead. I paused a moment longer then spun around on the heel of my shoe. “What?” I asked.

“I went home with a redhead last night,” he said again, “you wanted me to be honest, so there you go.”

I looked at the Sriracha in one hand and the tiny jar of mayonnaise in the other as I stood in the middle of the condiment aisle. I seriously considered hurling the mayonnaise at his head.

“But she was on her period so nothing happened,” he continued.

“What?!” I asked again.

“She was my first redhead so I had to go home with her…”

“Your first redhead!? Who do you think you are? Fucking Vince Vaughn? You don’t get to use those lines!” I snapped. I turned around and walked away.

“She was really ugly and I was like, what am I doing? So I stopped,” he explained as he followed me towards the bread aisle.

“So she was really ugly or she had a period? Which one is it, fucking Swede?”

“Both,” he said. Sprawled across his face was his usual shit-eating grin that always accompanied his victory in pissing me off.

“You know this doesn’t count as being honest, don’t you? You could have told me this 12 hours ago when I got to your apartment so we could have evolved past it, but now we had a great night and you ruined it with this because this is the last thing I’m going to have to remember…”

“No, we’re still going to make omelets!”

“Omelets aren’t going to make this go away, asshole!” I didn’t yell per se, I just raised my voice louder than necessary. I followed him blindly around the grocery store; he, with the basket of food he slowly kept adding to, and me, with my jar of mayonnaise that I was holding onto for dear life as if it were going to solve any of this.

***

Sometimes I stare too long at the crease in his forehead. It’s crooked, and although it’s supposed to be a line, it waivers a bit as any wrinkle might do. It’s when he lifts his brow that the crease becomes deeper; a fine line of a valley in between two slight hills of skin that is far darker than my own. It’s not an obsession, the crease, but something I always catch myself staring at for an unreasonable amount of time, and for reasons I can’t pinpoint or even make-up. I’m addicted to facts; pieces that you can’t erase; like a bad memory that still gives you chills long after you promised yourself to forget it. It’s a fact; it made an indentation, it placed itself within all future perceptions, conceptions and realizations. The crease in his forehead is a fact; and the words he said, whether or not he meant them, are facts.

***

We stood in the bread aisle.

“Wonder bread for you?” he asked. Then he laughed.

“So what was it: she was ugly or had her period?”

“About what?” He was too focused on the bread to continue our argument. I cocked my head to the side and sighed. “Oh,” he said, “both. But you can’t be mad, because I’m being honest.”

“I’m not mad at your actions, I’m mad at the placement of your honesty in the evening,” I explained.

“Mhm,” was his only response, “Do we want this bread or that one?” He motioned to a darker wheat with the toe of his boot.

“You suck,” I said.

“She was my first redhead…”

“So what time did you go home with this elusive redhead?”

“Oh, I closed that bar dooown,” he said smiling and drawing out the “o” for some sort of effect of which I was unsure. I stared at him in disbelief.

“And where were Amos and Elena during all this?”

“Oh, they left. She was too ugly for them to witness it.”

“You’re a horrible person… and you use women.”

“They use ME!” he exclaimed.

“Ugly people don’t have that option, Christoffer! Ugly people take what they can get; pretty people do the using, and you are a user.”

“You know what it was? I just wanted to be held. I just wanted to go home with someone and be held,” he explained as he wrapped his one free arm around his body in a mock hug.

“You? You, Mister Cold Town population, you, wanted to be held?” I asked. I was horrified by this turn of events. No one goes home with a stranger to be held.

“Yes,” he said rather triumphantly. His stance took on one of superiority as he straightened his back. It was as though in that one moment he realized he was doomed just like the rest of us; doomed to be made of flesh and blood and faulty wiring when it came to matters of the heart. “I wanted to be held,” he said again.

“I’ll hold you any goddamn day you want, you wonky tart!”

“It’s not the same,” he explained, again focused on food, “because it’s you.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. I felt my eyes squinting the way they do when I’m truly shocked by yet another level of insulting on his part.

“That it’s you, so it’s not the same.” He smiled when he said it, the way he does, the way he finds such humor in his taunts.

We were standing just a few feet from the register. “Come on,” I said, “they want us to leave, we’re being loud and making a scene. And I don’t want someone reporting us to Gawker.”

“Gawker?” he asked, “What? Now you think you’re famous or something?”

“That’s it!” I yelled. “I’m leaving your wonky ass for good!”

“Mhm.”

And I stormed out of the store.

***

He was wearing a red sweater the day I met him. I don’t remember what I was wearing, but I remember it was cloudy. That was also the day the company fired Blair for being too outspoken, and the day I first felt a kick from Suzanne’s son who was due in January. He’d been kicking all morning, and when she grabbed my hand and placed it against her belly, I felt the slight pressure of a tiny foot against my palm. I remember the softness of her t-shirt and the way she smiled when he kicked again.

I often think about when I first knew him, a distant figure in the office whose head I could see perfectly from my front desk. A boy of few words and overly-snug jeans, who was always on time and spent the majority of his day in the kitchen filling and refilling his pint glass of water. I sometimes wish I could see him now how I saw him then, the way I imagine he appears to girls who don’t know him in a crowded bar: brooding and serious until one too many drinks, then a roar of giggles and flirtation.

I remember I once saw him differently. I remember I saw him less clearly or maybe more clearly, or more complicated or less funny. It’s the way I saw him before I noticed the crease in his forehead: shiny and squeaky clean, like a freshly pressed penny you keep in your wallet for luck. I saw him that way once, I just can’t remember the details.

One of my earliest childhood memories was a painting on the wall in the living room where I grew up; it sticks out in my memory because for the longest time I’d stare at it from the floor and not know what it was. To me, it was a canvas of yellow and brown streaks, randomly placed without order or purpose, a Jackson Pollock-esque inspired knock off is how I would have described it to kids in the sandbox if I knew who Jackson Pollock was at the time.

Then one day, out of nowhere, I saw the painting for what it actually was: two leopard cubs playing on a tree stump. And although I’ve stared at it a thousand times since then, I can’t see anything but the cubs now, I can’t see it for the mess of lines and colors it was before the realization I had that one afternoon. Every time I look at Christoffer I feel the same thing; I can’t get to how I saw him before: that flat object in a brightly-painted office; a blip, an inaudible and unimpressionable hum in a cluster of noise.

***

I didn’t want to head back to the city. It was 5am by that point. I stood on the corner half a block from the store and debated calling a car service.

“Amanda!” he yelled as he walked down the front stairs and onto the sidewalk. “Are you coming over for eggs or what?” I didn’t hesitate; I followed after him, past him and then, in front of him.

“Are you mad?” he asked.

“No.”

“You’re in love with me, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Would you like me to be in love with you? Because if I lose all sense of right and wrong, I could probably do it,” I said; and I meant it. It would take surgery on the frontal lobe for me to concede to such a thing.

“No, I don’t want you to be in love with me, but I want you admit you are.”

“Fine, I’m in love with you.”

“I knew it,” he said.

“Yep, you’re smart. And when we get back to your apartment I’ll even hold you because I love you so much and that’s what you’re craving – to be held.”

“I thought a redhead would be a screamer,” he suddenly said. He unlocked the door to his apartment building and leaned against it looking at me.

“A screamer? Like during sex?” I asked.

“Yeah. Aren’t they known to be screamers?”

“I wouldn’t know. This is like your obsession with squirters last January. The whole time I was in Paris, all you did was threaten to pick up some squirter and bring her back to my apartment.”

We walked noisily up the stairwell to the third floor.

“Yeah… I never found one though,” he said with the faintest note of disappointment.

“In due time, Swedeums,” I assured him.

He unlocked the door to his apartment and I followed him inside. “You really don’t know if redheads are screamers?” he asked again.

“I don’t know and I don’t care. I just want you to stop talking and make us omelets already.”

I slid my feet from my boots, and set them against the wall. I ran to his bedroom to plug my phone into the charger. He removed the eggs from the bag and began to crack open one after the other.

“Eight is enough?” he asked.

“More than enough,” I said.

I knew when he was done, he’d put the two omelets on white plates from Ikea, he’d drown each one in Cholula and we’d wonder why he hadn’t bought jalapenos. I knew I’d only have a few bites of mine before I’d have to run to the bathroom to purge myself of everything I had absorbed, both on purpose and against my will, and when I returned to his side, he would have assumed I was done and consumed the rest of my omelet… as he always does. I knew in the morning he’d find the jar of mayonnaise in his fridge and I’d have to explain its reason for being there. I knew I’d tell him about him wanting corn the night before, and how he’d laugh at his drunken appetite; I knew I’d leave out the part about me holding onto the mayonnaise with the tightest grip that my fingers could bear in the hopes of blotting out the imperfections of the night with its thick texture. I knew I’d leave out the part about how I thought about his red sweater when I walked out the store, or about shiny pennies being fleeting and how oxidation is their worst enemy, that all pennies turn brown with too much air, and how, like the crease in his forehead, it’s an evitable fact.

Chatoyant: A Story About New Year’s Eve

2011-01-07T01:04:00.003-05:00

I kicked the snow underneath my feet. I slid slightly, but caught myself against the wall. The wall was made of brick and the way it felt against my bare fingers was like something out of a memory I had misplaced, or conveniently forgotten. I tend to do either or, when the mood strikes. There is something comforting in the make-up of brick, the lack of continuity, the soft valleys, and rocky peaks; like a land of turmoil perfectly man-made and constructed from ceramic. Man-made means doomed and broken, in the long run. I pressed myself against the wall in an attempt at balance. Although, I did not fear the fall; I knew I wouldn’t feel it. I fall from grace every time I get out of bed, every time I admit I love you more than you love me, every time the sun sets and I can’t appreciate it. I embrace the fall. It’s in the grit of the sidewalk I find the most beauty; I just wish I could rub it against my teeth without stares from lurking strangers. Sidewalks in New York City aren’t without an abundance of lurkers, gawking and judging. Television has no meaning in a city of curious behavior.

So there I was on a corner in the Lower East Side kicking the snow in my way, sliding haphazardly against the black ice I couldn’t see. My skirt was made of sequins, and under my arm was the red wine a friend had given me for Christmas. “It’s expensive,” he said as he handed me the shiny gold bag. I held it in front of me and read the label out loud: Nebbilo.

“Never heard of it,” I said. I wasn’t impressed. I wondered why I needed to know its value to enjoy it.

