Partly Cloudy

Leaving Soon

2011-02-13T23:19:00.000-05:00

She will not go to her next-door neighbor’s funeral, even though he was young and died of too-soon-sickness. How could she say goodbye if she’d never really said hello? It would be like going to an acquaintance’s going-away party because the night was free and the music loud. Because listen: “I’ll miss you,” only sounds genuine if it’s replacing “Don’t go— you are someone I could’ve loved.” She didn’t know him well enough, doesn’t want to be like all those other girls in cheap black veils, extracting tragedies like bees on cracked soda cans. Besides. She has had enough sadnesses of her own. She couldn’t get the cancer to kill her, just to leave a violet mark. Eventually, every lover will ask where the scar came from. “Surgery." She tells them surgery, but only if their eyes are a watered-down green. “Bitten by a shark,” she says, if she expects them to leave as soon as the sheets untangle.

The Lovelier Girl

2010-12-03T18:05:00.003-05:00

On our third date, Ralph told me that he was often lonely.

I was going to tease him as I had on our first date, when he told me that his fortune came from being the CEO of the largest North American toilet paper company.

“Don’t laugh, we’re developing a line of paper towels and baby wipes as well,” he had said, shaking a finger.

“As if that makes it okay!”

But really, as a failed actress with overdue student loans, who was I to judge the man who was buying me duck confit on a bed of wilted greens? So when he told me that he was a lonely man, and frequently, too, I nodded solemnly.

“I know about lonely.”

“The young don’t know about lonely.” He smiled. I smiled back. We were always smiling in these foolish circles.

“Oh sure they do." I had turned twenty-three that summer. “Children are the loneliest things. And teenagers? God, do you remember how awful it was to be one of those?”

“Sure, I remember.” He looked into his gin and tonic, squeezed the already pulpy lime. He was fifty-seven and it was my job to make him feel young. I waited for him to call me over the next few days, and when he didn’t, I realized that maybe I was bad at dating older men. But my loans from theater school were past due and I’d already applied for forbearance, and he was a handsome man, so I wrote to him on the website we’d met on.

“Loneliness is going through the trouble of dividing boxed recipes into quarters in order to produce a single pancake.”

He called me.

I hadn’t expected the invitation to move into his Beacon Hill townhouse so soon after meeting, not really, but he insisted. He paid the rent of my old apartment for the whole month of August, and I didn’t renew lease. My new home was decorated by his ex-wife, some blonde woman with a forehead Botoxed into submission who had moved to the suburbs after their divorce. Though her brocade and cream tastes weren’t exactly mine, the apartment was beautiful, and I hoped it was something I could try on for awhile, like a mink coat.

Nothing about living with Ralph was remarkable, not exactly. He was quieter than he had been on our first dates, now that he had me. I soon figured out that he was the type who only fought for things he was about to lose. He was different than other boyfriends I’d had. He never clung to me in his sleep, never called me baby. Before he left for work at eight every morning he would push the hair from my face to tell me that my breakfast was in the kitchen. I’d finally get up around noon to find a calcified egg-white omelet or cold toast, shiny with gelled butter.

I always looked forward to his return from the office. He normally had already eaten dinner, so I kept a lot of desserts in the house. Ralph liked pastries with tangy centers and sorbet more than ice cream—he had a respiratory condition (Nothing for you to worry about!) and the dairy produced too much mucus. Sometimes he would tell me about humorous mishaps at the toilet paper factory or something he had heard on NPR. I liked the stories about his childhood most, like how he and his little friend once snuck up behind a man on the street and shouted ‘Stick ‘em up!’ and were reprimanded because there was a war going on overseas.

Frequently, Ralph and I would not converse at all. He would come home to his favorite chair and study full of books (a lot of Dostoevsky, some pop-history) and read until dark. The only times he seemed to need me were dinners out with buyers and their wives. It’s okay, I told myself. This is how secure, happy people are. This is how people who’ve been in love a long time are, though we’d only been together four months. The couples who run out of things to say to each other have love to shake their hallways, but we don’t even have that! I used to whine in the dark of our bedroom, syncopated to Ralph’s raspy snoring. I hardly knew him-- all I had was the litany I had learned by living with him. The cheap Pert Plus and expensive cologne. The order in which he unpacked his coat pockets when he returned home. The way he looked at me when I descend the staircase wearing an emerald dress before his business cocktail parties. Like that was it, the point of everything.

I first saw the woman with the dog on a what was a very desperate day for me. I had just bombed an audition and was regretting moving to Boston in the first place. In LA it was still sunny and in the sixties. On the way home from the Theatre District I stopped on Newbury Street to buy something sensible, but ended up weighed down by bright pink bags and bone-China dinnerware from Chanel. Nearly back to our apartment on Chestnut Street, I slipped on the salt meant to fight the first snowfall of the season, and dropped the box of Chanel. All of the teacups cracked and I shouldn’t have bought them in the first place, his ex-wife had left a perfectly lovely set from Ralph Lauren, so, flustered, I left it and didn’t look back. I was sitting on the steps of our apartment, nursing a cigarette and trying not to weep when I saw her. She had been walking swiftly, but stood to let her little dog sniff around a tree trunk grown from the cobble stone. She wore a tailored black coat. Everything around her was dark and wintery, but she held the sunspot of a peeled clementine in her raw hands, and I wanted to be her friend.

In spite of the cold, I took long walks around Beacon Hill everyday, learning the side streets, sometimes seeing the same families and couples. We’d all smile at each other once we recognized that we were neighbors, but I didn’t know what to do after that. When I asked Ralph about friends who lived nearby he said that people had this idea that they were living in a neighborhood, but really it was still just Boston. People don’t make friends on the street.

“You don’t like, uh, whaser name, Julie? Herb’s wife?” Ralph asked. “I thought you two were having a nice time at the nondenominational holiday party.”

“Well, she’s all right, I guess.”

“Shouldn’t you be used to this? I thought people in LA all lived in people shaped bubbles to stay away from the smog.”

“No, no. It was beautiful and soulless and I would have stayed if I’d gotten the part of the kooky best friend of a teenager who just discovered she’s immortal.”

It was the last of the rejections I could handle. So I packed my things and transplanted myself to Boston because New York was too expensive. My mother’s house in Indiana with the cross-stitched pillow singing ‘Home Is Where the Heart Is’ couldn’t bring me back. People will say that the midwest is America’s heartland, but I know better. Our traveling ancestors shed all of the old world as they ambled toward the Pacific. Only, the wanderlust led not to new frontiers, but to a waking Americana dream, surrounded by billboards and palm trees. I got off the plane feeling that the city was strangely familiar, visited hundreds of times in Hollywood movies or my own suburban strip-malls, even though I’d never seen mountains or sea in my life.

“Any auditions lately?”

The truth was that with Christmas blooming like a hurricane, I had traded the rejection of auditions for the Prudential Shops with their understated frosted pine trees and silver bells. This shopping wasn’t like it used to be, in my previous life in JC Penney’s with my mother—all of her coupons and red tag items. I was no longer stroking polyester like a pervert, reeking of three different Clinique samples or snapping security tags off of cubic zirconia earrings.

This was shopping in museum-like rooms, void of any clothing. The salesgirls would look at you with elevator eyes, then pull out pieces from some secret room, suited to your exact taste. This was shopping without digging into necklines to check prices. This was shopping where anything could be mine. It made me feel delirious and uncontrollably alive.

“Buy what you want,” Ralph had said when he handed me a heavy black Amex with my name etched in silver. “Buy whatever will make you happy.”

So he must have seen the shopping bags folded and tucked into the pantry, must have known that the walk-in closet and maple armoire were nearly over-flowing, and yet he still asked if there was room in the shopping list to be an actress.

“I auditioned for The Little Dog Laughed this morning," I lied. "But I don’t think I got it. They wanted someone older. I did a little shopping, too. “

“Get anything nice?”

“A few things. Thank you.”

“Sia, you don’t have to thank me every time.”

“I know.”

The next couple of times I saw the woman with the dog I realized it was more than coincidence, that we were neighbors and that she was not just a tourist with beautiful coats and sherpa boots. She was always with her dog, and I was always outside to smoke, which I considered as much as a responsibility as a pet who needed fresh air no matter the weather. Whenever I saw her I would stamp out my cigarette quickly. I could only smoke light menthols, or white grape cigars, something I found vaguely shameful. The same type of shame I was sure the woman with the dog felt about her blond hair sprouting from dark roots. Those roots, that inability to schedule salon visits fastidiously, let me know that she and I were women who were new to money. That if we were to meet we would save each other from these frigid waters, or at least, understand one another.

But whenever I seemed able to swallow my shyness, and was ready to talk to her with a planned comment about the weather, she was already gone, the French bulldog trotting in stride with her Louboutins.

The breeder’s house was warm and filled with the sound of mewing puppies.

“You can’t even smell them right? Doesn’t it not smell like dog in here?” I kept asking Ralph.

“If I were to be blindfolded and asked if I were in a house with dogs, I’d say yes. But I guess it’s not bad.”

The breeder was a slightly plump woman who was able to make her living off selling French bulldogs and afford a nice Cape house. She asked Ralph and I not to interact with the puppies until they finished nursing off of their mother, a black and white one named Lula. I could barely contain myself and had to hold onto the crook of Ralph’s elbow to keep from jumping up and down.

“I want the runt of the litter,” I said to the breeder while trying to distinguish which puppy was smallest as they squirmed on their mother’s underbelly. I wanted to rescue the one no else would.

“So did the last two girls who were here, ma'am,” she said. “Everyone wants something to fit in their purse. But keep in mind that these are bulldogs!”

“Yes, but they are French.” I relaxed my face into what I hoped was a neutrally cruel expression.

“Right, well. Do you and your dad live in an apartment or a house?”

It wasn’t the first time someone had assumed that Ralph, with his salt and pepper hair and slack face, was my father. Each time there was a spell of uncomfortable silence, both of us hoping the other would rush in to explain.

“He’s my boyfriend, actually, and we live in an apartment with a lot of space. It’s near the Common.”

“Oh. Yeah, so, they are small dogs but that doesn't mean they don't need plenty of exercise. They'll fatten up on you if you don't walk them.”

