Scavenger

His eyes were heavy-lidded, as though they were swollen, healing from a slight. I avoided them carefully and how they followed the lines of my body beneath my over-sized sweater.

I bought it because my mother thought it was hideous, on one of those forced shopping trips that always seems to end in angry silence on the drive home and slammed doors. She said, “Ugh. Who in their right mind would buy that? Maybe her—” pointing with one fake manicured talon at an overweight redhead working the cash register. She reminded me of a vulture sometimes, my mother. I knew the girl. People called her Haggy-Maggie under their breath or just loud enough for her to look over at the familiar duo of syllables. It struck me then, how funny it would be to buy the lumpy thing. So, I did. Pulled it off the hanger and marched over to the till. My mother didn’t say a word. She just left the store. Waited by the car. It was easier sometimes, to hate her.

The next day Maggie smiled at me when I walked into History. Then she went back to covertly reading a novel behind her textbook. I only hesitated for a second.

“What are you reading?”

She tilted her textbook down so I could read the cover: The Bell Jar.

Too easy.

I don’t know how it happened but in a matter of weeks we were walking home together, turns out she only lived like three blocks down. We just ran in different crowds I guess, by which I mean, maybe not at all.

That’s how I found myself in her basement on Thursday night. Her father’s plaid shirts piled up on the washing machine and no idea how I’d got there. Basements, they really freak me the fuck out.

“So, are you going to do this or what?” He held the canister out to me.

It reeked. Wrapping my lips around the opening I inhaled as hard as I could and then sat back against the cold concrete wall as my throat began to tingle. I could hear him doing it again beside me, Maggie’s brother. Maggie’s brother. I couldn’t remember his name and when I opened my mouth to laugh I could feel the words rupture on my tongue and watched as they danced into the air before me. Purple, red, pink.

My face was on the floor before I realized he’d hit me. I let my cheek hold the ground, whispering secrets like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Giggling when I felt my insides tear and turn inside out. You have to shed your skin, that’s what my mother always said, at night, when she’d take a hot washcloth and exfoliate my face. “Cast it off!” She’d laugh, holding my jaw in her hand, until I was all angry and red.

“Don’t you want to be pretty?”

My eyes, rolling marbles kicked across the floor. Pooling and then bouncing up up up—there—to her face at the top of the stairs. Like it was waiting for me. All white holes, halo burning. The moon and the sun—and the sky, swollen, like right before it rains.

 

Sitting Ducks

“There are things you don’t know about me.”

He doesn’t look up from the joint he’s rolling, instead concentrates on his fingers, tongue flicking out to wet the end. I lean back on my elbows in a way I hope appears effortless, my forearms begin to ache almost immediately burning against the heat of the car hood. I lean into it until the pain ebbs.

He’s searching for his lighter, a silver Zippo with this shitty buffalo skull etched on it, he probably did it himself. He inhales. I close my eyes and let my head tilt back, feeling my hair fall down behind me coiling on the car like twin snakes. When I open my eyes his face is so close I can see the black hairs in his nose, it’s slanted slightly like it’s gotten knocked out of place a couple of times. I imagine him bloody, snapping it back with one hand. He purses his lips and I think, this is it, and I’m impatient and terrified, wondering if he’ll be able to tell I’ve only ever kissed that kid Keagan that lives next door to me—once—in a rushed game of sardines when no one found us and stopped looking. He tasted like milk and tuna and when we drove home that night and my mom asked how the party was, I blushed so deep I thought the whole car would know, like a siren.

I close my eyes and let my lips part thinking, for a second that I can feel his hot breath and then there’s smoke in my mouth and I’m breathing it in, shocked. Hacking.

He’s laughing his ass off when I sit up trying to swallow and quiet my lungs.

“I-shit-I told you I don’t do that.”

His laughter dies away and he takes another pull. One hand pushing his hair up and out of his face. Looking out past me to the water and my friends still splashing in the surf, even as the sun goes down branding the sky its own shade of blue.

“You should get back to your friends, kid.”

“That’s-I… I mean…”

“Hey!” Suddenly his eyes snap over to me like he’s just discovered I’m there, an afterthought. “Get off my hood, you’re going to dent it.”

The Woman Who Came After

She’s sweet, the kind of girl who would be named after a city, and is. I imagine her in an apron and heels, but that’s not fair, her long hair tied up in a perfect bun. I can’t hate her, the woman who came after. She housed your heart so easily. While I strayed she stays, and who could blame her for that?

The truth is as I write it, and I rarely think of you now, but once a year when I remember again that I’ve forgotten your birthday or how my feet felt in my shoes at your grandmother’s funeral, too big to fill. You cried and squeezed my hand so tight I had red marks for days.