“You’ll love it,” he responded, then he checked his reflection in the window behind me. “You don’t need a very experienced palate to appreciate its fullness.” I turned my head and rolled my eyes. It was a late Christmas gift, the one that comes after the holiday, the one that makes you wonder if the giver had received double, or didn’t like it, or simply felt obligated in some way. I had given him nothing. I felt my attention was enough, as half-hearted as it was on my part.

He was one of those people who needed the sound of his own voice to live, and this was a trait I re-realized every time we met. Each time I couldn’t understand how I could misplace such a fact about his personality. Conveniently forgotten. Too lazy to take my hands from my lap where they lay in equal boredom as the rest of my body, I rubbed my chin against my shoulder to scratch the part that tends to wobble a bit when I begin to cry. My chin began to wobble a bit.

I took a deep breath, looked up at the tin ceiling of the café and knew I would not be finishing my salad. Slowly, I pulled my attention from the way the backs of my knees rubbed against the wooden chair, the smell of Chanel on the girl next to me and the drowning of Jose Gonzalez from the too-old speaker above my head and looked at him. He didn’t notice that he had lost me.

I had expected him to be licking the window in an attempt at devouring his own beauty, the one he seemed too assure of, but instead he was waving for the waitress in that condescending way of his. I wondered where he learned that sort of behavior; his parents had seemed so normal and down to earth that one time I met them.

But back to the snow I was kicking, and the skirt I wore and the wine in the gold bag under my arm. It was New Year’s Eve. I smirked at the idea of it. I bit my lower lip as I watched passersby fumble, the way I had with the slippery sidewalks, dodging the piles of trash that adorned the curb in equal parts squalor and charm. “At least it’s not the summer,” said a girl as she stepped over a ripped open garbage bag in a glittery green heel. The bag contained rice and a dirty diaper; I could see Elmo’s face on the tabs from where I was. She was right.

The first time my sister came to visit me in New York, it was July. I had been living in the city for five months. I had hoped she would fall in love the way I did, but the humidity and the garbage, the piles of it that tends to happen on trash day, prevented that from happening. The stench was overwhelming for the week she was here, and the air being as thick as it was, captured the foul odor with sticky, sweaty palms, coddled it and made it even worse. She swore she’d never come to visit again. She did once more, however, but it was autumn; it was the day I turned thirty years old.

Despite my down jacket, I could feel the brick of the wall through the feathers. The coldness penetrated the fabric and ran its fingertips down my spine like a masseuse who didn’t read the memo that I’m ticklish, or more specifically, I don’t like massages at all. I always get at least one massage gift certificate every Christmas. No one can seem to believe that I find it the most stressful hour of my life. Hold me up at gunpoint, put my life in peril, rob me of my tongue and kick me from the rooftop… anything but a fucking massage.

I had to make a decision: go to the party in the Meatpacking District, or walk the half block back to my apartment. I pushed my lips together. I was wearing bright red lipstick, the same lipstick I wore everyday I was in Paris just the year before. I smiled remembering the way it looked smeared on a stranger’s face and torso one afternoon. My heels were green, too, but they did not glitter.

As if waiting to be pushed in either direction by a gust of wind, I stepped out from against the wall. I hate stepping out from my wallflower preference. I slipped again. I heard my heel scrape against the pavement that lay sneakily and deceitfully underneath the ice, and down I went. My head hit last, and the sound it made was so surreal and deafening, that I assumed I was dead.

In college we used to play “I Never.” A drinking game perfectly devised to lure truths from friends and strangers. When it was your turn, you said something you never did, then those who actually had done it, would drink. By the end of the night, it was always clear who had experimented with anal sex and spanking, and everything else that twenty-year-olds deem gruesome. One night, Tom, the skateboarder kid of the group posed: “I’ve never fallen so fucking hard that my insides exploded.” I can’t remember the context or the reason behind such a vanilla topic. We all collectively sighed at the fact that it didn’t relate to blowjobs or finger-banging on the back of the bus in high school.

I was in love for the first time then. I glanced at Timothy across the room. His arm was in a low-hung sling from a snowboarding accident in Alaska, and the contrast of the white hospital cotton against his navy cardigan stood out in the dully-lit living room of that Newmarket apartment. He didn’t look at me as I watched him, but the words I had written for him were inscribed on the inner soles of his Chucks, and I could see them, too. I have fallen so fucking hard that my insides have exploded.

I didn’t take what Tom had said literally; I had taken it metaphorically. I had confused falling in love with the falling off a skateboard ramp, as I’m sure Tom had actually meant. It wasn’t until years later that I was able to see the difference, and the true meaning of his dry topic at the time. When I had made the realization of my mistake, I hated myself for being so silly, so girlish, so in love. And as I lay there on the sidewalk in the Lower East Side on New Year’s Eve, I thought of that night again. I thought about Timothy’s cardigan, and how the words “forever and ever” trailed in the back of my mind like a whimsical eight-year-old promising things she couldn’t reach.

I put my hand against my lower stomach, the one that will never be flat enough for him or anyone else for that matter, and I gasped. There is something about gasping, the deep breathing that comes with shock or terror; it reminded me of being alive. It made me feel alive. I gasped again and realized I would be bruised tomorrow. The wine bottle was no longer under my arm but lodged under my thigh; the fall had not broken it.

I pulled myself to my feet and removed my heels. There was no sense in going down again; I didn’t have the will in me to survive another fall that evening. The sidewalk was dirty and cold; I was dirty and cold. I have fallen so fucking hard that my insides have exploded. I repeated it again.

My chin wobbled as I walked home, and the sequins of my skirt scratched at my thighs, the ones that will never be skinny enough for him or anyone else for that matter. The wine was under my arm, and I knew it would be gone before midnight. I felt the back of my head; the lump from the fall was already starting. I wished I were capable of such childish misunderstandings as the night I confused falling with falling; they look exactly the same on the outside, so there should be some room for error. I always thought it a scar in my personality, like my friend who needs the sound of his own voice, the way I loved Timothy that night. Ever since then, I’ve been running from the notion of such a fall.

This silly girl in her green heels in which she can’t walk is done preceeding the words, “I love you,” with “I’m sorry, but…” Apparently, I should really bang my head more often.

Luthier: A Story About Loss

2010-12-23T14:35:00.005-05:00

First it was the guitar he left behind in my apartment that was demolished. I had been staring at it every time a call or text to him went unanswered, and it was my phone that was the first object to make a dent in the soft wood of the body. I ran my finger over that initial wound, and realized: I can’t hurt him, so I’ll hurt this instead. I’ll cut you up, I’ll rip you to shreds and I’ll carry the pieces with me until I find a fire big enough to burn you to ash in seconds alone. I had never had an attachment to guitars; my heart belonged mostly to words on paper, and sometimes to the piano my parents gave me for my sixteenth birthday. I had asked for a car.

When it was obvious that he was not coming back to me, I carefully laid the already bruised guitar on my floor and proceeded to jump on it over and over again. In my Kelly-green heels, I smashed it to bits. With each downward fall against the neck, I slipped on the nylon strings and all but screamed: Take that! Do you hear me? Take that, I said! Yeah Yeah Yeahs were blaring out of the speakers.

I sat on my bed and looked at the mess I had made: the slivers of wood, the strings that were once so straight now coiled and pointing up and out in all directions, and the perfect circular hole that once echoed with sound and complimented his out-of-tune voice, was now jagged and misshapen. I let the guitar sit on my floor for over a week. When he came for the rest of his belongings, the ones I couldn’t break, I slid his broken guitar under my bed. I told him I smashed it and had thrown it out. I didn’t tell him I was waiting to burn it; he wouldn’t understand.

After a week of stepping over it, kicking it aside, throwing anything within arm’s reach at it, I took it outside to the garbage cans that lined the front of my building. It’s hard to find a bonfire in New York City. I shoved the pieces in one of the black trash bags just as two girls walked by: “Oooh! Someone must have been mad!” said the shorter one.

“Girl, why you gone do that?” asked the taller one in a hot pink scarf that extended far past her full hips.

“I used to be a rockstar,” I said. I pushed the pieces as far down as I could; I watched them pierce the thin plastic of the bag and felt mildly vindicated. I placed the cover back on the can and went upstairs. Bon Iver was blaring out of the speakers.

There were those who agreed with my actions, those who had wished it had been him instead, and the few who questioned if I had taken my meds the day of the attack. It wasn’t about medicine at that point; it was about loss. It was when the tears had begun to cease and my breathing was less strained that I decided to make amends the only way I knew how: I bought him a new guitar.

I could not afford an expensive one, nor was I steeped in any sort of knowledge in the difference between guitars outside of acoustic versus electric. Electric would have been harder to crush. I spent days comparing brands, researching types that might be an exact match to his, so he’d never know the difference and I could at least fake the resemblance of sanity. I had his new guitar messengered to his office the day before I left for Colorado. Jesper Norda was blaring from my computer at work.

***

“This guitar sounds like you singing,” was the text I received one night. I had been back in New York City for three days. I had walked up Driggs and over to the Marcy stop. It was December and I shivered with each step up the long staircase to the subway platform. I was sick to my stomach; at dinner everyone had oysters. I do not like oysters. Instead, I had too many martinis. It’s hard for me eat when there’s nothing there.

I had erased his number, but there he was again in my hand, coming through in digital print on my phone. I shivered and waited for the train. I would see him again before the night was over, and the replacement guitar, the one I had carefully researched, the one that broke my small bank account to buy, would be smashed by the both of us.

“I’m an ornament,” was what he had scrawled on its body in black Sharpie. We had decided that we didn’t like the guitar; it sounded like me singing, it was perpetually out of tune, and it had to be destroyed for what it represented. He threw it from the top of the stairs to the main floor of his apartment, and we took turns jumping on it. Again, the thin wood of the body flaked away as if made of Styrofoam, and the strings coiled up and out in all directions. He picked it up by the neck and banged it against the floor over and over again; he only stopped when his roommate came home.

“Great,” said Clifford as he removed his jacket and hung it on one of the hooks by the stairs, “Hurricane Christoffer and Amanda again… just make sure you clean that up when you’re done.” We agreed. Yeah Yeah Yeahs were blaring from his bedroom.

Long ago, my friend Fal left her guitar behind. It was nothing fancy, but based on what guitar players told me, it played well. I had my mother ship it to me, and gave it to him. I still owed him a guitar. He mostly kept it on a stand, as he couldn’t play very well, but just like the first guitar it complimented his off-key, out-of-tune voice; the voice that never got the lyrics right.

When I left for Colorado the second time in less than one calendar year, my friends swooped in and retrieved the guitar from him. He didn’t deserve any tangible memory of me, was the consensus; he didn’t deserve any memory of me at all. It was the sickening thought of the guitar sitting in his room being privy to his careless behavior that forced me to reclaim it. I still couldn’t play it; I had no need to learn how.