When the four puppies unlatched I sat down on the floor and held each one in rotation. They all looked basically the same—black bat ears and white bodies, two girls and two boys. Their stubby legs were too short for their thick bodies and they reminded me of crawling babies. I couldn’t pick one, but Ralph said that, no, we could not take all four. That would come to around eight thousand dollars, are you kidding me? Ralph suggested that he and I sit across the room from the puppies. Which ever one came to me first would be our puppy. I sang, and Ralph whistled, and the boy with the smallest amount of black on his ears wandered forward. I named him Bean.

Our dogs met before we did. They ran at each other, pushing their flat snouts together, pulling the woman and I close, tethered by leather leashes.

"Sorry, he's just a puppy," I said.

"Oh, he's adorable. How old?" said the woman.

I told her the number of months like a mother of a real baby. As the dogs circled us, tangling us in the leashes, I learned that her name was Aspen, yes, like the resort, and her dog's name was Finnegan, yes like the Wake.

"Finnegan's so cute. He's one of the reasons I wanted this breed."

"Someone once told me that it's the breed of Beacon Hill. Everyone has one."

We talked for a while longer before we admitted that we were neighbors. She'd seen me around, too. I pointed to my house, and she pointed to hers, and we smiled. It's a rare thing when little orbits collide, and it’s true : people don’t make friends off the street. But I was feeling crazy – not in a Come-to-my-apartment-so-I-can-cut-you-into-tiny-bits crazy, but in a This-is-random-but-would-you-like-to-come-over-for-a-cup-of-coffee kind of crazy. I felt a rush of giddiness when she said Sure.

I’ve never been very good at having guests over to my house, even for brief visits. After my father moved out, my mother stopped entertaining family friends at our house, so I suppose I never learned the necessary skills. I always find myself giving visitors tours—This is the living room, and this is the hallway and this is my favorite place to watch the sunset. I nearly began such a tour for Aspen but then I realized she would likely be unimpressed with Ralph’s Italian espresso machine or even the closet-sized fireplace. Unsure of what else to do, I said, “Let me give you an art tour,” and we shuffled along the apartment’s walls.

The door to Ralph’s study was open and Aspen poked her head in.

“Is that your diploma there? USC?”

“Oh, gosh it’s so embarrassing—my boyfriend hung it up because I told him how proud my mother is of it. I’m the first to graduate in my family. My mom went for a little while, but lost her scholarships. She had a taste for premium Colombian stuff.”

“It was the seventies?”

“Early eighties.”

She looked closer at my diploma before we both left the study. “I didn’t think that Sia would be your real name.”

“Well, yeah.”

She laughed. “A lot of women here change their name. You know Apple Benson? She lives on Pinckney. My real name’s Anne, but a friend took me to Aspen when we were sixteen, and we told our ski instructor and all the boys we met that I was Aspen making a pilgrimage to Aspen. Anyways. What is your oven doing?” she asked me when I took her to the kitchen to see the Lichtenstein which Ralph felt was too contemporary for anywhere else.

“It’s cleaning itself.”

“What?”

“It’s a self-cleaning oven.”

“Wouldn’t your maid do a better job than a lot of heat?”

It was moments like that that I knew I would always be separate from her, no matter what type of friends we became. Later, on our dog walks, shopping trips, and early, cocktail-heavy dinners she would tell me the details of her life's history. The New England upbringing. The ballet lessons in the winter and dusty horse shows in the summer. The boys from the wrong side of the tracks. All this before the recession and the sale of her father's business and the resurfacing of her mother's drinking. How her husband placed her back where she belonged. She was fun to talk to, and told her stories well, her voice somehow always sounding as if she had just eaten a delicious piece of candy. And I should have understood her fully, but I couldn't. We had left through the same door, but had always lived in different houses.

Aspen's husband worked as a corporate lawyer in the Financial District, and since they'd gotten married three years ago, her only job was to get pregnant. He was a wonderful man, busy with work, preoccupied by small hobbies. He liked to solder.

"He's had the same damn toaster for over a decade," Aspen told me.

Prior to getting married, Aspen was a dental student. She met her husband in the seafood restaurant where he worked as a waiter to pay for Harvard Law. She wrote her number on the check and she fell in love with him because he told her she was funny before he told her she was beautiful.

"I used to always sing that song to him. You know the one, 'You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, I picked you out, I shook you up and turned you around into something new.' God, it drove him crazy."

On our walks to exercise our Frenchies, Aspen would sometimes pull me into baby boutiques where were would coo over all the soft pastel. Aspen would lazily buy some gender neutral item, or a bulky developmental toy for when the nonexistent baby grew into a toddler.

"Where do you keep all this stuff?" I once asked when we were drunk at a posh bar. I had been to her townhouse-- it was modern and uncluttered, so I imagined a secret nursery overflowing with collected organic cotton blankets or plastic bibs.

"It sort of cycles through with the in verto. I usually end up donating everything when the eggs don't stick," she said, digging through the cavern of her purse for lipstick. Beautiful men kept offering to buy us drinks. Each one I had to turn down stung like a certain kind of death.

"The people at Goodwill used to love me," Aspen continued. "But I haven't tried as much lately."

"Why not? You don't want a little snot-ball love-bug?"

"I guess I do. But maybe it's not worth all the trouble? It's started to feel like something that's being done to me. All that prodding. The new ‘lie back and think of London,’ for sure. What about you? You and Ralph having kids?"

"We're not-- I mean, he's not. We haven't thought that far ahead. I want a baby. But."

“So what about, well, sleeping with him?” Aspen giggled. “Can I ask that?”

I laughed too. Another overpriced lychee gin martini sweat in my hand.

“What can I possibly say? I don't want to tell you that it grosses me out, or that he's just so old, you know?”

“And yet you just did!” We both howled with laughter and told the bartender to bring another round.

“You know what, though, I'm happy. I am!” I said. “But there are times that I feel like I’m wasting my talents. Like a lesbian who’s really good at deep throat.”

Aspen covered her mouth in shock before cracking into a terse smile. I had to keep in mind that she had to maintain a certain aura. It was bad enough that she had befriended a gold digger while trying to stay involved with the Hill House charities. I was always doing this, saying things with a manic vigor, uncontrollably seeking some warm glow of spotlight. I couldn’t help myself.

“You’re passionate,” a boyfriend once said to me, a little out of breath, a little bewildered. I laughed at him until he apologized. I felt naked, like he had discovered something about me I hadn’t yet had a name for.

“Do you think I’m awful for dating Ralph? I mean, because of our age difference?” I asked her, a little serious now.

“It’s certainly not unheard of. Hey, to each his own, right?”

I knew she was trying to think of something else to talk about, but I pressed on.

“It’s not like he doesn’t mean a lot to me. He really does! I just, I never expected this. I’m not this type of girl.”

“What type?” Aspen asked, and I wondered if she was just trying to make me say it out loud. Gold Digger. Whore. Harlot, if you wanted to be archaic about it.

I had a roommate in college who I confessed everything to on the nights that I’d come home smelling less like me and more like the people I’d danced with. Across the room in her own twin extra long, she’d listen to my drunken warbles about boys with sticky beer lips or men who pocketed their wedding rings, took me into the nightclub bathroom.

“Hey, listen, it’s okay,” she’d whisper, hearing some lamentation in my voice I didn’t even know was there. “We do these things.” And I wanted to believe so badly that she meant we, not just as in she and I, but as in a collective. The things we do when we’re lonely and want to be saved.

I let my eyes glaze over on the martini glass cradled in Aspen’s thin fingers. A bird’s nest held in wintertime twigs.

“The type who needs someone to pass time with,” I said.

Her teeth were the brightest thing about her face, as her eyes were rather brown and she used smokey eyeshadow no matter the occasion. But her teeth—they reminded me of baseball. It’s strange, but I dreamed of knocking them out with a hard pitch, dismanteling her jaw. Isn’t that what we all want for women with perfect bone structure? I imagined collecting the fallen little pearls for myself. Part of my preoccupation with her mouth may have come from how rarely she flashed her baking-soda white teeth. Though she told me she once had her wild days, she was now a woman who gave closed mouth smiles, whose laughter had limits. I never asked Aspen her age, but placed her at thirty, based on a story she told me about sleeping with a man she met in Florence on the night of the new millennium. He was one of those men who weave rainbow threads into tourists' hair on the street, a gypsy, but just so charming.

Does it seem like Aspen was my great, true love story? It would, except that I never forgot an important rule: you cannot both want to possess and want to be someone. I was jealous of her—green streaks of it flarring not in my eyes, but along my shoulder blades. An aching. Any love I felt for my friend was a sort of time-travel love—she was who I hoped I’d one day become, a poised woman who knew when to just shut up already.

I remember that Ralph told he had cystic fibrosis on exactly February fifth only because my mother had called me the night before to talk about the Colts winning the Super Bowl and why didn't I watch, didn't I miss home? That Monday morning when I woke up I did not expect to see Ralph sitting in the kitchen, looking at his hands.

I stood at the doorway for a full minute, watching him. I wish now I had stood there longer, stayed in that time where my problems were not problems. I do that now. I freeze myself for as long as possible, refusing to move forward. In the back of taxis, letting the meter run. In the bathroom, a foot perched above steaming water until my muscles ache. In bed until the sun arches shadows across the floor.

But then I sat down across from him. “Baby, why aren’t you at work?’

“Do you want anything to eat?”

“No, I’m okay. Do you want anything?”

“I went to my doctor this morning. I have a lung infection,” Ralph said. He wouldn't give me much more information than that. I would find out the rest later that night through my own research. The lungs filling with fluid. The organ failure. The salty taste of his skin which I should have realized long ago was a sign of genetic disease he was hiding from me. He kept his mask nebuliser and various orange-bottled antiobiotics, and at work. Such great lengths! His secretary knew more about him than I did!

“Listen, Sia, I want you to know that you’ll be taken care of. Even if we don’t get married in time, I want to make sure that you get the money.”

“Please, don’t say that. I don’t want the money. I don’t need it. I’d marry you.”

Ralph smiled at me like I was a sweet little fool.

“Come on, now. It’s yours.”

“I really would marry you. You’ve never asked.” I began to weep and covered my face with my hands.

“You’re too young to get married. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

“No, I don’t. I’m sorry for crying,” I said. We sat there for a while, not touching, just looking at each other across the kitchen table, the space between our faces growing soupy and sad. He was looking at me like he was surprised I was a thing that could cry. He was looking at me like I was a child who’d just scraped her knee after falling from her bike. That I’d heal quickly and go on like it’d never happened. Meet a nice, young man.