The ring is modest, as it would be, but painstakingly picked out and deliberated over. You always did work out the details, thought ahead. No grand gestures or cheesy clichés but you listen and you remember. It was probably lovely how you asked, intimate, a little nostalgic. But, then, you do nostalgia so well.

It’s difficult to say what I really mean when what I mean is drifting and what I say is hard pin points of light bursting through the shades. I love you. I never loved you. Looking back, you could have been anyone but you were you, sitting behind me in history class, letting me borrow your chewed up pen.

I’d love to congratulate you and mean it. But, how can I? You’re still 18 and fearless, driving on the wrong side of the road, playing chicken with my heart. You can’t be getting married, you’re still across from me at that 24/7 Perks Coffee, telling me how happy you are. I never did do honesty right with you, so I nodded and listened, smiled, and walked away again. Always.

So, here we are backs turned, living the lives we were meant for. Loving stronger, better, faster, the way you only can if you’ve learned from mistakes, lived through the heartache.

Still.

You’re engaged, and somewhere out there the fat woman is gearing up to sing. The things I’d say to her, to you, if I had half a chance.

Like, congratulations, you make a beautiful couple.

I wish you well.

Losing the Fight

They try their best to convince us not to go, but we go anyway, and the weather is beautiful and the conditions are ideal. We hike uphill for an hour, ignoring coyote warnings and fresh droppings. We don’t all live our lives in fear of yesterday’s storm. I shrug into my sweater, ocean views on all sides and berry plants that flame against the sky. On the way back a moose and her young block the path.

“Don’t move,” he says, pulling me behind him.

I can feel it all pent up inside me and I want to scream and charge it and scare something off for once. I’m not afraid, though he thinks I should be. It’s like crossing without looking. Thinking, “hit me, hit me, hit me.”

Later, we fight. I shut up and shut off, stepping out of his reach. The whys are no longer relevant, we say enough in silence, in terse words rationed out one by one. The new apartment is too small to house our bodies fighting, magnified. So we claim rooms like property and set up temporary forts, doors closed, for the cats to butt their heads against.

Hours pass and the immediacy of anger fades, I’m left hollow, wanting only to be held but unwilling to crawl into his arms or call a truce. I fall asleep curled against my body pillow, under my own blanket, a careful inch of space between us, backs rigid.

Overnight we lose all our fight, deflate, fit into our bodies again.

I get up and go to work. Slam the door, only to change my mind, come back, and kiss him softly as he sleeps. Pause to whisper love into his dreams. Unseen.

Just Peachy

He says, “Do you want to keep this pasta cookbook?”

And I say, yes, of course. When what I really mean is keep everything. File it all away, store them on shelves and in stacks and hanging from the wall. Hide them in cupboards, even if they tumble out on top of you, just push them back in until the door stays. It doesn’t matter if I can find it again, I just need to know it’s there.

We move to a new apartment. We spend a week painting the colours I picked out in ten minutes and I love them all, even the “Just Peachy” that was supposed to be “Farmer’s Almanac” because that’s life, right? Sometimes we get the wrong shade of yellow, but it still looks good.

The seasons change again, like they do, haphazardly, reluctantly. I wear the wrong clothes and too many layers and then not enough, shivering in shorts and his jacket, appearing nude as I pack box after box into the back of his car.

We signed a lease. I said, “It’s scary.” He said it was the least frightening thing in the world. But, we put our names to a piece of paper that says “we’re going to last”. It’s the confidence that scares me. I’ve often had the wrong reactions to the right things, I’m learning to ignore it.

It’s like this: If my life was a paint swatch, it would match the walls.

Needs Water

Don’t ask him why, he won’t answer. He’ll just look through you a little to the left of your ear; making you want to turn around. It’s not because he doesn’t want to tell you, it’s just that he has a hard time finding the words inbetween the plots and lies, the bullshit that gets left behind and takes root growing hard and fast like weeds. Have pity. Hold your questions in.

Tomorrow he’ll bring it up. A day ahead. Well rehearsed and you’ll nod and say okay. We can’t all be gardeners. We can’t all cultivate the love we want from the land. Some thumbs are no shade of green. That can be okay.

We can want for nothing but answers and still come up thirsty. If we come up at all.

Thoughts on Almost Getting Hit

They say life flashes before your eyes, but they didn’t say it might not be recognized. Might not even be mine.

Cars are too smooth these days. Windows that won’t be confined to a side. Colours that splash into sight. My head barely clearing the hood of trucks—supersized.

If they told me I’d be getting hit in a crosswalk today, I would have prepared. Painted my nails. Dug out the good underwear.

Instead I’m laid out in saggy should-have-done-my-laundry-weeks-ago beige. Chipped fingernails reaching for memories that don’t even belong to me.

Man, death can be so mean.