Coec went to his office, collected my belongings and placed them in her living room. She leaned the guitar case against her bookshelf, and when I was ready, she promised to return them to me. I promised myself to never be ready.

When it was clear that the ultimatum had been drawn along the ground, and sides had been chosen, Coec asked me to come for my belongings. She couldn’t see me, she didn’t approve and she wanted me to remember how I felt each time he forced me to leave the city, because it would be happening again. I didn’t need a lecture; I didn’t need a lesson.

On Tuesday I went to her apartment building to once again chase down a guitar that was never mine to begin with, to make a possession of something I didn’t even care to possess.

“I’m here to pick up a guitar,” I said to the man in the red and white Santa hat behind the front desk, “My name is Amanda.”

He flipped through a logbook, ran his dirty-nailed finger over black-penned words, and looked up at me. “Ah, yes. Come right this way,” he said. I followed him to the storage room; there it was once again. I picked it up with both arms, unsure as to how one even held a guitar case, and the man laughed: “Looks like you missed it,” he said jovially.

“Yeah, something like that,” I whispered as I balanced the case between my feet to put my mittens back on before going out onto the cold Brooklyn streets. I leaned it forward and grabbed it by the handle; it was heavier than I thought it would be. Just days before Christmas, the crowds were thick and I struggled to weave through them with the clunky black case at my side. Broken Social Scene was blaring on my iPod.

My mother wasn’t sold on the idea of me learning to the play the guitar, or the thought that maybe I could be the next Joan Baez with enough practice, so I started piano lessons at eight-years-old. I thought of this as I walked along with the guitar I had learned to hate. I knew once I got it home, it would again sit in my bedroom until I allowed Christoffer to take it away once more, and months from now when we both said things we will have meant in the moment, I’d stand outside his apartment making a public plea for the guitar back. And it wouldn't be about the instrument at all, or the fact that I still wouldn't be able to play it, or even that it’s not my guitar to give away or reclaim… no, again it would be about loss. It would be about what’s mine isn’t yours and what’s yours will never be mine, it would be about spite, about the drink he spilled by accident months before, the nights I stayed up until dawn scratching at my insides with a black pen and the fact that sometimes importance is misplaced.

I thought of how it felt to pound on the piano keys as a kid, the way it feels to have such power to draw sound from a box of perfectly placed steel strings. Pianos are bulkier than guitars; you cannot wrap them up in a case, close them in with rusted latches, give them away, take them back or leave them behind. Pianos are lucky this way.

On Thursday I took the subway into Brooklyn with the guitar in hand. I got off somewhere in Park Slope, climbed the stairs to the sidewalk up above and leaned the guitar against a random brick building. I did not make an elaborate scene, a teary-eyed farewell; I was simply done. I crossed the street and took the subway back into Manhattan. Matt Pond PA was blaring on my iPod.

Cacophony: A Story About Swords

2010-12-17T12:45:00.003-05:00

“Like hell,” I said, “that’s how we ran.” I poured the boiling water from the pot and bounced the teabag in the cup to make small rings; trying to replicate ocean buoyancy in the tiny space enclosed by ceramic, and adorned with a hand-painted spotted dog. “So we ran up Bedford Avenue chasing each other with these Nerf swords, and when we got under the Williamsburg Bridge, we threw down our bags, removed our coats and went for it. I think he may have won though… he didn’t seem to run from the sword as easily as I did. I probably would have had a better time running towards it had it been real.” I paused and waited for a response. “Hello? Are you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here… I’m just listening,” said my sister.

“Anyway, so in that moment, the one where I faked my death dramatically at the hand of his Nerf sword just as a bunch of cabs went by, I remember thinking: it doesn’t get much better than this. I mean, there aren’t many people I’ll run down the streets of Brooklyn with playing Nerf swords…”

“No, there probably aren’t… and that’s why I hate this,” she said. I could tell she was trying to feign interest, but her attention was on the aftermath, and the carcass that would be mine.

“I know,” I said. I put my hands on either side of my tea and took it with me to the couch. I pulled my knees into me and balanced the cup on the armrest. “I guess my point is, I had a moment… and I so rarely have them.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, “You have them all the time with him… your entire relationship is one moment after another, and the parts that aren’t moments are these two fucked up people trying to convince themselves and each other that they’re not fucked up and everything is just fine. I’ve never spent as much time with anyone like you two do with each other…”

“But he’s my best –”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah… we’ve all heard it before. You’ve got an army of friends who don’t want to know you because of him, you have a pile of plane tickets because whenever you two get in a fight you’re not strong enough to stand there and fix it. You cry for weeks, you don’t eat, you don’t sleep and we’re the ones who have to hold you up; we’re the ones that literally have to feed life back into you… and we do, and you just go running right back to him the first chance you get. It’s fucked up. It’s the most fucked up non-relationship in the history of the world.”

“But…”

“No buts… he’s going to get out of this alive. I just don’t think you’ll be as lucky. And he’ll move on and live his life, and someday, a long time from now you might cross his mind, but he’s never going to have needed you the way you need him. He’s a part of your being, Mandy, we subtract him, and you just collapse.”

“I’m not in love with him, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” I said defensively.

“I’m not saying you are, but I am saying you will never be strong enough to handle your friendship with him… you’re not strong enough for a lot of things.” Then she sighed. “Jackson just crawled out of bed again… I’ll call you later.” I turned my phone off and put it on the coffee table.

My sister came into this world prematurely. She was three weeks early; I was three weeks late. It was after it became quite clear that I would not be departing my mother’s womb on my own, that labor was induced. I was not a large baby, rather average: slightly over seven pounds. However, I’ve spent every day that has followed being on the small end of things: always the smallest in my classes, the shortest one who threw off a room of average height, forever doomed to be in the front row of a class photo, the tiny girl on the very end… that was me. If one were to deduce a fact from this, it would be that considering my size, I shouldn’t be strong; I’m lacking muscle bulk, height, and most importantly presence, in many cases. So my sister was right in her assertion: I am not strong enough to come out the other side of most debacles unscathed.

And we are a debacle, he and I; and anyone who has witnessed us, would agree. We are a tornado that has our way with things that are not our own, we’re a hurricane that will leave no survivors, and we’re a silence that is so loud it’s going to blow every speaker in the room and leave bystanders deaf.

The sidewalk was covered in bird shit, but it didn’t register. He thrust his sword into me, and I could see the grey of it extend out past my lower back, at an angle pointing down towards the ground. I grabbed at my heart, envisioned blood at the corners of my mouth, and down I went, without grace, regard, or purpose. He stood over me, as he does when he knocks me down, and ran his hand through his hair.

“What time do we have to be at that thing?” he asked.

“Seven. We can be late… a quelle heure?”

He peeled the sleeve of his plaid shirt back and looked at the bright pink watch, my watch, the one he had stolen because he felt it fit better than this. “About that… wanna head there now?” He held his hand out towards me, and I grabbed it. I pulled myself to my feet.

“They’re not friends with me anymore, because they’re jealous… just so you know,” I said, regarding that small army of friends who disowned me when I allowed Christoffer back into my life. “They’re jealous that they’ll never be as fun as us.”

“Probably,” he said, “and Kathleen wants to have my babies.”

“Well, that, too,” I laughed checking my bag for all our belongings, “but there’s no sense in bringing up a sensitive subject for everyone involved.”

The boy walking his pug a few blocks before had given us the wrong address, so we walked mistakenly up South Sixth Street at first. It was Sunday and most places were closed; that was the major difference between Brooklyn and Manhattan: Sunday and late night convenience, Brooklyn failed to deliver them. We wandered the way we do when he’s had too much to drink, and I’m not in rush. Normally, it’s me playing catch up with his long legs. Even when I’m ahead, he has to surpass me although I’m never sure why or where he’s going or what he’s trying to prove, other than the fact that he simply can. This night, he had too much to drink and opted for eggs at brunch; my decision of pizza kept me more able to walk without a stumble or falter.

We got to the restaurant to meet some coworkers of mine. I had prepped him to behave; I had begged him to keep the Christoffer I knew to a minimum. They were not an uptight group, they just wouldn’t understand. He sat across from me when the table was expanded to include others, and he sleepily leaned on the palm of his hand and ordered Jameson after Jameson.

“Pussy,” he whispered as he looked at me. His face was serious, not moving in the slightest, and even in the dimmed light of the restaurant, I could see the brown splotch in his eye, the same eye my dog Hubbell tried to take out one night when he realized he met the first and last person who would ever pose a threat to our perfect sanctuary.

“Don’t,” I said.

He picked up his napkin and held it to the side of his mouth so no one else could see his lips as they moved. “Pussy,” he said again.

“Seriously, don’t –”

“Pussy,” he said even louder than before.

I widened my eyes with anger, like a mother, or an older sister or someone who had forgotten she had spent the last hour of her life chasing after him with a Nerf sword.

“Why don’t you eat pussy,” he said, “since obviously you don’t want anything on the menu.” The girls on either side of us stopped.

“What did he say?” asked Jennifer.

“I said pussy, because the doctor here, hates that word,” he explained, “so I suggested she eat some and get over it.”

“How can you hate the word pussy and be a feminist?” asked Lily.

“I don’t know… I don’t like lots of words. It’s not the context, it’s the word. I don’t even like it in regards to the plant – ” I said.

“What plant?”

“The wussy pillow plant.”

“You mean the pussy willow?” asked Jennifer.

“That’s what I said: wussy pillow.”

“Do you see what I have to deal with on a daily basis here?” asked Christoffer.

I excused myself from the table and went to the bathroom. I stood in the fluorescent lighting too long. I didn’t even have to go, I just felt suffocated. By the time I got back to the dining room, Lily was already drenched in water from the glasses that had broken upon Christoffer’s attempt at departure. He stood by the door, sword in hand; apparently he was ready for another round.

I removed his wallet from his pocket and took the cash I was lacking to pay for our very expensive part of the tab thanks to his Jameson. I zipped his jacket and faced him towards the sidewalk.

“We should go to Chinatown!” he exclaimed. We had decided at 4am that morning that Chinatown was the greatest idea in the history of the world, but it had taken us well over twelve hours to remember the idea that had put us both in such a whirlwind of excitement. I looked at him as he wavered in his stance.

“You really want to go?”

“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked.

“Not really… we just ate,” I explained.

“I think we should go,” he said, “it will be fun.”