“Sia, the doctors told me that I have no more than five years left. They can make me comfortable, but there is no way of stopping the fluid from filling my lungs. You don’t have to be there for that, Sia. I’m lucky. Most CF patients don’t live past fifty.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? You never, ever told me.”

He rubbed his eyes, hard, and said he didn’t want to tell me until it became absolutely necessary. I went to the refrigerator to get him a bottle of water we import from the Amazonian rain forest. I thought of Ralph drowning inside of his own body. I imagined it would sound the same as putting a moonshell up to your ear: hollow and rushing. I loved him more in that instant than I had ever loved anything. I once met a woman who told me that it wasn’t love—it was me getting exactly what I wanted. I threw my drink at her.

“Sia, are you listing to me? You’ll get all the money, but I won’t let you be my nurse. You’re too young.”

I opened the bottle for him with a crack, and set it on the table before him. I pulled on my winter coat, and took Bean’s leash from where it hung on the wall. I pretended I couldn’t hear him when he said my name again.

“I’m talking Bean for a walk,” I said, though I had already shut the door.

Since adopting Bean, I have watched a lot of inspirational dog movies. These movies are all the same, really. A person gets a mischievous dog, and sometimes they are happy about it, and sometimes they are not, but either way they must potty train the dog. The dog will be bad at learning to pee on a certain square or newspaper, and it may slobber on everything, or demolish feather pillows at worst, but at best, it will solve crimes or win basketball games.

I liked to watch these movies with Bean cuddled by my side. I liked to think it encouraged him to learn to pee on certain squares of paper, even if he didn’t have the ability to win townspeople’s hearts or become a sled dog with a distinctive personality.

There always comes a point in the inspirational dog story when the little boy or girl must cast out their pet. Once Bean and I got to the edge of the park I checked that his sweater was on securely before gently dropping him into the foot tall snow. He looked up at me and cocked his head.

“Go on! Leave me alone!” I nodded to the distance in front of us. It was blindingly cold, the sky violet though it couldn't have been past noon— aside from a few skaters scraping the ice on Frog Pond, no one was lingering. Bean tried to move through the thick gray, the texture more like wet sand than powder. Soon he discovered that the way to move was to burrow, and in lightly packed areas he was able to bound and hop. He looked really happy. I tried to sneak away but he came after me.

“No!” I shouted like the child actors in those movies. “Go on, git! Can’t you see that I don’t want you any more!” Bean sat down in the snow. I backed away, and he stayed sitting. When I turned and walked a few feet, I heard the jingle of his collar.

“You heard me! I don’t want you!” I turned and ran until I knew he wouldn’t catch me.

A few mornings later when Aspen opened her front door and saw that I did not have Bean with me, her face fell. It was the same reaction Ralph had had, before he attempted to console me.

“Where’s Bean?” She was already in her coat, Finnegan at her side, so she shut the door behind her and we began our walk sans Bean.

“He ran away. I’ve bee searching for days.”

“Oh my God, are you ok?” She put her hand on my shoulder, and pulled so that we both stood frozen on Chestnut Street. I had been regretting throwing Bean out the way I had for the past few days, but in that moment with Aspen the weight of how terrible everything was became very real.

Sometimes, when I think of Bean, I still wonder why I did it. The best I can figure is that I thought I was casting out all of my nice things before the universe could. You can’t miss what was never yours.

“I just want him to come back. That’s all I want.”

“Well, we can make flyers. Did you go to the police? Maybe someone stole him. Frenchies are so valuable. How did you lose him?”

I told her that we were in the park and that I let him off the leash because he looked so delighted, but then his white fur became lost in the snow. She nodded, but said nothing. As we walked her dog along I felt that our connective tissue was unraveling.

The last time I saw her it could have been months or weeks later, I couldn’t know. The snow had melted and I was no longer wearing sweaters and wool coats. I was sitting on the street curb outside of the hospital, smoking a cigarette, when I saw her walking down the street with Finnegan. I looked at my shoes, hoping maybe she hadn’t seen me. A pair of buttery leather heels appeared directly in front of my sneakers, and when I looked up her face shielded me from the sun.

“Hello stranger,” I said like they do in movies, but she looked just the same. I was the one who looked different—my hospital pallor, my easy sweatpants. Aspen asked how I was, how Ralph was, if we had gotten the fruit basket from Spain, if the seedless blood oranges were divine, why I hadn’t called. She smiled at me and I tried to smile back but I thought of Ralph and I in restaurants and how we smiled at each other like it was the only thing.

“Did you ever find Bean?”

“Who? Oh, oh, Bean. No. I hope a nice family found him. A nice, Beacon Hill family.” I put my hand in front of Finnegan’s snout and he licked my fingers.

“Lucky we live near such a good hospital. Really good reputation, I hear,” she said. I nodded. She and I used to complain about the sirens we could hear as we sat in her kitchen, drinking lemon tea. For the rent we pay! I missed when we lived in a neighborhood where the hospital was just another building.

We said our goodbyes, and I promised to call her. I watched her and the little dog walk down the street, toward the river, and for a moment I let myself think of how the pair will fill the hours until her husband comes home at eight. Back inside, I took the stairs from the lobby because the elevator is slow, and I did not want the love of my life to wake up and think he was alone.

Cover Letter For Submissions

2010-10-14T22:43:00.003-04:00

Michelle Cheever once won Seventeen Magazine's Fiction Contest, just like Lorrie Moore! Except, Cheever got second place, and Moore won first. The year the contests occurred were different as well.

Cheever is a senior Writing, Literature, and Publishing major at Emerson College, and is excited to graduate so that professors will stop being disappointed when they find out she's not related to the John Cheever.

Aside from an apparent love for name-dropping, Michelle Cheever enjoys procrasti-baking, looking like people's exgirlfriends, and the idea of tea.

Her story in the Emerson Review was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Thank you for your consideration.

Quirky, right??!! I really doubt that it's an okay cover letter, but I'm sure that if I have any marketability as a writer, 3/4 of if is derived from the fact that I have Zooey Dechanel bangs, etc., et al.

Oh here's an alternative one, my friends helped with:

You may find that Cheever is skilled at dialogue. This is probably because sometimes she has conversations and remembers what they were like.

Automat

2010-10-02T20:10:00.006-04:00

I have been taking a yoga class for grief, loss, and bereavement for a month now. The class is taught by a woman named Teal, though I have my doubts that that is her real name. She calls us her bean sprouts.

"Bean sprouts," she'll say, "fold in to child's pose from down-dog. This is your center, this is your rest. Whenever you need to collect yourself go into child's pose."

And all seven of us mourners push ourselves into the studio's polished wood floor until we look like wet pebbles.

"When you're ready, bean sprouts, rise into sun salutation. Open your chest. Imagine the sun in front of you, now take it inside you with your breathe and the sweep of your arms. Exhale. Now let it go. Let it go."

Here is where the woman who lost her baby will cry. She is always the first. It's quiet crying, sharp breathes now and then, but I notice because I look around at the others, no matter how many times Teal tells me not to. The woman who lost her baby wears the nicest yoga clothes and dislikes me because I wear stained button downs. I have the money for clothes like hers but I don't see the point in seventy dollar pants to stretch in. I'm the youngest and prettiest in the room, anyway.

"Lower yourself to the floor, inch by inch, vertebrae by vertebrae, until you are flat on your back," Teal says. She lowers the lights and her voice melts in to a wispy trance.

"You are in an ocean. It is clean and blue and you are floating. You're not afraid of going under. You can get your hair wet." A lot of the women in this room have extensions or get daily blow-outs, so I can imagine this is legitimately frightening to them.

"It is just you out in this turquoise, but you are not afraid. In this single moment you are at peace and you have no want for anything other than to be exactly as you are." At this point I am certain she is making it up as she goes along.

"In this water you are at peace because you are forgiven. An ocean of forgiveness, a limitless supply. You can let go here, give it to the ocean." Everyone in the room is crying. We're all innocent, crying babies in a dark yoga studio, lying on the floor, shaking in our shared grief, and loving each other because we're lost things. Oops! Where did I misplace all these people?

I mean, they are crying. I am not crying. I have not cried yet.

"Let go," Teal has said to me. "You have to let the ocean out through your eyes."

I like the sound of it, but I think if I were to, I’d die.

I tell my girlfriend that I don’t think I will take the class anymore.

"Why not? I think it's good for you. I think it's really helping."

"It's not," I say.

"Oh," she says.

She is still upset with me because I didn't let her come to the funeral. My family still thinks she is just my roommate. When I told her she couldn't come she said this was just like that episode of Six Feet Under. She is always doing that. Watching a lot of television and then telling me our lives are just like it.

Sometimes I humor her. "Which one?"

"The one where Nathaniel won't let the gay cop he's life-partnered with come to the funeral."

"Well, you're not a cop."

"No, I'm not." And she touches me and I am so hollow. I could break apart under her fingertips.

Tonight there is one man in the class. He is here because his wife died in a plane crash. A famous one. All of the women are attracted to him because he is sad and hasn't shaved his face in a long time and they want to rescue him. But I am certain that he will be mine because I am the most beautiful girl in the class and because I want him the least. After class we both linger on our yoga mats, talking about music. When everyone is gone we start kissing because we're alone and it's dark and it makes sense.

He carries me into the locker room like I am a child, and places me on the granite counter in front of the mirror. There are travel-sized hairdryers where sinks should be-- this is the ladies locker room. We are kissing in a wet way that sounds like crying and his hands are moving everywhere. We make love lovelessly and it's nice. I like this, taking things that are not mine and hiding them inside my body.

When nothing more is going to happen we pull our clothes from the heap. We walk together to the subway station and discover we take the same train. There is a woman sitting on the yellow line with her legs dangling over the edge, right where the trains skims by. He and I had been talking about how strange the money system is in Prague, how a cup of milk tea and a scone costs five hundred koruna, but seeing her I fall quiet. I feel sick until an official tells the woman she cannot sit there. Two weeks passed before anyone knew my mother was dead. Depending on which resident you ask, the apartment complex either smelled sweet, like rotten fruit, or like cat litter, but never both. One of her neighbors told me that my mother gave everyone an alibi-- said she was going to Spain for some sunshine.

He gets off the subway at his stop and I get off at mine. Though it is dark out, black trees and buildings smacked against a lavender sky, I do not want to go home quite yet. The only shop open on my street is a Goodwill so I buy three paintings, none of which I like or will ever hang up. One is of a flower I have never heard of, 'meadow fleabane'; another is of a little boats rowed out too far. The third is of a girl wearing a green coat in a restaurant soon to be shut down for the night. She is drinking coffee from a white cup and sits near the radiator. I don't like her. She's one of those girls who never takes their coat off when they get places. They always think of leaving.

