You never listen to what I say when it matters. You’re treating this as a ticket to be with other people. I should have seen the symptoms when you stayed on your side of the bed, your body sleeping on the edge, rather than close to me, our feet touching. The last straw was when you came home, your body reeking of musk, the way it used to when we made every space we touched burn. You were never mine and I was never yours.
She talks to me at the bar. She talks about him. Him, the fucking bastard. How could you not fall in love with him and how could you not hate him? She talks back at me. On the front patio of the bar, she lies next to me and the inner mass of a star collapses inside her. The star collapses inside her earthly body. The star collapses the lives of crumpled people—people shrinking, people expanding. Have you seen that Lars Von Trier film—fuck—what’s it called? You know the one where the leading actress is blonde and white and she
“Words fail…” No one says that anymore, but sometimes she still thinks it. She hears it in her mother’s squeaky, horsehair voice, the one that meant sarcasm: when her father put all the pots and pans in the oven to “clean them,” when the neighbor dressed her Persian cat in a tutu…But that’s not the only time words fail—quick footsteps behind her at two a.m., Ginny waving from airport pick-up after two months in Tucson, her dog’s muscles going slack before the vet has finished emptying the syringe—these are also things that cause a blank space, a lapse in words.
For once I was leaving well enough alone. The rain was harder than average. My sweater was coming apart at the sleeves. This was when I was officed by the Pacific and could walk in the waves during lunch. This was when my colleagues wondered at the afternoon damp at my ankles, at the slight briny scent that came from below my desk. I placed a huge jellyfish over my head. It slipped on wet against my scalp and face and dangled plant-like to the edge of my collarbone. I thought of words like tendril and vine. My bald patch
The petrol station has a toilet but no window. Behind the door, a song that she has heard before plays. Or maybe she hasn’t. It’s muffled. The speakers’ range only extends to the shop with its packet sandwiches and cheap mobile phone accessories. She exits and catches a glimpse of him in the convex mirror above the window. His body morphs into a giant insect. A bloated beetle in jeans. “Are you listening?” He taps a finger on the counter. “I said pass me one of those cans…no not that one, that one.” He snatches the drink and fumbles a
Hannah passes out with the lights on again, the room as bright as day. Her phone is almost dead from staying up late sexting, slipped underneath the pillow on a bed that’s not hers—a bed she borrowed so she can sort her life, a bed too short for long legs, bent like figure fours on unfamiliar sheets. Hannah preset an alarm (and a backup and a backup for the backup), but she wakes when the alcohol abandons her system instead, her stomach pinched with unease, her brain brimming with a laundry list of what-ifs, always landing on the worst-case: What
Sadonna was always my last visit that summer before she died. At Derek Jeter Rehab Center-Delray, we dispensed meds between 1900 and 2100. I’d start with the early sleepers at the sober house on 999 Swinton, then swoosh on Freaky Fred’s moped through the back alleys and garbage docks behind the strip mall to the sober houses on 9th and 10th streets, between the head shops and the Amscot. I dispensed Suboxone, SSRIs, SNRIs, B-Vitamins, and retrovirals for the former needle users. On a PRN basis, I distributed: hemorrhoid cream, Midol, hydrocortisone, aloe vera for suntan relief, dimethicone for chapped
The hairdresser takes too much off the top. Whoops, sorry! she says, holding out a piece of scalp for me to see. I take the little hand-mirror and inspect the damage. A swath of skin pulls away from my brow and wraps around, like a halo. I take the scissors and plunge it into the hairdresser’s leg. Whoops, sorry! I say. She laughs and smears the blood around her leg. It’s red and vibrant. She is liquid inside. There is a glossy sheen brighter than the brightest no-smudge, stay-on, fire-engine-red lipstick. The hairdresser smiles and says I think we should
Take your brother to the orange grove, and do not let your friends throw rotten fruit at his head, or any other part of his body. Take your brother to Stop-N-Go, and do not spend these dimes on anything else but candy bars for you and him. Take your brother up to bed, and do not hide in the closet and scare him. Take your brother outside to play street football, and do not let your friends tackle him on the asphalt. Take your brother to school, and do not let him gawk and gag at all the dog poop
Every morning Mom digs in the garden plot behind our house, dressed in a faded red shirt and ripped jeans. She refuses to wear black. “I’m done mourning,” she says. “I’ve been grieving since the day he enlisted.” Kneeling in the dirt, Mom turns the soil with a hand spade. It’s a small plot, maybe five by seven. She says she’s putting it to bed for the winter. No cover crop seeds yet, so there’s nothing to bury, just dark loamy soil she churns and churns. She’s still there in the afternoon when I open my Spanish workbook at the