I took his hand in mine, and walked us towards the subway. His hair was messy, and he walked unevenly. I had the swords under my arm; there was no sense in losing in them…

“What do you mean by that?” asked my sister.

“What part?”

“How would you lose them?”

“Because people lose things when they’re drunk…”

“Ugh. Sometimes I wish he’d knock you up… actually, him or anyone at this point, so you’re forced to grow up and not drink for nine months,” she snapped.

“Don’t wish that on me,” I said, “Everyone knows I’m not financially or emotionally ready… it would be unfair to everyone. Especially my awesome baby!”

“So what happened to these prized swords of yours?”

“Are you mocking?” I asked.

“No,” she said, slightly laughing, “I’m just wondering.”

“They’re on my bedroom floor.”

“You should frame them,” she suggested.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because someday you’ll want to remember that once upon a time you loved someone more than you loved yourself,” she whispered.

“What does that even mean?”

“You love him the way you love me, the way you love Jackson… it far exceeds the love you have for yourself.”

“So?”

“So… it’s just a matter of time before you’re without, so you should frame it,” she explained.

“That’s just silly,” I said.

“Why?”

“Think about it… framing Nerf? That’s more than difficult… they’re so bulky. I could never get one of them into a frame.”

“Oh, so you already thought about it, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Maybe. And maybe according to the guy at the art store, they don’t make frames that deep. Maybe it’s a special order,” I said as I fixated my eyes on the television screen. Family Guy was a repeat again.

“Maybe you’re a special order!” I heard a voice say in the background.

“Was that Scot?” I asked.

“Yeah, he’s got a radar when it comes to any chance to be annoying… Anyway, save the swords. I’m not sure what Nerf is made of, but it definitely has a longer lifespan than you two… and someday you can chase Jackson down the streets of Brooklyn with them.”

“But it won’t be the same,” I said as I tried to picture myself being chased after by a toddler.

“Yep,” agreed my sister, “and that will be the best part.”

Idioglossia: A Story About Thanksgiving

2010-11-30T01:40:00.003-05:00

We had left the list of names on the living room floor. It was an accident, of course; the leaving behind, not the list. It was the first Thanksgiving since my sister, Jennie, had moved to Colorado, and I had not seen her in three months; this was a record for she and I. Our father came across the list, and stood at the bottom of the stairs waving it in his hand.

“Mandy! Do you two need this? Is it some sort of game or something?” he asked. The lined piece of paper, having been ripped from a legal pad was torn at the top, and the inability to find a pen had forced us to use a dull pencil. We couldn’t find a sharpener either. Jennie and I looked at each other with wide eyes, and I lipped the words: “Oh fuck.” I peered around the corner to see my father reading the list.

“Louie? Mandy? What is this?” he asked again.

“It’s a list of names we think we’d like to name our future sons,” explained my sister from my bedroom with her voice just loud enough to echo down the stairs to the first floor.

“Names? That doesn’t make any sense… you guys have John and Chris written several times.”

“Dad, it’s a bizarre mathematical process of how first names sound with middle ones… you can just throw it out,” I yelled. My sister laughed into a pillow and I rolled over onto my back. “Brush my furs and tell me I’m the prettiest.”

“You sho’ be da’ prettiest,” she said still laughing.

“Fine. I’m throwing it out,” he yelled back, “And hurry up – it might be nice if you helped your mother for a change.”

We had immaturely decided to make a list of all the boys we had kissed. Then, because our virginities had been misplaced a few years before that, we starred the names of the ones with whom we had had sex. It wasn’t a contest or a race, but rather we’d been up since 7am and had exhausted several rounds of the card game, Spit. A list of our sexual conquests seemed like the next most entertaining way to spend that morning. By the time our father found the list, we were already upstairs getting dressed for Thanksgiving dinner, and our mother had just lectured us on how to behave upon the arrival of our grandmother, aunt and cousins. It wasn’t that we misbehaved; we were 19 and 20 at the time, we just had this way of ganging up on people, and usually our victims didn’t have the slightest realization as to what we meant with our private lingo and eye glances. Our mini-lecture from Mom was also followed by the fact that we “absolutely would not be fake sleeping on the couch after dinner to get out of quality family time.” Just because we had successfully pulled it off last year, didn’t mean we should think it appropriate behavior again.

It was the first Thanksgiving that our grandfather would not be joining us. His Alzheimer’s had officially taken over his mind, and he had been in the hospital since early spring of that year. Before my sister had moved to Colorado, we went to see him. Due to the high number of dementia patients, we had to be buzzed into the premises, sign-in, and be escorted to his room. It was the first and last time we saw him in the hospital, and also our last living memory of him: slumped over in grey sweatpants and a sweatshirt, the slightest bit of recognition for either one of us long gone. The corners of his mouth were cracked and dry, and having dropped his glasses the week before, he was now wearing make-shift ones that resembled something out of a Jeffrey Dahmer documentary – it was not our Grampy.

Jennie, the stronger of the two of us, stood at my mother’s side and tried to engage our grandfather in conversation, but he had forgotten how to talk, the words were no longer there; he was no longer there. I turned and ran out of the room. I didn’t wait to be escorted, I didn’t sign out, and when I opened the door in a fury to escape the reality that was now my grandfather, a loud alarm went off. I fumbled with the handle, I felt like Rain Man when he burned toast; I wanted to pound on my ears and shake the facts off me, let them slide from my skin and build a puddle I could demolish with one quick jump. Finally a nurse helped me, and I tripped over my own feet down the stairs. I caught myself with the palms of my hands on the crushed rock of the parking lot, and stayed there until I caught my breath. I didn’t cry. Even when he died, I didn’t cry. I don’t know how to cry when people die. Whoever said denial was a bad thing, never understood the importance of self-preservation.

Our grandmother had headed to the hospital that morning before dinner. She had gone to all the effort to make dinner the night before, just so she could bring the only man she ever loved a plate on Thanksgiving. Grampy had stopped eating at that point, and this fact was something we were not allowed to discuss. It was as though we were supposed to pretend the missing part of the equation, our grandfather, was on vacation; and if we were lucky, he’d be back in time for Christmas.

While my sister and I had been busy compiling the list of the boys who had ventured in and out of our lives, our mother had gone to the Honey Baked Ham store in Nashua. Neither my sister nor I ate ham, but our grandmother preferred it, and considering the emotions at stake, her needs took precedence. We never saw the turkey our mother had bought, before it hit the table. Our mother had always been an avid cook, and excellent one, too. She could cook and sew and do all the other motherly things that didn’t come so easy to others; and she was amazing at it. Outside of Halloween, Thanksgiving had always been a favorite, as my mother dedicated the entire day to course after course as we lounged and watched whatever holiday movies happened to be on cable. So when we sat down to eat and still had not seen or even smelled a turkey cooking, we were confused.

“I’m trying something else this year,” our mother said as she finished all the sides that would normally accompany a turkey dinner.

The fancy visitor-only table linens had been set up perfectly, and the China that our mother had saved up to buy piece by piece from Tiffany in her early 20’s was placed around the dining room table with place cards for the mere eight of us. I was put next to my aunt, as usual; and that year I was finally excited to be seated next to the woman who had been asking me if I had a boyfriend since I was 13-years-old. I had been dating Timothy since the spring, and was fairly certain we’d be married within the next year or two. On the other side of me was my cousin Kristen; and across from me, my sister sat in between our grandmother and cousin, Kim. Our parents took the head of each end of the table… a place that my father could never stay in longer than five minutes at a time. He was constantly pushing out his chair to “get something,” although it had been decided among the three of us, that he didn’t really need anything at all, he just feared being sucked into the monotony of family gossip. Sometimes he’d get up from the table two or three times just to get more butter even though there was enough already out. Despite our affection for dairy, we would not be able to consume three sticks of butter between the eight of us… even if we had been forced to sit there for days.

After our mother put the ham in the center of the table, she went back into the kitchen to get the turkey. On an average-sized plate sat a brown thing that wasn’t much bigger than a football.

“What is that?” asked Jennie as she poked the turkey ball with her fork.

“It’s a turkey – it is Thanksgiving…” replied our mother.

“No, it’s not,” said my sister as she got up for a closer look. “Where are the bones? Is it a Spam turkey?”

“Spam turkey?” asked my dad, “Like your mother would ever prepare a Spam turkey.”

“I didn’t prepare it… I bought it at the Honey Baked Ham store. I didn’t see the point in making a big turkey for two girls who refuse to eat ham for a change.”

“The pilgrims didn’t eat ham, Mom!” I said watching my sister push on the turkey with her index finger as if waiting for it to turn around and tell her to stop.

“Jennifer!” snapped my mother, “stop playing with the turkey and sit down.”

“But it’s not a turkey!” said Jennie. She stabbed it with her knife and watched the juices spill out onto the plate. “It’s bleeding! It’s bleeding!”

I stood up and leaned over the fowl to see if it was indeed bleeding. “That’s not blood…” I said.

“Mandy, Louie, sit down and stop being dramatic. Your mother made a fine meal and we’re going to enjoy it!” exclaimed my father.

“I’m not eating it. It’s weird looking,” said my sister. We looked at each other across the table. “You try it first,” she continued.

“No, I’m practically a vegetarian… I don’t eat Spam,” I said.

“Try it,” she said again, gritting her teeth.

“No,” I said, “You do it.”

Then she threw her napkin at me. The linen napkin, light-weight and without the ability to do much damage in the long run, almost took out one of the candles in the process. When I called her a bitch, she threw a popover at me. I ducked and heard the soft eggy roll hit the window behind my head. Before I could respond with my own Thanksgiving weapon of choice or before we could be reprimanded, she threw a ceramic napkin holder and it hit my lower lip perfectly in the center. I started to bleed.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I yelled. I was more than willing to leap across the table and strangle her for trying to ruin Thanksgiving, but feared my inability to aim would mean I’d end up taking out my grandmother instead.

“Amanda!” yelled my mother, “language!”

“But she’s hurling shit at me!” I screamed back.

“That’s it!” said my father, as he pushed his way from the table again. “I’m going to get more butter and you two are going to your rooms right now.”

“Are you kidding?” laughed Jennie; “you can’t send us to our rooms… we don’t even technically live here anymore!”

“You’re upsetting your mother and I won’t stand for it! Now out! Out!” He had thrown his napkin on the table and was now pointing to one of the two doorways that led out of the room. I grabbed the popover and marched out of the door, with my sister following right behind me.

Like spoiled children, we pounded our way up the stairs, each step louder than the next. We could hear our mother apologizing and our cousins laughing at our behavior. When we got to my room, we lay in the bed and pulled the covers over our heads, as if to make a mock fort.