The paintings are heavy and bulky, so I go home. Inside, I hear the laugh-track of a sitcom, and my girlfriend is on the couch, not laughing. I fold myself into her, under the throw-blanket, and it is so warm and she is so soft. She pushes her head onto the top of mine so she can see the television.

"You smell bad, you beautiful thing," she says to me. It's true. I am the most beautiful girl a lot of people have ever seen. I start kissing her and we have a sleepy sort of sex, like usual. I probably would have preferred for her to have brushed my long hair instead. She didn't even bother taking my jacket off.

I almost tell her that I slept with a man. I know that she can smell him on me, but can't place it. I almost tell her, but I then think of the girl in the painting and where she will go when the restaurant closes for the night. I do not want to wonder where she will walk to while pastries dry to crust in glass cases.

2010-09-14T14:19:00.000-04:00

dinner plates turning clean white under sinkwater,

unmade beds as ladders walked across to new cities.

here are the words, and here are the lists,

the stories I don’t want to be in

but keep hearing on the radio.

2010-08-04T10:44:00.001-04:00

my skin like the riverbed,

i'd swallow the moon

if i thought it'd keep you bound.

2010-07-22T01:47:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I read some of my diary from last year. I think I've changed a lot. But anyway.

I just typed up this story I wrote on February 5th, 2009 and tried to keep myself from editing it. I may use parts one day-- I'm not posting it because it's complete or good, but because it fascinates me how my stories sometimes end up coming true. I wrote this in February of last year, and didn't have any of the same feelings as either character. One February later I felt like both of them. More strangenesses have occurred.

We were terrible in restaurants. We were out of things to say. We had told each other everything about ourselves, giving the pieces away slowly, knowing it was what was keeping us together-- that need to know someone as well as you think you know yourself.

Reading the menu took some time. Less for Scarlett for all she needed to do was find the vegetarian option. After a couple silent dinners in noisy restaurants I began reading the newspapers, hoping that if we couldn't talk about her, or me, or us, we could talk about the world at large.

"There are nine dead in Amsterdam from a Turkish flight."

"Oh?"

"Chris Brown beat up Rihanna."

"So?"

"They discovered that little girl's remains today."

"West, why are you always so morbid?"

It's true, dinners with me were like watching CNN on a sad day.

We stopped going out soon after that, instead eating frozen meals in front of the television, but never the news. Usually just talk shows where there are six possible fathers or babies who get to eat whatever junk they want.

There were times I tried to fill the quiet with kisses, distract both of our mouths.

We ended up giving each other the same head cold over and over. Scarlett complained that if she couldn't breathe through her nose she would need her mouth at all times. I was literally suffocating.

Then came the nights where Scarlett would crawl out of bed, pull her suitcase from the closet and put one thing in it. The first night it was just a pair of socks she dropped in. Then she closed the suitcase, put it away and got back into bed. The next night it was jeans, the next a bra, the next more socks. I never said anything. I think she was trying to let me get used to the idea that she wouldn't be around soon.

By the time her whole wardrobe was in two cases, I knew what I was going to say to her. She packed her last thing, a hairbrush, and stood in the doorway, letting the hall light slide in like spilt milk.

"Don't go. I'm not me when you're gone."

Titles For My Fictional Memoir

2010-07-18T23:59:00.003-04:00

In the winter it was going to be "Sad Girl in a Party Dress," but I just came up with "Some People Like Me Because I Look Like Their Ex-Girlfriend."

Funerals, 1994

2010-06-12T21:42:00.004-04:00

Dad was supposed to drive. He usually did. But he was crying too much to see the road, so Mama made him pull over at a rest stop with a McDonald’s. I asked if we could go in and get a strawberry milkshake, but she said now was not the time for milkshakes. I told her I was hungry. She said that there’d be food after Auntie’s funeral.

Mama gripped the wheel and nervously crunched on Pep-O-Mint Lifesavers, one after the other. She forgot to look when switching lanes twice. Dad had taught her how to drive some. In her village in Poland women didn’t really learn to drive, never mind at sixteen.

My sister, Jane, who had just gotten her Massachusetts driver’s license, was reading Sassy magazine and rhythmically pulling out loose strands from her blonde hair and letting them fall to the carpet. Jane had beautiful hair, the same light texture as cotton candy. She had wanted to dye it pink, but Mama wouldn’t let her.

“Mo-om, would you just let me drive?” she asked when Mama hit the brakes a little too hard.

“You make me too nervous when you drive. We’ll be there soon, Janey. And Owen, will you turn off that Game Boy?” Mama asked me. “You’re going to give us all a conniption.”

I looked to my father sitting in the passenger seat. His face was slick with tears and he was trying to sleep. I was eleven years old and it was the second time I’d seen my father cry. I shut the volume off and watched Donkey Kong avoid fireballs and rivet holes in silence.

A month before Auntie died, Jane and I stayed in her apartment for the weekend because our parents were taking a respite in Nantucket. Auntie and Dad were five years apart, the same as Jane and I. She made a bed for us out of the sofa and taught us how to turn on her television.

“Jane, how’s high school going?” Auntie asked while making us hotdogs for dinner.

“It’s okay,” Jane said. She was trying to pay attention to an episode of the Real World where everyone screamed at each other.

“She wants to be a celebrity writer in Hollywood,” I offered.

“Shut up, Owen,” Jane said. It was April. Kurt Cobain had just killed himself, so Jane was especially sullen.

“Oh, don’t give up on acting, Jane. I thought you were perfect as Anne Frank. And Owen, have you dreamed up any new domino patterns?”

“I’ve learned how to make the dominos fall so that they turn on my K’nex Ferris wheel.”

The next day Auntie sent us out with some pocket money to explore the neighborhood. I was nervous because it was my first time being in Cambridge without a grown-up. Before leaving I said to Auntie, “I know you don’t have any kids, but usually they need some supervision.” She laughed and shook her head.

Jane and I spent most the weekend in a shop called Cheapo Records. We’d return in the evening to listen to our finds. One of the nights Jane and I were lying on the sofa bed, staring at the ceiling fan and listening to the songs Kurt Cobain never thought anyone would hear. He had recorded a few songs on a boom box before he fired a shotgun in his head. The record store owner found it for Jane after she bought In Utero. The song we were listening to sounded tinny and odd.

“It sounds like he’s praying,” I said quietly to Jane. On the day that Jane found out Cobain killed himself, a week before our visit to Auntie’s, she stayed home from school and played his music at top volume. She wore her black Nirvana T-shirt until Mama begged her to wear anything else, even offering up a rare shopping trip. Jane refused. Then she wore it until Mama begged her just to let her wash it for an hour.

“He’s not praying. He’s pleading. He’s asking us to let him go. To wish him night.”

Auntie came into the room and loomed over us, her head fuzzy in the lamplight. “Pretty song,” she said.

“He killed himself,” Jane said.

“I know. I’m sorry,” Auntie said and she seemed to really mean it. Mama and Dad had thought Jane was being a ridiculous fan. I did too.

“It’s not like she knows him,” I said. Jane twisted herself deeper into the sheets.

“No, Owen, I know she’s never met him. But I think Janey knows him better than you or I ever could,” Auntie said and Jane smiled at her.

On the drive to Auntie’s funeral, as I marveled at the power of being in a procession of cars no one could legally cut into, as if we were a thick river of grief, I became painfully aware of what was really making Dad cry that much. Within the span of only a month, my father had held two sets of cold hands while kneeling beside a hospital bed. First was his daughter’s hands, then his older sister’s. Dad had rushed Jane to the hospital after she swallowed pills. Auntie was rushed to the hospital three weeks later, after she suffered a brain aneurysm. She died. Jane lived.

Each of the funeral home’s rooms were monochromatic. The room with the body was all shades of peach, with some cherry-wood chairs lining the walls. I was too afraid to go in there. I stayed in a pistachio room, sitting on a celadon-colored sofa. If I learned over, to the far right, I could just barely see the casket. It looked like any other casket, and if it had not been for Auntie’s large nose sticking out, I would have thought we were in the wrong place entirely.

My father stood near the casket, next to his father, my Dziadziu. Dad gripped Dziadziu’s shoulder every now and then. His hands had the power to say what his mouth could not.

Dziadzu is the reason my parents met. He and my Babcia came to America when Dad was two. Dad forgot most of his Polish, but his parents kept him involved in community events. He met Mama when they were both eighteen. She was at a bake sale, nibbling on chrusciki and surrounded by fruit pies. She arrived in America only a month prior, and needed an English teacher and a tour guide, and my father found her very beautiful. They married by the sea two years later.

Mama wandered around the parlor, touching people’s elbows, consoling them and offering cups of coffee with condensed milk. I watched Jane wander from room to room, shuffling in her Doc Martens. By that point most family members had heard of her suicide attempt. They regarded her with mild surprise, as if she were not really there. No one knew what to say to her in the few months that followed the attempt, myself included. She had only been out of the psych ward two weeks.

She sat next to me on the couch, taking no care to smooth her baby doll dress as Mama said ladies should.

“Are you going to go in there?” she asked. I shook my head.

“It’s no big deal. It’s not Auntie lying in there. It’s just her body.”

“There’s no difference.”

“Sure there is. You’re such a baby. Here, I’ll go with you.” She snatched my hand and pulled me into the peach room. Dziadzu ruffled my hair and stepped aside so I could kneel at the casket. Jane stood behind me and pushed my head to look down at Auntie.

Her skin seemed papery and she was wearing more blush than she ever would have in life. She looked stiller than sleep and her hands were bound together by a rosary. I had the worst desire to touch her hands so I shoved my own in my suit pockets.

“They put a lens with a metal spike in to keep her eyes closed,” Jane whispered in my ear. “Otherwise they’d keep popping open.”

“I’m out of here,” I said. For the rest of the services I stood outside in the offensively bright sunshine. The ground was too wet for her to be buried that day. Every now and then a friend of Auntie’s from the city came out for a cigarette and told me that she had loved me very much.

I often think of the morning Jane tried to kill herself. Did she walk around that morning with the idea that it’d be her last, wading through the thought like it was the deep end of a swimming pool? Is it why she ate Frosted Flakes with me instead taking the bowl to her room to be with her music?