“That went well… don’t you think?” Jennie asked.

“It was fine until you threw the fucking napkin ring. Was that really necessary?”

“It’s called acting,” she replied. I threw the blanket off our heads, gave her half the popover and put on the record player. “I guess it’s a good thing we overdosed on appetizers so we won’t totally starve while we’re up here being punished.”

“Oh, they’ll force us to come back down before they leave… we won’t get off that easy,” I said.

We could hear someone coming up the stairs, and feared another verbal lashing from our father, or even worse, being denied turkey sandwiches later that day. Our father stood in the hallway and turned on the light. In his hand, he had yet another stick of butter and the Morton salt container. “Next time, include me, please? We can all fake food poisoning or something,” he said. He looked at his watch, then back up at us. “Only a couple more hours…” he sighed. “Now you two really need to learn to grow up!” he yelled for the sake of the visitors downstairs. He turned off the light, slammed the door, and descended with his butter and salt in hand.

“How could he have possibly known?” asked Jennie.

“I don’t know… most of it was improv! Maybe he’s psychic…”

“Or maybe you really are just like him!”

“I am not,” I said. I was sick of being compared to my father. It had been an ongoing theme since day one.

“Yes, you are!”

“No, I’m not…” I whispered to counteract her yelling; then I pinched her thigh hard enough to leave a bruise.

Before we could get appropriately settled into a game of Scrabble, our mother came upstairs and asked that we rejoin the party. Downstairs, nothing had changed. Everyone was still seated in their designated spots; and our grandmother, the one for whom the ham was supposed to be for, was eating the round turkey ball; she had not touched the ham.

“Mom, do you want me to get you some ham?” asked our mother. There was a silence. Jennie and I exchanged looks over the spiral-cut swine and wondered why everything had become so somber.

“It’s Thanksgiving,” said our grandmother, “You eat turkey on Thanksgiving. I only ate ham because your father preferred it… I don’t even like ham. I’ve never liked ham.” She didn’t seem to be saddened or moved or even aware that she had opened her mouth. She continued to chew as the words sort of rolled off her tongue like a simple truth, like how nine will always precede ten and that’s just how it is.

“Well then,” said my father, “Someone hand your grandmother the mashed potatoes… I’ll go get us more butter.” And with that, he was up and out of his seat again, only to discover that there was no butter left in the refrigerator. Instead, he brought back the gallon of milk, although no one at the table was drinking milk.

Inchoate: A Story About Atlantic City

2010-11-08T17:38:00.004-05:00

I threw the glass and it broke. I didn’t think it would break against the carpet. But it was more of a rug, a thin one, the kind that doesn’t indent under the weight of your body, but stays flat. A rug that doesn’t move; had I been a poet, I would have found a metaphor in it.

Christoffer had snuck the glass of Jameson out of the bar, tucked in the inside of his sports jacket. It was the same jacket he had once smuggled out multiple pint glasses from a bar a long time ago, in college maybe, or Barcelona, or some place faraway – he had told me the story so many times. I just could never remember the location of this thievery of his. I sometimes wondered if he remembered either.

I laughed at the sound of the glass breaking, the way one laughs at a joke that’s not quite funny because it’s mostly true. We decided not to pick up the pieces, they were better off there on the rug, and considering our state, we weren’t equipped for such sharp objects. It was somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, and we had not yet slept. There was the hour or so in the cab, but I’m not sure that counted much. I had always been taught that eight hours was necessary to function at full capacity. Despite my affinity for the number eight, I had never adhered to this health-conscious suggestion. Eight, when flipped on its side, represents infinity; when I realized this in a science class in elementary school, I anointed it my favorite number. Infinity is unbounded, and an eloquent display of a never-ending escape. That’s the scientist in me.

When we got to Atlantic City we had the driver drop us off at the only open bar in town. It was somewhere before 7am, and surprisingly, there were patrons still standing. Patrons, whom I’m sure had been going there for years, or decades at the very least; staples and facts like the walls, the ceiling, and the small window with the neon sign in it.

The bartender was gruff, with a thick New Jersey accent, and behind his head on the wall, a bat; you know, just in case he had to use it. This is New Jersey like how they do in the movies, was all I could think. I ordered us each a beer, but Christoffer opted for Jameson. Since I’d left town, he had been on a Jameson kick. I momentarily liked to believe that he needed it to sleep at night since I was put in his past. Instead, I remembered what my friend Bess said about whiskey: “It’s cozy like a blanket, but one with holes in it, because it’s still not strong enough sometimes.”

I looked at Christoffer as he swallowed a small, hard gulp. Then he smiled. “This is the craziest thing we’ve ever done,” he said. And he was right.

Christoffer had been back in my life for less than a week, or exactly a week, or somewhere in between; for those who were keeping track of time and hours. I was not. I just knew he was gone, and he was back; it was simple math that even I would have aced had I been given the test.

I got up from the bar and made my way to the bathroom. The floor along the hallway was wet from the early morning mopping that had just taken place, and the walls were made of fake wood, the kind you find in old houses, a relic of the 1970’s that someone had forgotten to remove. I tried my best not to slip in my shoes. The heels to my flats had already been worn down on the city sidewalks since my return. I tend to scuff when I’ve had too much to drink. I looked at myself in the mirror, the way my hair stuck up in all directions, and how my facial features looked even more crooked than usual in the fluorescent lighting and through puffy sleep-deprived eyes. I leaned in close to examine further. I scowled at my reflection, and bit my lip. I like to bite my lip when I’m tired. It’s my proof I’m still awake.

When I came out I ran into Christoffer as he, like me, slowly made his way across the wet floor.

“I can’t drink that beer, you do it,” he said. I shrugged and obliged. It wouldn’t be hard at that hour, and with the sky turning that sunrise shade of pink over the tops of the buildings, I planned to enjoy it, too.

After a brief rundown of directions and a paid tab, we headed out to find a hotel room. We wondered who would let us check in at such an hour, if we’d have to pretend to be married, as if we were in Donna Reed movie; but then we laughed when we reminded ourselves where we were: Atlantic City.

We wandered around a casino, rolled our eyes at the old people still at work on the slot machines. It was like something out of a Wal-Mart weekly sales circular, these middle-Americans in tee shirts donning puff-paint American flags, and matching sweatpants with shoes clearly for orthopedic purposes only, or at least that’s what I hoped. I wanted to grab Christoffer, shake him and make him promise we’d never be like that, like those people; that we’d always be a little more special, a tad more crazy, and ideally, always aware, acutely aware of the difference between them and us.

“We should get sweatshirts!” he said excitedly. He clapped his hands the way he does when either mocking me or someone else who suffers from clapping induced by over-stimulation. I thought compared to the original idea of coming to Atlantic City, this one he had was the next best thing.

We checked into a room that overlooked the boardwalk, and the ocean was just feet away. We stood on our mini-balcony and gazed triumphantly out over those who were just waking up or going to bed, and relished in the fact that we would do neither. We would buy New Jersey-themed sweatshirts instead, we’d purchase postcards and key chains, and we’d skip the coffee part of the morning and head straight to the bar.

Again Christoffer would opt for a Jameson, and after a couple of them, he would pocket the last half-full one, and we’d stumble out the door; proud that we were so bold.

We paid a kindly older gentleman to push us down the boardwalk in a rickshaw of sorts. The man had a wide smile, and smiled a lot: a mouth full of these lovely crooked teeth, and with stories to tell and years attached to them that were older than Christoffer and I put together. Christoffer jumped out to photograph him, and in the photo I’d see later, I’d notice that I was staring straight ahead. I was done looking over my shoulder.

We made our way to the ocean’s edge, and I felt compelled to jump; and if there had been a dock, I would have. And I would not have even considered the aftermath, or the fact that it might look suicidal or simply, insane. Without a dock for jumping, there was only running to be had; stripping down to my underwear and running full speed into the water. I needed the salt against my skin as much as I needed Christoffer to be there on the beach when I came back up for air.

I stood in the water; it burned like icicles against my body, but I loved it. I could feel it penetrate through me, soaking past my bones, tickling my insides, and setting up a home just on the other side of my rib cage. I thought of the fact that our blood has the exact same percentage of salt in it as the ocean does, and I shut my eyes to feel the balance of two forces, two parts of a whole pushing up against each other in an epic battle that has no winner. I didn’t need there to be a winner that day.

The ocean stretched out before me as I kept my wrists firmly in the water, no matter how much it hurt. When I was younger, I wanted to be an ocean diver, and the first thing I learned was that your wrists, when submerged, help to stabilize your entire body with the shock of temperature change. My wrists didn’t need tattoos on them then; quotes from long dead writers, who killed themselves with the same substance that brought us to Atlantic City in the first place. I wondered if I drank too much. I wondered if I tried to swim away, how far I’d get, and if Christoffer would try to stop me. I wondered if the sand at the very bottom of the ocean would be softer than the large granules between my toes, if it would be less coarse from exposure to the world, more like soft clay you don’t want to share. It was the end of October; Halloween was the following day and I couldn’t believe how my body could bear the temperature, or even more so, how it craved it, needed it to remind me of something that I had forgotten; or more specifically, misplaced.

I plugged my nose and arched my back into the water, the way I used to on the front lawn of my parents’ house growing up; the way I did the day I knocked the wind out of myself. It was a failed back handspring, and I came down against the ground with a bang that echoed through my chest. I lay on the grass and looked up at the blue sky. It was October then, too. I made deals with entities in which I didn’t believe, just to let me live one more day. I gasped for air; it was the same shock to my system as the ice-cold water. I shut my eyes, and I had a hard time separating the two instances; which came first, which one was less scary, or which one I’d recall more vividly when I was old.

With my hair dripping wet, I turned around and made a beeline for the beach where Christoffer stood completely dressed.

“Do it,” I said.

“I can’t,” he responded.

“Do it! You have to do it,” I said again. I watched him hesitantly pull the layers from his body, until he was standing in his boxers shivering. I don’t think he was officially cold yet, but rather cold at the notion of the impending plunge. Then he ran toward the water. The wind sort of blew at the thin fabric of his boxers, his body still bronzed from the summer and his trip to the Dominican Republic just the week before. He didn’t last as long as I did. I had always assumed he was stronger. Some Viking, I thought.

We gathered up our belongings and dressed closer to the boardwalk. Onlookers asked us how the water was; I told them it was perfect. I took off my wet underwear, put them in my bag, and we walked back to the hotel room.

I threw the glass and it broke. I’m not sure why it was in my hand, but I’m pretty sure I threw it from the bathroom doorway. I was not angry or searching for a dramatic announcement about the state of the world, the state of us, or the fact that my lips were now blue from being so cold. I just threw it because it was there, in my hand, and it was empty and its purpose seemed to be gone.

The glass shattered against the rug, and I laughed. We moved the trashcan to the front of the mess, so we’d know better not to walk there later. We knew we wouldn’t remember otherwise.

I’ve always loved the sound of breaking glass. It’s like the pop of a full balloon, or the snaps of multiple air-pockets in bubble wrap: that release of something with bounds becoming boundless. In that moment I felt boundless, I felt light an eight tipped on its side. We left the next morning.

I debated picking up the shards before we walked out the door, mildly sober. I was concerned about the maid, not what she would think, but I pictured her on her hands and knees in flesh-colored pantyhose and white sneakers, picking up the pieces of someone else’s mess. But it was Atlantic City, Christoffer reminded me, she had certainly seen worse. It didn’t make me feel much better. I looked past him and out towards the ocean, and wished I had a vacuum, a heavy duty one, the industrial type you see in mall stores right before closing.

I’ve only owned one vacuum in my adult life. It sits in my bathroom charging all the time, but never really works. I wonder why I keep it. It can barely pick up dust, let alone dirt. But like the shards of glass on the floor in that hotel room in Atlantic City, I needed certain messes to remain. Certain messes are hard to live without. No matter how much they make you bleed when you try to fix them, they’re a fact; like a neon sign in bar window, or cheap carpet underneath your feet: you don’t particularly care for them, but you hope they’re always there.

Nepenthe: A Story About Saving

2010-10-15T03:15:00.020-04:00

Brian moved out before Christmas break. He was the only one in our dorm who had a fake ID; and he was the one on campus with the best pot. He grew it himself in his closet, and it didn’t take long for the smell to waff down to the RA’s room on the first floor. The rumor was he was rubbing one off in the middle of the floor when campus security broke down the door. I wish I had been there, but I had decided to go to Anthropology that day for a change.

Although he was dragged out in handcuffs through the snow-covered quad in front of the dorm, they let him come back later that day to pack up his belongings. Brian blared Phish from his room while he boxed up his short-lived college career in containers from the local liquor store that our RA had provided for him. He brazenly stood there with a cigarette hanging on his lower lip and condemned any society that didn’t see the healing and medicinal purposes of marijuana. He even managed to save a plant or two… or at least that’s what Daniel across the way said. Daniel had a habit of exaggerating.

Brian left the tie-dye tapestries that covered his walls behind, and the Jerry Garcia poster on the ceiling. These were the first things I noticed in the dumpster outside our building when I returned after winter break. I went up to Brian’s old room to see who had replaced him. The door was wide open, and a tall, thin, blond boy was standing on the desk trying to attach a Beastie Boys poster to the wall with that gummy substance that’s supposed to remove easily at the end of the year, but never does. He had a black stocking cap hanging out of the back pocket of his jeans, and I could see that it had the word London on it. I wasn’t impressed. I went back downstairs to decide what of my new Christmas duds I’d wear to the radio station later that day.

I started seeing the new boy around the dorm all the time; he kept my late night hours. I didn’t sleep much that year. My roommate’s obsession with Janis Joplin kept me constantly on the move when she was in the room. One would think there should be a law against how many times “Me and Bobby McGee” is allowed to be played per day. I had a key to the student union building, and I would often go to the radio station around midnight and hide out in the production studio all night listening to records and writing bad poetry about my recent heartbreak: the way too much soda stuck to my teeth during our long drives to Lake Champlain, how my pink Chucks looked against the grey dashboard of his Jetta, his weakness for Dave Matthews that I was supposed to keep a secret.

When I came home between four and six in the morning, Brian’s replacement would usually be on the front stoop reading. I found it strange, as he was fortunate enough to have a single room and didn’t have to share his space with some hick from northern New Hampshire who was quite adamant that she had been kidnapped by aliens when she was a kid. One morning, as he sat huddled in his usually spot on the stairs, his London hat pulled snuggly over his ears and almost down to this shoulders, I asked him what he was doing. It was early February, and why anyone would subject themselves to such weather was a mystery to me. Without looking up, he smiled and said: “I’m reading, silly.”

“I can see that,” I responded, “but it’s so cold. How can you stand it?”

“It keeps me awake,” he said.

“Okay… well, enjoy your book.”

He dropped the book to his lap and looked up at me. “I’m Heath,” he said as he reached out for my hand to shake it. His eyes were a dark brown that made his pupils seem nonexistent, and I caught myself staring. I cleared my throat and pretended to cough. I’m always filling up space with unnecessary sounds.

“Amanda… it’s nice to meet you.”

“I know who you are. You’re the DJ girl… I listen to your show on Tuesdays when I get back from my Humanities course.”

“Oh… thank you then,” I whispered out of embarrassment.

“I noticed the WUNH stickers all over your door,” he explained, “and when I saw you going into the station last week, I figured out it was you. You sound the way you look, so it was easy.”

“Really? That’s an interesting assessment – I always thought I sounded better than I look.”

“No, it’s about even. You sound like a pixie and you look like one, too,” he remarked.

“Okay, well have a nice night,” I said. I turned my back and started to unlock the door.

“It’s morning,” he said. It was morning. It was close to six o’clock and the sun was starting to rise up over Hunter Hall.

“Okay,” I said again, “Bye.”

I went directly to the bathroom and pulled my black beret from my head. My boy haircut was sticking up in all directions. “Pixie?” I asked quietly as I examined my eyes and stuck out my tongue. I did not see a pixie looking back at me. I saw an awkward nineteen-year-old who was taking Anthropology for the second time because she failed it the semester before. I was a sophomore and really should have known 8AM classes wouldn’t fly with my nighttime habits. I brushed my teeth and went to bed.

When I awoke later that day, after having missed my Logic class for the second time that week, I saw a CD on the floor. I picked it up and immediately noticed the cover was a montage of cartoons from The New Yorker. I laughed and turned it over in my hand. On the back was the list of songs, and written on the actual CD in a thick black Sharpie was: From HEATH! I laughed again at his obvious excitement. It’s not everyday you get a mix CD with an exclamation point on it. I put it in my stereo and started to get ready for lunch. That semester, my schooling focused around lunch socials and the radio station. I still blame WUNH for all the classes I missed those four years.

A graduate student named Michael had been pursuing me for weeks since the fall semester; I finally gave in and accepted a coffee date with him one night. I knew him from the radio station, and as a freshman I had a crush on him. We spent the night talking about tattoos and music and our love for Jeremy Enigk – this was when Emo was just whiny music and not that silly lifestyle that is mocked today. He drove me to my dorm, before heading back to his apartment. When he pulled up, Heath was sitting on the stoop. Michael got out and walked me to the door. Heath immediately got up and introduced himself.

“And what do you do, Michael? What are your plans after grad school?” asked Heath like a concerned father.

“I plan to continue on with my education and get my PhD,” he explained hesitantly.

I stood between the two boys as they briefly discussed the pros and cons of getting one’s PhD and the storm we were supposed to be getting that upcoming weekend. When there was finally a brief lull, I interrupted, hugged Michael and told him I’d talk to him later. I watched Michael drive away and gave a final wave before pulling out my key to go inside.

“I don’t like him,” said Heath.

“Okay, thanks for the input, dad,” I said quickly.

“What are you doing for Valentine’s Day? I don’t believe in it, but if you don’t have any plans I thought of something we could do - I was thinking dinner in Lower Huddleston Hall…”

“Oh, the dining hall! How romantic, Heath!” I squealed overly dramatic to assert my disappointment.

“Wait – I’m not done. So dinner, then we come back here, drink wine and watch French movies all night.”

“That sounds fun actually… I could do that.”

“But the best part is, we’ll speak French the whole night!”

“You can speak French?”

“No, but I’ll pretend.”

“Mhm… okay,” I said unenthusiastically. All my friends were either in relationships or in that beginning stage of romance when the notion of Valentine’s Day is practically a necessary evil that must be conquered in order to get to the next step. I was content to sit in my dorm room, smoke pot then head to the radio station to listen to records, but French films and wine sounded a bit more exciting.

Heath insisted we dress up for our date. He put on a suit that he had bought at the thrift store in town, and I wore the dress I had worn to prom: a full-length silver number that thanks to The Pill barely covered my breasts at that point. We walked into the dining hall arm-in-arm, and we both decided on the macaroni and cheese. I was a strict vegetarian then, and Heath didn’t want to offend me by eating meat. I told him I wouldn’t be, that I was a live and let live type of gal. Still, he insisted that meat would just be upsetting.

From his pocket he pulled a flask in which he had poured wine and we smuggled sips. We laughed; we talked about music, movies, our family and our love of Bar Harbor. He was from Maine; his mother was Norwegian and his father, a born and bred Mainer with the accent to prove it. He had one younger sister and one older, and while he was in London the previous semester, his parents separated and didn’t tell him. He got off the plane at Boston’s Logan airport and was just greeted by his mother who told him the news. They had decided it best to tell Heath to his face and not over the phone. When they reached the house in which he had grown up, his father had already moved out and arrangements were made for dual Christmases. His was heart broken.

My parents had been in love since they were sixteen years old; I didn’t have much to contribute to the conversation, so I just listened. He admitted he was lost, he was confused and as a result, he had started going to church, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, to be exact. They were a small group on campus that was fanatical in their beliefs and incessantly trying to convert people aggressively and threateningly. In fact, the university had tried several times to move them off campus citing research that pointed to the organization being a cult.

“They’re a cult,” I said to Heath.

“No, they’re just really misunderstood. They’re really loving people,” he explained.

“I don’t doubt they’re loving, but I even looked it up myself – they’re a cult.”

“No, no… I was baptized just last week. Cults don’t do that,” he said. I rolled my eyes.

“Fine. You can figure it out on your own – just don’t try to convert me, because it’s never going to happen.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” he smiled, “You’re pretty perfect as is.”

We finished dinner and walked back to our dorm. As we walked past my room, I could hear my roommate playing Janis yet again. We both laughed and continued upstairs. I sat on the couch, while Heath got the wine from the closet, and a small box from his desk drawer.

“Here,” he said, “I had to give you at least something.”

I opened it slowly. It was the size of a jewelry box, and I couldn’t imagine what was in it. Folded neatly and secured into a perfect square with a paper clip was a piece of tattered purple ribbon. I opened it and held it in my hand. It read: “Happy Valentine’s Day, Mandy. I love you!” The words had been written in a black Sharpie and bled through the thin fabric. I didn’t know what to say.