I remember that it was hot, even for late April. Our parents were upstairs, getting ready, and Jane and I were still in pajamas, eating the cereal. I’m not sure if Jane was actually sad, but now I remember her that way. She was picking at the blue polish on her toenails. I kept shouting, “They’re grrrrreat!” like that tiger. The grains of sugar melted off the wheat and sprayed as I spoke.

“Oh my God, Owen, if you say that one more time, I swear to God,” Jane said. I stayed quiet for a moment, glared at her, and sang even louder, “They’re grrrrreeeeaaaattttt!”

She darted her hand out to my arm and caught a chunk of my lingering baby fat between her fingers.

“You’re so fucking annoying,” she said, pinching as I struggled to pull away. “This is exactly why you have no friends. Just a bunch of dominos.”

“Mooooom,” I began to call, but Jane suctioned her hand to my mouth and stopped pinching. Her hand was warm, and smelled slightly like the bottom of my hamster’s cage.

“Don’t tell Mama. Owen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” Jane said. And then: “Listen, I promise that life will be a lot easier when you just grow up.”

She peeled her hand away, and I didn’t call for Mama. My sister looked at me for a long time, and I know now that she looked at me that way because she thought it would be the last time she’d ever see me.

When I said goodbye to her from the doorway, she said, “You’re a dork, but I love you.” Which was weird because we usually only admitted we loved each other on Christmas.

I caught the bus to day camp, I built a birdhouse, I passed my swim test and I got a sunburn. Dad went to his firm to research a case and met with a client whose story he didn’t believe, and Mama went to the shop to help women buy baby cribs and bedding. That afternoon Jane went into our parent’s pink, porcelain bathroom and swallowed every pill in their medicine cabinet. She washed down everything from the dental surgery codeine to ambiguous-looking vitamins with tap water.

Because life is funny, or because life is a miracle, Dad came home from work a few hours early. His client fired him because he could tell Dad disliked him. He found my sister lying in his clean, dry bathtub, a pink froth bubbling from her nose and mouth.

He told me this story much later. He told it as if he forgot whom he was talking to. But it was his story, the one he held and recited in his mind endlessly, unwillingly. The one he sometimes just had to say aloud—maybe he hoped that the words would finally disintegrate for good once he let them leave his mouth.

He told me how he stood there in the bathroom with his daughter at his feet for nearly a full minute. How everything was so quiet, so still, that he forced himself to scream just to break through what he thought was the universe collapsing into a pinprick of star. How he went to Jane, searched her neck for a pulse and, once discovered, how he kept the weak, beating plum under his fingertips in wonderment. Snapping out of his awe, he shook her and begged her to wake up. He doesn’t really remember the rest, but he called the ambulance, his hands still coated in Jane’s foamy spit, and rode with her to the hospital. He watched them pump her stomach. He saw the contents laid out on a metal tray; pills misappropriated in his mind as wet jewels.

I knew something was wrong when no one picked me up from camp that day. A boy who doesn’t like me because I couldn’t do the rope course or play flag-football was forced by his mother to offer me a ride home. I used to keep a house key around my neck so I let myself in. Because no one was home I got to eat Pop Tarts for dinner, watch Casper cartoons, and work on my domino patterns without anyone threatening to knock them down.

At seven o’clock when the sun cast the living room in a such a way that it looked like we lived inside a tangerine, Dad called. He hoarsely told me what had happened, and that Auntie would come and stay with me. He and Mama would spend the night at the hospital with Jane.

Auntie arrived an hour later and shook her head a lot, as if the shaking would make her brain figure out Jane’s reasons.

“Did Jane have a boyfriend?” Auntie asked me.

“Sort of.” After the New Year Jane had dated a Shaw’s checkout boy for a few months. Our parents hated him. He skipped class all the time and spit tobacco into soda cans. Jane had loved him, but he left her by the time the snow melted.

“Does she have friends?”

“In a way.” Jane used to be really popular, but then a lot of her friends stopped coming around. She sometimes snuck out for parties with them, though.

I kept the television on but I wasn’t really watching it or thinking about it. I wasn’t thinking about anything, really. I just let the cartoons slip over my eyes. It was still Casper, still ghosts. Auntie told me to go to bed, and I got into bed. And I tried to sleep and I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep.

I went into Jane’s room. Her walls were covered with music posters she had bought at the mall. As I went to the shoebox where she kept her cassette tapes, Lou Reed, Kathleen Hanna, and Iggy Pop stared down at me. I felt as though they were hoping to see Jane instead and I wanted more than anything to be her, for them. Not just for them, but for my parents, too, if ever Jane was truly gone.

I found the Nirvana tape we had listened to at Auntie’s, but I did not want to leave her room just then. It felt like museum—everything was just as she had left it. Her bed kept the shape of her and the pillow smelled like her clover shampoo. The little things on her dresser, crusted nail polishes and chipped unicorn figurines she used to collect, remained lined up. I touched everything carefully, searching for what her fingertips remembered.

Her shoes were not arranged, but scattered about the floor. I found a pair of purple high heels. I put my bare feet into them, left stab marks in the carpet as I went to the mirror. I allowed myself to be fascinated by the reflection for only a few seconds before I leapt from my sister’s shoes.

I took the tape to my room, put it in my old Fischer Price cassette player and planned to listen to that song until I understood everything about Jane, but I fell asleep before that could happen.

For the first week Jane was in the hospital, Mama spoke no English. No one in my family had learned much Polish, so none of us knew what she was saying. It was like a zombie movie; she moved slowly, her skin turned into a dull gray, and she spoke in guttural moans.

Dad told us that, once she came to America twenty years ago, she left her mother tongue in her mother country. She needed, he said, to a draw a line between her two lives. She took classes and read every bit of English she could, everything from Huck Finn to supermarket tabloids. She gave us American names and only spoke Polish when she was mad enough at us that her mind couldn’t keep up with her mouth.

Though she spoke English very well, she could never loose her accent. She was afraid that it spoke louder to Americans than her words. People often smiled politely at her, nodding, waiting for their chance to ask, “So, where did you immigrate from, honey?”

She learned that no matter how many issues of InStyle she read she would never belong here. And so she saw many of the faults with America she hadn’t seen when she was a new bride picking out generic baby names. But the line was drawn and she would not speak Polish. That is, not until her daughter, her daughter who knew only English, who hated polka but loved grunge, hated tales of the village, but loved stories of Kate Moss’ exploits, tried to kill herself. Only when all her visions of the good life had fully disintegrated, could she speak Polish.

She sat at Jane’s bedside, rolling her daughter’s fingers between her own, and letting words pour out more rapidly and surely than she ever could in English. I think that none of us actually knew that she had that many words in her. But of course she did. Of course she did.

“I don’t understand, Mom. I don’t understand,” Jane would repeat, tears welling in her eyes. Even in the pysch ward of the state hospital Jane still lined her eyes in dark kohl.

Dad became the quiet one. I’ve tried to imagine what exactly he felt in that week and the months to come. But I cannot. What it must have been like to not only have the possibility of loosing your child, but to know it was their choice.

And so, wordlessly he filled her room with flowers and teddy bears bought at the hospital gift shop. He bought her Crunch bars and Jujubees. He held her chilly hand, or hugged her gingerly, as if he were afraid of squeezing the weak pieces of life from her.

Jane sat there in the hospital bed, making a coffin of that sweet-smelling room. She looked amazed to still be here and at times her eyes seemed empty. On one of my visits I realized that rather than empty, they were just drinking everything in, savoring all details. Hopeful at my discovery, I talked to her about happy things, in part because I didn’t know what else to say. She nodded and smiled at all the right times. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so like Dad, I held onto hers.

On one of the earlier visits I asked a question no one had yet dared to.

“Why did you do that?”

She was quiet for a long time, and then she said, “Because I’m really, really sad.”

“That’s a stupid reason. Nothing was even wrong with your life.”

“Whatever, you don’t know me,” she said. We were both quiet for a little while, and then I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. I used to cry all the time when I was little, like if I tripped or got picked last for T-ball, and the kids at school called me a baby. So I tried to never cry. And yet.

“Owen, please don’t cry,” Jane said even though she was, too. Some of the black makeup melted away from her eyes in streaks.

“It’s just that, well you know that part of sleep when you’re not having any dreams? That part is the best part and I wanted it to be like that always.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. She shrugged.

My father resumed his position as driver on the way home. Jane had barely spoken all afternoon; she just kept playing with her hair.

Looking out the window, she said, “First, Auntie’s cells will turn into a liquid to feed the bacteria. Bacteria breed more bacteria and she’ll start to smell terrible.”

“Jane, now’s really not the time,” Mama said, shifting in the passenger seat. But Jane continued.

“The bacteria create gas and her body will balloon, getting even fatter. There will be worms and maggots, of course. Everything inside her will be a soup. Her brain will pour out of her ears and mouth.”

“That’s enough, Jane!” Mama shouted. “Is this what they’re teaching you in these schools? Owen, is it?”

“No, Jane’s just a freak.”

“I swear, in America you don’t love your dead, but you love your death! Who ever heard of crying for a dead rock star? Who ever heard of killing yourself for one?” Then, to no one it particular, “This place is going to murder my babies!”

The car was silent for a while.

“Because Auntie was embalmed it will take decades for her bones to disintegrate. But the last organ to go will be her uterus. Funny, she never got use of it in life, either.”

At that my father spun the wheel, bringing the car to the side of the highway. He slammed on the brakes and we all lurched forward and back. Mama and I were both whimpering.

Dad smacked the wheel with the flat of his hand, leaned his head back and cried with no tears. Just his mouth open like a fledgling bird, aching for something.

“Jane, Jane, my Jane, why?” he choked out, his whole body shuddering.

I looked to my sister but she had covered her face with her hands. My father got out of the car and crossed the guardrail into the woods. He looked thin and broken, sad in his wrinkled funeral suit.

Jane got out of the car and went after him.

“Come, Owen. Sit on my lap,” Mama said once the car was empty. I climbed to the front seat, and curled into my mother’s lap, though I was much too big even then. After about ten minutes, we saw Jane and Dad walking up the tree-clogged hill to the car. His arm was around her shoulders. I stayed in Mama’s lap and we drove home that way.

Later, I asked Jane what she said to Dad. I thought maybe she’d talked about how our souls become stars pinpricking the bluish-black sky like in The Lion King. But she said, “I just told him I was sorry for it all and that I love him very much.”

And then she looked at me, with those eyes I used to wish were my own, and said, “I told him I didn't want to die anymore. And he believed me."

Ryan Teitman

2010-05-09T14:42:00.002-04:00

I randomly found this Indiana University MFA student's poetry and I'm really happy I did:

Prayer to Saint Anthony, Finder of Lost Things

I have lost: churches cupped in my hands, the moon drowned in a glass, pocket watches tied to tree stumps, watchdogs swimming in lakes of whiskey, hungry fingers to the night’s saw teeth. Keep those. Please find my hearts, those thousand knotted plums fled from my body. Return the small one in the pit of my stomach, worn smooth as marble. Return the one in my left hand that beats with the stroke of a hammer. Return the cilia-pricked one in my ear that hears the memories of animals. Return the one in my knee that sings like a bellows. The one in my wrist that stutters my pulse like a skipping record. The one in my right hand that spins sand into glass. The one in my eye that plucks the streets from the city. The one in my tongue that shakes the sea from the shoreline. Return the one in my heart that builds ships in a bottle, with its small surgeon hands.

Ode, Elegy, Aubade, Pslam

The songbird that escapes

from a burning house

will build its nest

in the shape of a cage.

This is one thing

we know: song begs

for the places that make it

grow from seed to starling,

places that put the heart's hemlock

in an empty rowboat

and heave it from the shore.

We only praise what we cannot

keep: violin strings berried with rain,

teacups overflowing with brandywine,

radios sickened with static.

Glass tossed out with the tide

will come back smoother and stranger,

but never to the same person.

This is something we want

to know. The woman in love

never touches her ears.

The man in his house is always lost

without her.

Morning pulls light

from the dark like a boy

hoisting a trout from the lake

by its clean, pink gills.

When the woman escapes

from a burning house

she will know the path of the wind,

how it writes its scripture

in peach blossoms blown

into a baby's empty pram.

She'll feel it compose its words

against her body, against the night,

against the water, in an endless, artless psalm.

Smut

2010-05-01T11:09:00.003-04:00

(This is fictional and yet it still makes people think badly of me.)

Kai wanted to traipse from motel to motel like an outlaw. She wanted the frantic haircut in a gas station bathroom, the alias with a name that isn’t her own, and for the mouth of her suitcase to always drool blouses. She liked the dark sunglasses of it, the all-night truck stops, and the ribbons of freeways stretching out, always leading away.
Instead, this motel is just a bus ride from her house, and she’s isn’t going anywhere. Just sits on the slippery bedspread, the one stitched with periwinkles, telling herself, There are dirtier things, There are dirtier things.
She’s been having dreams where she calls for ambulances but when they get there, nothing is wrong. It’s just her, barefoot in a dingy nightgown, attempting to say she’s sorry. There are other dreams too: Kai robbing a bodega at knifepoint, Kai drowning kittens in tin pails, Kai seducing you at parties, then leaving you bruised and alone. Each morning she wakes up with stones quaking in her stomach, as if shame could solidify.

Jackson has yellow teeth but beautiful hands. He and Kai sip cream sodas bought from the motel’s rusted vending machine. Everything in the room has its pair: twin beds, twin sinks, twin water-stained highball glasses. They are filming a movie, Jackson’s movie, Eros Circus, and Kai is the star.
“It’s too bad we don’t have a couch in here, like the pros. But it’ll be great. You look ravishing, darling.”
Hers is the sumptuous body, ripened with butter cakes drowned in plum sauce, or overly sweetened lemon tea. She is not fat, but she is full. Her hunger has unwittingly formed a body whose symptom for others is lechery. Her body is her only option, as she is frequently silent—not for lack of things to say, but for lack of opportunity or allowance to say them. Her body speaks. So when Jackson says, “You are ravishing,” what he really means is, “You look ravenous.”
The room, with its carpet like rock-sand, watery paintings of seagull beach-scenes, and moth-eaten yellow curtains, starts to close in on them so the pair go outside. They sit by the swimming pool, green in spite of the chlorine heavy in the air. They keep looking through the fence to see if the others will arrive soon. But the July night is falling glassy-blue and it’s hard to see through the bougainvillea growing in the chain link.
Eventually a battered Chevy shakes the gravel and twin men get out. Both are tall and thin with wavy blonde hair. One wears a polyester Superman costume, the cape limply spread across his shoulders. The other is Clark Kent, in a gray suit and tortoise shell glasses.
“No, no, no!” Jackson shouts running toward them. “I asked for conjoined freak twins. This is a circus, not some boyhood, comic strip fantasy!”
Kai looks at her own costume: all ballet slippers and trapeze artist sequins, and laughs.
Clark Kent sheepishly apologizes and Superman stares at Kai. They all go inside the room and the men set up the camera equipment and Kai paints on more lipstick until she looks like someone else.
Kai never wanted to be herself. She does not just want a change. She wants to be an other.
A knock on the door reveals a stout woman with gelled hair and a eyeliner beard.
“Ah ha! Our cunning linguist has arrived,” Jackson says. The dyke rolls her eyes and calls him a fruit. She is the bearded lady.
“Does anyone want to do a line of K? I cooked plenty last night,” Jackson says, producing a small bag of ketamine. Everyone in the room nods and Kai finds a coaster for him. The coaster has a picture of a jungle bird none of them have seen in real life. Jackson cuts a few lines and pulls a straw from his pocket.
“Our movie star, my applejack, you first,” he says to Kai. She whisks her hair away and vacuums two lines.
“Easy,” Superman says. “You don’t want to fall into a K-hole.”
Everyone snorts one line or just a bump, which makes her feel greedy.
“Guess we should get naked then,” the dyke says.
“There’s the spirit.” Jackson says, lifting his camera, “Ready, aim, fire on Eros Circus.”
“Don’t you mean, lights, camera, action?” Superman asks.
“There’s really little difference in this movie. Now remember, you are actors. Here, in this motel room, you are not you, now.”
There is the plot of course, but we’ve heard it before. The trapeze artist and Superman are in love and he owns her, but his brother, Clark Kent, loves her too. And then there is the pesky bearded lady, always trying to lure the trapeze artist into her tent. Under this Big Top, the sunlight splitting into pink and white stripes, will they find a way to figure it out, to love and fuck her all at once? How many times can Kai dissect her heart?
Many times, it seems. The ketamine kicks in just as they maneuver a four-way kiss. Kai learns that the world is made of layers, and each one opens like stage curtains on a loop. While three people undress her, she looks into a motel painting of a stormy sea. She is on that wave, going up and up, but it feels as though her stomach was left on the ocean floor.
Hands moving over her, hands crawling and skating with certainty, with a destination. She had wanted to be the sort of person who knew what to do with her hands. Everyone moves over her like maple syrup—they are translucent and shining golden. Superman stands over her, now just wearing his cape, and tightens her hair into his fist. She looks down at his cock and before she can make the connection of what it actually is, because nothing is connecting, it is in the back of her throat and he is telling her to keep her eyes open. With her eyes peeled she sees that the dyke’s cock is bigger than either of the twins, offensively big, really. It is the color of a creamsicle and is flecked with glitter.
Superman leaves her mouth, pulling out spit like moon thread, and he is replaced by Clark. Clark comes suddenly, like a toothpaste tube squeezed too hard. This lack of professionalism upsets Jackson, but the dyke saves the scene by rubbing it into a froth on their bodies.
Then it’s all hands and mouths, and noises. The syrup of the room turns into flames. All at once, everything is on fire, everything is burning. Not just their bodies, but the room too. The curtains eaten away by tongues of fire, each brick in the wall melting like sugar cubes. The fire catches onto the outer world, too. Trees on fire, birds aflame flying from them, cutting the night sky in a comet’s arch. Kai is on the smoldering ceiling, watching them tug at her body below. They are relentless.
“There are rubies in your stomach. They’re blue,” Clark Kent says to Kai. His pupils are gone.
“Then wouldn’t they be sapphires?” the dyke asks.
“No, they’re blue rubies. I need to get them out,” he dives into her. She still doesn’t know what to with her hands. If she did, she couldn’t do it anyway. She is lost in a K-hole, and she is the only one. She tries to move but her mind has frozen her neurons. Wiggling a toe is like lifting a cement block.
And Jackson is there with the camera, he is the ringmaster, he tells them what to do.
“Twins, put Kai between you both. Remember how much you love her, how you would do anything for her. There, that’s it. Perfect.”

With everyone pounding inside her at once: the dyke at her mouth, Superman at her ass, and Clark Kent in her cunt, everything falls away. The room gone, the twin beds with the twin boys gone. The motel, the street, this circle of sky, scratched at the edges by pine and telephone pole, all gone. The ten hands in the room catching fire like the birds. Their burning hands fly away from them, out the window that is no longer a window. Everything receding into itself, everyone’s ribs caving, puncturing their lungs, their last breaths escaping into the yellow ether of the singed curtains. Words too, and her name, dissolving like salt in sea. All this, until there are no words, and all she can do is scream so loud.
EEEEE eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee O,O,O,O.
They carry her to the bath and submerge her in cold water until the marrow soaks back into her bones and she finally stops screaming.

When Kai wakes up she is in the passenger seat of the Chevy, slipping down the highway through foggy dawn. Clark Kent is driving next to her humming quieter than a radio ever could. He has laid his wool jacket over her. She doesn’t know where they are going. She doesn't know if he'll stab her to death and scatter her from the open window, or if he’ll bring her to a river she’s never seen, and wash her off, sweetly. She doesn’t know what he will do to her, but she takes his hand in hers and holds it between her palms.
“How did you end up there, pretty girl?” Clark Kent asks.
He wants a justification that makes sense, a reason why she would do something like that. He wants her to say that maybe she was in that motel room because a bad man held her too close when she was still in diapers, that the rent is due tomorrow, or that she really is ravenous, hungry enough to pull things into her that aren’t her own. But her reasons aren’t problems, unless the absence of reasons is a problem.
“I was there, like you were there.” She drops his hand.
She’s materialized out of a biography that doesn’t exist. Not because it wasn’t written, but because the hand erased the words once they began to settle—like forgetting, like forgiveness.
“Your voice is beautiful. Like a song I haven’t heard in awhile,” he says.
They drive and drive, until suddenly—sunrise.

Some Sunday in April

2010-03-17T12:30:00.001-04:00

I submitted this to Gangsters in Concrete the other day, and I like it a lot better than the short-short I wrote for Stork, which just came out. Plain face.