Heath turned around and was facing the television. “Like I said, it’s Valentine’s Day and I had to give you something.” He seemed awkward as he fumbled with the movie, then the appropriate lighting for the room.

“Thank you,” I said. I felt embarrassed. I put the ribbon back in its box and slipped it into the pocket of my pea coat that was draped over the back of the couch.

He poured us wine into red paper cups that he had stolen from the dorm social a few nights before and sat next to me. We had decided to watch Godard’s À Bout de Soufflé first.

“You look like Jean Seberg,” he said quietly not taking his eyes from the screen.

I’m ran my fingers through my equally short blond haircut and disagreed.

“No, you do,” he said again. Then he turned and stared at me. He put his hand on the side of my cheek, and started to lean in close to me. I closed my eyes in preparation of a kiss that I had already determined would be perfect. I felt like my eyes had been closed too long without feeling his lips against mine, so I opened them.

“I can’t,” he said. Before I could question him, he continued, “I’m just so confused right now with everything that’s going on and I don’t need anymore complications. I really want to give this church thing a try. I think it’s what I need right now, and this is just wrong.” Again, I felt embarrassed. I didn’t say anything and turned back towards the television. We sat in silence for the duration of the film. The second it was over, I thanked him and went downstairs to my room.

The next day I met Michael downtown for lunch. We had not been there for more than a few minutes when Heath showed up. Without an invitation, he pulled up a chair to the table and joined us. It was a Saturday, and he had definitely been drinking. He was arrogant and insulting and rude.

“Michael, have you ever thought of Rogaine?” he asked snidely.

“No,” said Michael, “I don’t really think I need it.” And he didn’t, he had a very thick head of hair.

“Well, you’re pretty old, so maybe you’ll need it soon,” said Heath trying to reach Michael’s head. I smacked his hand away.

“Heath,” I said slightly strained with annoyance, “why don’t you go now and I’ll call you later.”

“I don’t want you to call me later,” he snapped. He got up quickly, and knocked over the chair in the process. The wood of the chair against the black and white tiled floor of the restaurant made a loud “clack” sound. I jumped a bit. When Heath was clearly out of sight, I apologized to Michael. He shrugged it off and suggested we ignore it and share a chocolate mousse instead.

When I got back to my room, Heath was sitting on the hallway floor. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I know,” I whispered as I unlocked the door.

“I haven’t heard any Janis, so I don’t think she’s in there.” Heath got up and followed me into my bedroom. I sat on my bed confused. He sat next to me and put his hand on my knee and squeezed it.

“What do you want from me, Heath?” I asked.

“I want us to be friends,” he said, “I want us to be inseparable.”

I laid back and dangled my feet off the side of my bed, rubbing the tips of my toes against the thin blue area rug. He lay next to me.

“You can put your head on my shoulder,” he whispered into my ear. I could feel his lips against my earlobe and shivered. And I did. We fell asleep like that.

The next morning, I awoke to Heath straddling me and dangling a paper clip chain over my face, its end just barely touching the tip of my nose. I rubbed my eyes.

“I want you to come with me to church today,” he said. I sat straight up and laughed.

“No way. If you’re hanging around me in the hopes of some miracle conversion, you’d be better off spending time in a cemetery trying to raise the dead – that’s more likely than me joining a cult,” I explained.

“I just want you to see how loving these people are,” he said. He was still straddling me so I wiggled my way out from under his hips. “You said religion fascinates you, so come on.”

I was fascinated by religion. I had once attended a Born Again Christian service when my high school friend was going through what Heath was going through, and witnessed children speaking in tongues and crying at the thought of abortion. I was of the belief that speaking in tongues wasn’t real and that children shouldn’t know what the word abortion meant. I had resolved then that my next exploration into the religious unknown would be a Southern Baptist church. I really wanted to belt out gospel hymns and exclaim “Amen,” every few seconds. I had been raised Catholic, so I felt I missed out on the really exciting religions.

It was a rainy Sunday. I knew I wouldn’t be doing much that day, except for getting caught up on all the work I had ignored all week, so maybe religion wouldn’t be a bad thing. I told him I would go.

We met Carrie and Linus in the parking lot by Hamsmith Hall, and got in the very back row of the minivan. Heath locked his arm in mind and held my hand. Before we left campus, the minivan was full. I hadn’t even asked where we were going. For all I knew, they could be hauling me off to a virgin sacrifice. I wasn’t sure at what point I should tell everyone in the van that I wasn’t a virgin, so their god might be a little disappointed at this particular offering.

As we got closer to Portsmouth, I asked Heath about the exact location of this so-called church.

“The Holiday Inn,” he replied.

“The Holiday Inn off the traffic circle in Portsmouth?” I asked.

“Yes, that one.”

“But it’s such a dump,” was my response, a comment that was a little too loud. Heath squeezed my hand again.

The girl in front of me turned around, swinging her long thin ponytail quickly. “That’s our place of worship. It may seem like a dump to you, but that’s just because you haven’t let God into your heart.” I did everything within my power not to roll my eyes. I smiled and didn’t open my mouth for the rest of the ride.

I followed Heath and the others into the inn. Their congregation was quite small, at least in comparison to the Catholic ones I had known in my youth, but yet still bigger than I expected. I was introduced to many of the members and the man who was the pastor who would be conducting the mass.

The service was held in one of the conference rooms, the kind with neutral walls, but out of date carpeting: pink and turquoise cubes peppered with grey steaks. What would have been the center table, was pushed to the back of the room and was covered in Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and Munchkins. The brown tin folding chairs were set up in rows, with a middle aisle for the pastor to make his grand entrance. Their makeshift alter was just a smaller table and a crude painting of a crucifix that resembled something a first grader might have done in Sunday School.

Since I was a guest, I was seated in the front row. I immediately started to hate Heath. I hated him even more when I was introduced to the entire room by the pastor, Randy, before he started his sermon. I had never been to an AA meeting, but the collective “Hi Mandy,” said with feigned interest made me think of a support group that I had been forced to attend as a punishment for bad behavior. I had never felt like so much of an outsider in all my life.

Pastor Randy spoke in varying octaves that bounced around the way I had hoped they would in a Southern Baptist church. His entire hour-long speech was about staying away from people who might try to steer you away from the righteousness of the Lord, and to be wary of new people in your life. As I sat there, I began to sweat. I felt the sweat build up under my bra strap and drip down my back. I kept wiping my upper lip with the back of my hand to prevent any sweat build up there as well. I feared once I stood up, there would be a puddle from all the perspiration. I felt like I was on trial. I couldn’t figure out if I was being used as a lesson, or if it was just a bizarre coincidence that the topic was about outsiders.

After an hour, everyone clapped. Heath grabbed my hand again and we walked outside. “What did you think?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I was silent the whole way back to campus. The others in the minivan were on some sort of spiritual high and blabbered on and on about being inspired and moved. I just felt sick.

When we got back to campus, Heath and I parted ways. I went to find my fellow atheists, and left Heath with Carrie and Linus to discuss their favorite scriptures. “You should really come with us,” said Carrie, “Sunday is a gift from God and the best day to give praise.”

“No, Carrie,” said Heath, “Mandy has other stuff to do, it’s fine.” He winked at me; he had saved me from what would have been an afternoon of torture for me.

I didn’t see Heath for a few days. Even when I came back from the radio station late at night he wasn’t there. One night I brought Michael back to my room when I knew my roommate wasn’t around – that night I was more than grateful to not see Heath on the stoop.

The next morning, Michael kissed my forehead and slipped out shortly before daybreak. We both had 8AM classes. On my way to the shower, I ran into Heath.

“He’s ugly and stupid!” he yelled.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“That buffoon!”

“Oh, Jesus, Heath! And I mean that both literally and vernacularly!” I pushed past him and headed into the bathroom.

He was still outside when I walked out twenty minutes later.

“Really?” I asked, “What is this even about?”

“I saw him leaving this morning. I was on the stoop waiting for you!”

“Well, I didn’t go to the radio station last night,” I said. I was standing there in a towel and flip-flops. I was freezing. “I have to go to class.” I pushed past him again and went into my room. I locked the door behind me. When I emerged a bit later, he was gone. Again, I didn’t see him for days.

It was March and the snow had melted. The ground was soggy from the long winter, and it had just started raining. I stood on the stairs of the student union building wondering if I should make a run for it or wait for the storm to pass. I watched students running in all directions. Then the sky cracked and opened up even more, as if someone had just cut a major artery. The rain began to pour in huge droplets. I decided to run.

I ran down the steps, and tried not to slip in my Chucks that had long ago lost traction. I had my new New Yorker magazine over my head as I ran down the sidewalk, through the parking lot and the muddy shortcut behind the all-girl dorm. I stood under the overhang of another building and waited for a minute to see if the sky had a change of heart or at least would weaken for a moment. I was soaked all the way through, and my magazine had served zero purpose in protecting me from the inevitable. I put it in my bag and continued on, listening to the puddles in my sneakers squish with each step. As I ran through the lower quad, I saw Heath. He was bent over on the sidewalk picking something up. I made my way to him.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m saving them,” he said pointing at the ground.

“What?” I rubbed the lenses of my dark-rimmed glasses to see what was there. All I could see were dozens of worms.

“They come out of the ground when it gets too wet for them,” he said, “but then they come out here on the sidewalk and get stepped on by people who don’t care.” He wasn’t looking at me; he was frantically moving each worm, one by one, off the path of any oncoming student. I joined him.

In the pouring rain in March, I wandered around the campus of the University of New Hampshire one night moving worms to safety. For hours, we continued our rescue efforts. I had never seen so many worms in all my life on the move before – they were everywhere. Sometimes I’d pick up as many as I could in one swoop and toss them into the grass. At one point I wondered why we were even bothering. If they were trying to escape all the water, they would just make their way out to the walkways again. We couldn’t troll these streets forever saving worms; we couldn’t wait until summer for the ground to dry.

Once we had made it to the other side of campus we stopped. Heath looked up at me from his final save and smiled. We were both drenched. His wet hair hung over his eyes and grazed his cheekbones; the drops made it look like he was crying. He looked so pretty under the blue-tinted lighting of the parking lot, the way his damp face sort of glistened. He stood up and kissed me. His lips touched mine and lingered for just a second before he stepped away. I put my fingertips to my mouth, I wanted to push that moment into my skin, or at least try to trap it long enough to not lose it too fast.

Heath grabbed my hand and we walked back to the dorm. We got to my room and pulled the wet clothes from each other. I got into bed and he crawled in next me. I put my head on his chest.

“Worms have seven hearts,” he said, “that’s why they’re worth saving.”