I’ve been feeling like an orphan lately. My clothes are worn and could use some patches. There’s always dirt behind my ears and no one there to take a bar of soap to them.

So I wander the city, looking for things.

Today the sidewalks are lined with lilies wrapped in cellophane and the buds on the trees are bursting yellow. I can feel a pollen paste sitting in the back of my throat. I stop at a pharmacy and debate over antihistamine pills for half an hour. I have pocket money from feeding an old woman’s cats. She has more than twenty and I’m allergic to them, too. She should really just pay me in these pink pills.

I buy a generic brand and two Cadbury eggs. I sit on the stone steps of a church and watch pastel families go in and out. I swallow the pills and lap the grainy cream from the chocolate shells.

A woman who looks a lot like my mother, all beige skirt and clean fingernails, stands on the steps to smoke a cigarette. I nearly tapped her on the shoulder, nearly cried out, “Well, take me home already!” I wanted to be in her arms, chewing ice clusters from a glass of too-cold milk, my head rising and falling against her lungs.

But I’m an orphan, so instead I decided to take a train somewhere.

Across from my seat there is a little boy sucking on a red lollipop, turning the cardboard stick into a wet pulp. He is an orphan too, I can tell. We send out these secret signals. I want to ask him if he’ll be my little brother, but then he starts making video game bleeps and beeps for no reason and jumping in his seat. I’m probably better off alone.

At each stop the driver says through the intercom, “Thank you for riding. Thank you so much. Have a beautiful day.” He seems so grateful for all these people whose faces he can’t even see.

I imagine him driving the train to his house, his family still in the yard, waiting for him. The sun is just setting and everything seems to be happening on the inside of a tangerine.

“Hiya daddy!” his grass-stained children will shout.

“Welcome home, sweetheart,” his perfumed wife will say.

And they’ll go inside, say prayers over lamb with mint jelly, and leave the tangerine to sleep in the icebox of moonlight.

I ride the train to the last stop. Instead of breaking from the tracks it just moves in reverse. So I get off at a stop I know and sleep on my friend’s couch.

Your Name is Katherine

2010-03-04T14:40:00.002-05:00

Author's Note: (I've been reading too many theoretical author's notes in Critical Fictions. So apologies if I get lofty here.) This story is in second person. I know everyone has something against second person but it was truly the only facility I had to write this story. In workshop everyone thought it worked well, and felt it was distancing and personalizing all at once, which was what I was going for in this story. This story was so hard to tell because, though it is thinly veiled, it is ultimately nonfiction. The fictionalization came from second person and accurate details, both of which are sort of veils.

Your Name is Katherine

Your mother says she named you for Saint Katherine of Alexandria because she wanted you to marry someone grand. But it is also your mother’s name. You call her Kathy. When you were sixteen you renamed yourself Kit. That was four years ago. In that time you’ve done a lot of things. You moved out of the house and went to college. You worked the night shift in a 24-hour IHop. You went to Paris and smoked romantic cigarettes. You kissed a lot of boys, and some girls too, but that comes later.

Inside of you there’s a tumor but it isn’t cancer. For just a moment, and secretly, maybe you hoped it was cancer. You ran your fingers over this lump, the size of a grape, and thought about how your life could change. It would have been a reason to eat organic raw food and practice yoga. It would have been a reason to yell at people for no reason and they’d love you still. They’d love you more.

But none of that would happen. The tumor was benign. “A lipoma,” the doctor said. A hard deposit of fat clogging up that hole in the hipbone and compressing nerves. “Don’t worry! Even the thinnest people in the world can get them!” he sang and you half-expected him to give you a light punch in the arm. Kathy made the appointment to remove the tumor for later that month.

Back in the city you go to a friend’s party and drink gin and tonics and wish you had remembered to buy some limes. The host comes up to you and you touch his elbow. “Happy birthday, darling,” you shout, cutting through the music. Someone is playing the Stones, and the host thanks you and touches the satin on your dress. There are playing cards scattered on tables like dried leaves across a swimming pool. It feels like a movie—it’s always love in the movies, it’s always Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Then you realize you’re drunk. Your girlfriend, Bee, is drunk too. She’s in the bathroom throwing up, so you wipe her mouth and take her home, pull the covers up to her chin. That morning, in your favorite diner you eat raspberry pancakes and sip what must be instant coffee. The girl you love sits across from you, eating eggs.

When you get back to your apartment late that afternoon your bedroom is filled with orange light. Take in a lungful of this light, hold it in you, and let it rumble inside you like it’s always been there. Think of the tumor. Let it go.

Kathy hasn’t called in a week and some part of you knows she is drinking again. It doesn’t surprise you. Her sobriety has been a revolving door since she was your age.

After the morning of a different party (this one with Diet Coke and watermelon vodka, this one with Daft Punk and denim) you’re sleeping next to your girlfriend in the milky light of nine a.m. Your father calls you out of the blue, which he never does, and tells you Kathy had to be taken to detox in an ambulance.

“I’m sorry, Kit. We all know by now that this is your mother’s demon, and it’s a hard one to beat,” he says. This renaming of things is his ritual. It soothes him.

“How long has she been drinking for this time?” you ask. He sighs.

“It’s really hard to say.”

They watch television in separate rooms every night. During the day he’s an ear nose and throat doctor. He lives by the Hippocratic oath. Don’t harm. Never tell.

“Should I still come home for my operation? It’s in three days, I think.”

“Yeah, might as well come home. We’ll get this whole mess straightened out.” All of his words come in a groggy exhale, as if he was sleeping.

When you hang up, Bee asks if you are okay. You’ve told her about Kathy. Bee understands that nothing about Kathy’s drinking is reasonable. Bee sits on the outside, while you, under the warm beery breath, try to find definitive reasons Kathy bounces from sober to drunk every other month.

It’s because I’ve left the house and she has no one to mother. It’s because alcoholism is as regular and familial as telephone lines. It’s because I’ve told her things I wished I hadn’t. Until you inevitably arrive at the only grain you can attempt accept as logical: the dopamine must move like syrup in her brain, reaching the synapses much too slowly. Instead of waiting it out, she opens a bottle of wine, and then another.

You’ve told Bee these things because you want someone to scoop you out of the river and dress you in warm clothes again. You want to be in her arms, drinking tomato soup from a blue bowl, your head rising and falling against her lungs. She’ll tell you it’s okay to cry. You probably wouldn’t cry, but it’d be nice to know it was ok.

You want something to add up to an answer you can swallow. There was the Christmas Eve Kathy promised you a sober holiday, a sober new year, a sober forever. Christmas morning you tried to wake her up and she was still drunk from the night before. The presents remained in shopping bags in the attic.

Then, on your first day of college she helped you move into the dorms and pressed every button in the elevator. The other elevator riders tried not to laugh when she flung you into her arms and squealed, “I’m so sad you’re leaving!” Later she passed out on the common room couch.

There was the time you came home for the summer and had to find her sponsor’s number hand-written in a copy of One Day At A Time. You called because Kathy hadn’t left her bed in a week, except to go to the liquor store. She smelled metallic, her hair was coated and slick and she never stopped crying but you couldn’t understand what she was saying. Only that it was a hundred personal betrayals all spelling out I need you. Can’t you see that I need you?

During one white wine summer she watched the news everyday about a missing little girl. She cried for that little girl, squeezed your hands in hers and slurred, “Oh Kit! I couldn’t imagine losing you. I just couldn’t imagine it!” You can imagine losing her.

In the car, your father tells you that they wanted to keep her until Tuesday, but she got them to let her out today, a Sunday, because she wanted to hold your hand during the operation.

“Oh, God,” you say and slide on dark sunglasses. It’s four o’clock in the dead of winter and there are no leaves on the trees. “They should have kept her.”

“I guess we figured two days wouldn’t make much difference.”

When your father first picked you up at your apartment he turned the car radio volume down to an inaudible five or six on the dial. Neither of you are brave enough to turn it back up so you make the journey in silence. She probably told the detox center that it was a major operation she couldn’t miss. It’s not supposed to be. It a novocain surgery and you’ll be walking that very day. They’ve just got to open you up an inch and get under the skin, pull the tumor out.

Here is the town you left behind. Here are the old houses and older oaks. Here is the house you grew up in. Inside it are the things you left: holes in the walls from hanging your paintings, a fish bowl with dried algae, and a stuffed pink elephant named Galileo.

You find Kathy in the laundry room, wearing pajamas. She is crying and she cries more when she hugs you. Her bones feel like splinters in your arms and she is shaking. You ask her the usual questions: how she’s feeling (shitty), how long she’s been drinking for this time (since October, a little less than four months), and you want so badly to tell her to stop doing laundry. She’s sorting the lights and the darks and talking about a young man who said in group, “‘Ever since the first time I did crack every cell in my body oozed for more’—wait, maybe he didn’t say ‘ooze’. But that’s what it’s like.”

“Ache?” you offer.

“How are you? I didn’t even ask,” Kathy says.

You smile because it doesn’t matter how you are. Tell her you’re good.

“I can tell you’re good because you look it. Did you dye your hair?”

“No.”

“Ah, that means it’s getting dark like mine.” This makes her happy.

In the refrigerator there seems to be nothing but meat and molding cheeses. You’ve been a vegetarian for four years. You have pistachios and buttered toast for dinner while you watch reality television. As you’re sitting there, your back has never hurt more than it does now. But you can hear your mother wailing upstairs and bumping into things. She must have mixed the medications the doctors gave her with whatever wine she hid in the house. You’re afraid to go upstairs so you tell your father to help her.

You know that tomorrow’s surgery isn’t an option. You’re afraid to have them open you up, but mostly you want this thing out of you. Your mother has them, small ones in her arms. “Feel it, it’s right there,” she said after your doctor appointment. But you refuse. “I’ll take your word for it,” you tell her. The doctor said lipomas are genetic.

When you get bored that night, you attempt to make macarons like the ones you adored on the Champs-Élysées last year. When Kathy was your age she wanted to be a translator in French publishing houses. But she had to leave college because of her drinking, and she’s never left the country.

Kathy stumbles down the stairs and asks what you are doing. You tell her and try to give her a spoonful of the almondy batter. She refuses. She’s always on a diet. You used to always be on diets together, even though neither of you have much weight to lose.

“Mom, should you go back upstairs? Back to bed?” She’s standing there, swaying.

“You said that if I ever drank again you’d never trust me or love me or talk to me again.” She’s still crying, hasn’t stopped crying.