“I know,” I whispered. I wrapped my legs tightly around his, and pulled him into me.

“I can’t,” he said.

“I know,” I said again although I really didn’t know, “I’m just cold so I’m going to suck the heat from you.” We fell asleep with our legs interlocked, my face tucked into his neck and his arms draped over my chest.

We lay in bed well into mid-morning. It was still raining.

“Why do you hang out with that guy?” he asked when he knew I was awake.

“He’s smart,” I said, “and funny. I like funny. Oh, and he said I was his Diane Court.”

“What?” asked Heath obviously appalled.

“He said I was…”

“Yeah, I heard you the first time,” he snapped cutting me off, “so what does that make him? Lloyd Dobler? He thinks he’s fucking Lloyd Dobler?”

“I don’t know… maybe?” I started to laugh.

Heath jumped out of bed and pulled on his still-wet jeans. “He’s not! He doesn’t even look like him!” he yelled.

Before I was fully awake, Heath had left and slammed the door behind him. I lay back down. For an un-relationship, it was more complicated than any actual relationship I had ever had. I put my hand to my chest. It felt tight, and when I breathed in, not only could I just take shallow breaths, but it hurt. Assuming it was an oncoming panic attack, I reached for a Xanax. I shook my head at Heath’s behavior, and decided to go back to sleep. Just then the door opened and my Janis Joplin obsessed roommate entered. I sighed loudly, pulled my wet clothes from the floor and back onto my body. I went to the library.

Despite the Xanax my chest continued to hurt for the rest of the day. Had I been more sentimental, I would have assumed my heart was breaking. But hearts are made of muscle and blood and those aren’t things that break. I walked around the campus in the rain. It had been raining for two days straight. All our work from the night before had been in vain: there were squished and ripped apart worms all over the place, bodies strewn in all directions as if there had been a horrible car accident of worms and I was witnessing the aftermath. Occasionally, I’d come across a live one, and I’d pick it up and move it back to the grass. But I knew that it was pointless. They may have been made up of more than one heart, but that was it… their ability to reason did not exist.

I made my way to the radio station. I locked myself in the production studio with a stack of records. I took off my wet clothes and hung them over the heat vent on the floor. I was going to force Heath out of my consciousness with moody and obscure 7 inch EPs, and a strawberry chocolate smoothie from the food court. When I left a few hours later, Michael was just showing up for his show. We exchanged a few words, before I headed home. It had finally stopped raining.

My roommate was already asleep. I found my pajamas in the dark and let the lights from the lower quad guide me to the edge of my bed. I lay awake for some time. I kept looking at my clock, and time was moving slowly, too slowly. Shortly before two, there was a loud knock on the door. Both my roommate and I were shaken out of our beds and bumped into each other on our way to see who was there at that hour. She cracked the door and saw Heath staring back.

“It’s for you,” she said. I went into the hallway. Heath reeked of alcohol. His eyes were blood shot, and I couldn’t tell if it was from tears or too much drinking.

“I told him,” he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I waited for an explanation. “I went to the radio station and told Mike he was disgusting and he could never be Lloyd Dobler.”

“That’s really great, Heath,” I said dryly, “Do you want a medal?” His smile of pride slid off his face. “Did you expect me to be happy by this move?” I asked.

“I don’t love you!” he yelled, “In fact, I hate you! You’re nothing but a slut! I know you fucked him!”

“Actually, you prick, I didn’t, but thanks for calling me a slut.” My voice was even-keeled. I was exhausted. I was confused. I was pretty sure I was in love. I was also pretty sure that that would be the night we wouldn’t be able to recover.

“You’re a slut! You’re nothing but a slut!” He kept saying the word slut over and over again. Had I not been so angry, I would have cried. I could feel the lump slowly rising in my throat, and when I knew I wouldn’t be able to hide the impending tears any longer, I turned around and went back into my room. The last thing I heard Heath say was “I never want to see you again!” And he never did.

He moved back to his mother’s house the next day, and continued the school year by commuting. The following semester he went to France for the year. I always hoped our paths would cross, but they never did. It was amazing how many tall dark blond haired boys were on campus who weren’t him. For a long time, I called the university operator to see if he still had a number listed, that he was still a student and relatively within reach. I’d always take down the number on a scrap of paper and tuck into a random book on my shelf. Sometimes, I’d look at it too long, until my eyes got blurry and the number no longer made sense, until it looked like foreign scribbling in a language I hadn’t learned yet, but I never called it. I still find Heath’s phone number in my books from time to time.

The COBRA Incident: A Story About Dana

2010-10-09T18:06:00.004-04:00

It was Dana who interviewed me for my Office Manager position at GW Media. It was Dana who officially hired me over the phone; and on my first day, it was Dana who enthusiastically greeted me as I got off the elevator. She asked me if she could call me Mandy. I’m not a Mandy.

Although my closest friends and family have always called me Mandy, I do not consider myself one. Mandy is the name of a girl who is rail-thin, with long blonde hair who wears too many pastel colors. Mandy is the girl in high school who would have made fun of me, Amanda. Amanda with her dyed magenta hair, purple Doc Martens, her dad’s old flannels and Kurt Cobain obsession. Mandy is cloyingly sweet; Mandy eats everything low-fat or fat free; Mandy is the girl I would have been if my mother had actually listened to the doctor and not smoked during her pregnancy. I’ll never be a Mandy, but I told Dana she could call me that so as not to complicate things for her. Besides, I had been in the midst of browsing the “Adult Gigs” on Craigslist when she called, so in my mind, she had saved me and could call me whatever she wanted.

Dana whirled around like a drunken ballerina, and triumphantly got down on one knee as she presented my desk to me. “So this is your desk! I set it up myself last night and got you this nice pad of paper and these really fun pens! Do you love these really fun pens?” Before I could answer, she continued. It didn’t seem to matter whether or not I loved the really fun pens, she obviously did. “And here is the welcome note I made for you!” She then proceeded to read the note out loud to me, as if I were not only a child who couldn’t read it myself, but also a hard of hearing child. “It says: ‘Welcome, Mandy!’ I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but I was pretty sure you’d let me call you Mandy.” She looked back down at the star shaped yellow construction paper and began to read out loud again. “I really hope you enjoy your first day, and please know that if you need anything at all, just come by my desk! Your new friend, Dana!”

I felt my eyes getting wider with disbelief as each syllable of her welcome note rolled off her tongue and penetrated the air like fingernails on a chalkboard. Dana was a tiny thing, with big green eyes and light brown hair in two shoulder length braids that she had pinned up into loops making her resemble Heidi. She wore a pink shift dress and those atrocious gladiator sandals that women insisted upon wearing for two summers in a row. She looked like an elf, to be honest; and I half expected her to tell me how she spent the evening before frolicking amongst the trees of some magical, Shakespearean forest with her boyfriend Puck.

It was Dana who I fired, inadvertently, five months later.

It was one of those warm days at the end of February when everyone actually leaves the office for lunch… that first flirtation of the calendar year with spring weather. I sat at the same desk that Dana had set up for me just a few months before, when I was approached by our accountant, Linura. In her thick Russian accent, she told me to ask Dana whether or not she’d want COBRA since it was her last day. I was confused. Not only did I not know that it was Dana’s last day, but I had no clue what this COBRA business was. I walked around the office, but Dana was nowhere to be found – she was actually out in Washington Square Park for lunch enjoying the weather. So I took my extra time to Google the meaning of COBRA and carefully compiled the information in one of the pink pens Dana had given me on my first day.

When she got back from lunch, I gave her a few minutes to settle. It seemed so rude to approach her about what I assumed was a sensitive subject while it was still technically her lunch hour. I stared at the clock on my computer and waited eleven minutes. Eleven minutes seemed like a sufficient amount of time for one to settle. I walked over to her and stood at her desk. I asked her how the weather was outside, and if the NYU female population were already sporting tank tops and barely-there mini-skirts as they do from March to October. They were, of course. Then I asked her what Linura had told me to ask:

“Dana, are you going to be wanting COBRA?”

“What?” she asked looking up at me obviously puzzled. I had never heard of COBRA either, so her confusion made sense. I racked my brain to remember for what the acronym had stood, but had already forgotten it. Something about Omnibuses?

“You know that thing for insurance after you leave your job.” Dana just looked at me with her mouth agape. “You know,” I continued, “because today is your last day…”

“Today is not my last day!” She snapped. I immediately felt flushed. I fumbled over my words and immediately began to apologize. Had Linura gotten the wrong person? Linura was fairly dumb and had a tendency of always saying or writing the wrong things. Once in an email she wrote “sorry for the incontinence” when, we think, what she meant was “sorry for the inconvenience” when she had failed to pay us on time yet again. We were paid late at least once a month.

“I must have misunderstood Linura,” I said quickly, “or she said the wrong name maybe!?” Dana got up and pushed me out of the way as she ran to our boss’ office. She slammed the door behind her. From inside the office we could hear yelling; strange, because one would never take Dana for a yeller. When she emerged ten-minutes later, her face was puffy and blotchy from crying. She went directly to the bathroom and we all followed behind her. She was crying too hard to explain what had happened and the real reason as to why she was let go. She was in the handicap stall and wouldn’t open the door, but for some reason she kept throwing her dirty, tear-soaked tissues over the top. When Linura walked in the bathroom, we all quickly dispersed.

From my desk, I could see Dana packing up her belongings: slowly removing the tacks from photos of friends, the piling up of so many Chinese paper fortunes, and tossing of all those expensive pens she loved so much into her handbag. She also walked to the storage room and helped herself to some more. Within a half hour of me firing her, Dana was gone.

I would later learn that’s just how the company let people go: they either set someone else up to drop the bomb, or they’d just shut off your email account. There were so many incidents when the email ceased because of the faulty wiring in the old building. It was during these episodes that people would start crying and pleading with invisible entities, screaming: "Why?! Why me!?" No one ever really knew why; the decision to fire someone seemed so random most of the time, as if they had all our names in a hat in the main office, and it was just a matter of bad luck, and even worse timing.

Before leaving that day, Dana leaned over my desk and told me she was going to expose the owner for the fraud he really was. She said she had emails that documented "suspicious behavior," and she was going to send them to all of us and the New York Post. I don't think the New York Post would care, I, however, couldn't wait to read the juicy details. However, the email never came.

I eventually ran into Dana - she had moved to my neighborhood and I would see her quite often. She found the job of her dreams and was really happy. And finally, after one too many Blue Moons one night, she spilled the juicy details... again, my cheeks flushed. There's just some information about your boss that you're not supposed to know.