“When did I say that?”

“I don’t know, two years ago. You said you wouldn’t love me or trust me!” the words gurgle out.

“I was young. I’m sorry. I don’t even remember saying that.”

“You said it!”

“I didn’t mean it. I love you. I wouldn’t take love away from you.”

In high school you took a psychology class. In it you learned about unconditional love—no matter what someone does, you love them anyways. It’s what parents should have for their children. Last summer, you sat next to your drunk mother in a lawn chair, attempting to get as tan as her. You don’t love me anymore. I can tell, she said when you gave her a short answer to some question. That’s not true, you said. A girl always loves her mother.

No, it ebbs and flows, until one day it stops, she said, waving her hands in the air.

You couldn’t understand this, or why she said it. Your love for her has always been homeostatic.

Your father is upstairs with Kathy. He comes down now and then, shakes his head. “She’s crazy, she’s going crazy. She just repeats the same things over and over. I’m sorry, Kit. I really am. She never should have left there.” Your father is older, and Kathy was his receptionist when they met. When he married this bright, young thing he couldn’t have expected this.

“What about my surgery?”

“I could take you.”

“I’m too nervous to do it without her. If she stays sober for a while, I’d still like her to take me,” you say. You’re not angry with her. That ended years ago.

“We can try to get an appointment for next week. We’ll just have to keep in touch about if Kathy’s going to meetings or not. I’ll bring you back to your apartment tomorrow.”

You hug him goodnight and go to your old bedroom. You call Bee and she asks how everything is going. You can’t tell her, not yet, you don’t have the words. So you say, “Please, tell me what you did today. Tell me every little thing. Just talk.” And she does. She talks and talks and you listen to the thread of her voice until you fall asleep and wake up to the static of telephone lines.

Last year you told your mother you fell in love with a girl. Up until that moment, you believed Kathy understood everything about people and about you. Kathy always told you, “it takes all kinds in this world.” But her silence that day made you this strange, weird girl who possibly would not marry someone as grand as your namesake dictates. She can’t understand why you’re like this. “I thought you told me everything,” Kathy said.

The truth is, you were surprised too when you found yourself in a stairwell asking Bee to kiss you. Was this just what you’ve always done—make friends into lovers because you want everything from anyone? And yet, possibly you were meant to kiss this girl in that stairwell. Fibers of you ached for it, and not only for the kiss. You ached to diverge from the heavily wooded path you saw yourself following blindly. The one with brambles that stick to your clothing like mundane annoyances, rather than the quick drop-offs and sharp corners you felt would be a welcome alternative.

“You’re only going to hurt her in the end,” Kathy had said. “You’ll find some boy and she’ll have been lied to that whole time.”

Because that’s what you do, you take the things you love and you carve them a new face with a dull blade, just to leave your mark. When you were little you threw a rock at another child in the schoolyard. Your mother said you had a mean streak running through you, and you imagined a bolt of lightning.

The day after you told Kathy you were a girl who likes boys and girls she relapsed. She had been sober for almost a eight months, one of her longest stretches, and you ruined it. You did.

“I’ve got nothing against it! But being gay, or bi, or whatever, just makes life harder,” she after refilling her glass for the fourth time.

“Kathy, the hardest part of all this has been you.”

In a fit of hunger this morning you drive to the grocery store. You find yourself standing in the frozen food aisle next the dinners, for ten minutes. There are goose bumps on your arms. Do you want mushroom masala with wheat pasta? Or black bean mango rice? It feels like forever since you’ve eaten real food and your heart is fluttering from having only cups of coffee for breakfast. Indecisive, you walk to the produce section. Under the florescent lights you marvel at the mathematically stacked fruit, at all those colors. Each orange seems perfect until you pick it up. Consider an avocado. One summer you ate a tomato and avocado salad everyday for lunch. You were beautiful.

Eventually you get cucumber sushi and a carton of raspberries. Your back hurts. You feel plain and empty. You imagine that everyone can see the hole in your torso, can look right through you into the lines of cash registers. That afternoon, your father takes you back to your apartment and you and Bee watch foreign films together all week and go to theme parties all weekend (cults of the 1970’s, white trash and mustaches). At one, with a fake mustache scratching your nose, you see a boy you used to sleep with. You catch up with him for a few minutes until you and Bee have to dash for a train. Each morning you wake up with your head swimming until it is time to go home again for the operation.

This time it is really happening. Kathy is driving you to the outpatient surgery center. It is raining, but it shouldn’t be. It’s February and this should be snow. Kathy is trying to be positive—she has not had a drink in five days and she’s convinced herself that things are going to be different this time.

“Do you think you want to go to lunch after, sweetie?” she asks, exhaling a stream of smoke into the rain through a cracked window.

“I’m not sure if I’ll feel like eating after.”

“You’re still nervous?” she asks and you nod. “You’ll be okay. I’m here.” She touches your hair.

In the waiting room she tries to make small talk. She’s proud of your grades and proud of your internship. She asks how you and Bee are.

“We have our ups and downs, but we’re mostly good.”

“I can tell you don’t like talking about her with me.”

It’s true, you don’t, even though you know Kathy is trying to accept things. Still, you tell Kathy you’re just tired.

When the nurse brings you to a small room she tells you to take your pants off. You didn’t realize this would happen, and your underwear is pink and lacy and possibly dirty. She wraps you in a sheet and asks if you’ve eaten.

“No, I was too nervous,” you say. So the nurse gets you a can of warm Pepsi and two graham crackers held in a Kleenex. You need something in your stomach—they don’t want you to faint. The doctor comes in and lays you on your stomach.

As he washes your hip he and the nurse speak to you sweetly. You’re being so brave, so very brave, their voices seem to say. You’ve stopped listening. You’re concentrating on the needle going in, trying to numb you. You keep pouting until the doctor says he cannot give you anymore novocain. You skin doesn’t feel like your skin anymore—it feels like rubber. Then the operation starts. You hear your skin being cut, then there are a lot of slimy noises and squishes. It feels like he is trying to pull the flesh right off of your body. You’ve gone white with the idea that you are open back there, that he’s got his hands inside you. You’re moaning like you have before, in sangria hazes when your body crashes into another’s so fast you swear you’d both ignite, and that’s embarrassing. The nurse pulls the hair from your face with a purple gloved hand.

“Almost done, hang in there, Kit,” the doctor says and you think he is stitching you up then. You feel him put the gauze dressings on and he tells you to stand. You rise from the table, still unsure if you really can. You body feels new and open. The pair leaves the room so you can put your pants back on. The nurse comes back in to wash the instruments. You see she washes two shot glasses and you find that funny.

“Will I get the tumor back?” you ask. It’s yours, after all.

“Oh, no. We send it to the lab and they biopsy it, just in case. But lipomas are rarely cancerous. Nothing to worry about.” She is washing scissors now.

When you get to the waiting room there is nothing but your coat in one of the stained chairs. You take the elevator down and walk towards the car. Kathy is there, smoking a cigarette.

“I was just about to come up! Hold on, I’ve got to go give them the co-pay,” she says, tossing you the car keys. You sit in the car, listening to nothing but the rain on the sunroof. The words That was awful keep playing in your mind and you start to weep. That was awful and my mom left me. You feel young for thinking this.

When Kathy is back in the car she says to you, “Are you glad you got it over with? No more nerve pain?” You tell her no and she sees you crying.

“Aw, baby, what’s wrong?”

“That was horrible and disgusting and you weren’t there!” you cry, snot running out of your nose.

“I was about to come up, I swear. Katherine, come on, I love you. I was about to come up.”

“Fine. Just take me to my place.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come home? Aren’t you hungry?” she asks and hugs you, but it pulls at your back and you yelp. Think about the bottles on the windowsills in your mother’s home. Some were red, and some were blue, but most were white. Light streamed out through them and always looked so wrong. The shadows created phantoms stretching across the floors. You want to be back in your apartment where the light is red like watery blood because the sun hits the windowpanes just so.

“No, I want to go to my apartment.”

So she takes you home and you sleep for a long, long time.

During the next few days, you feel angry. The tumor is gone, but you still feel the doctor’s hands inside you. It hurts to move and walk, and you’re afraid that if you lean too far forward, you’ll split open. Bee comes over and hugs you like your bones are eggshells. “I don’t want to hurt your little back,” she says. It’s late and she’s drunk from dinner beers with her friends.

You’re annoyed at everything she does (the stumbling, the rambling) and when you both crawl into bed that night you don’t move to kiss her. If she kisses me first then this is real and I’m not making it up.

But she doesn’t kiss you, and she’s afraid to touch you in case it will split your wound apart. You flop around the bed, searching for a comfortable position.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” it sounds like you’re shouting.

You drift in and out of sleep until three a.m. when you find yourself in the kitchen, peeling the skins from oranges and eating ice cream off a fork. Bee woke up to the noise and joins you in the yellow lozenge of refrigerator light.

“What are you doing up?”

“Do you love me?” you ask her, shutting the fridge.

“I love you so much,” Bee says. You want so badly to believe her. You want so badly for something to be concrete, to be definitive. No more of this floating in the light of rooms painted in red.

So you ask, “How much?” longing to quantify something there are no words for. You are going to wear her out, and you know this. She knows it too. She throws the orange peels in the trash, puts the fork in the sink and brings you back to bed. She kisses you, silently snapping the twigs of your heart, possibly trapping burrs and brambles in your sweater.

Emma Forrest

2010-02-17T23:52:00.004-05:00

If I had to pick my very favorite short story, it is possible that I would pick "The Grief Diet" by Emma Forrest. It was a gem in a so-so anthology about being 16. This story is very, very sad, but also very funny and light, with plenty of pop culture references. I'd describe it, but I think hers (and mine) are the sorts of stories that sound really dumb in synopsis.

I urge you to read it here via google books, even though they cut out one page.

When I first read it at 16 I emailed Emma and we corresponded for a while. She said that this story is the best thing she's written. I've read her novel Namedropper and I have to agree. I sent her my stories and she was nice enough to read them and encourage me to pursue with tomfoolery.

She is now a screenwriter and dating/ fucking Collin Farrell. So yay.

And LAWL, I just dug up what she emailed about a story I sent her. In case you care.

'It's really good Michelle! A tweak I would make would be to try and use language that's less "writerly" and more conversational, for example instead of saying "view her" why not just "look at her" or "watch her"? But other than that, it's really strong. Seems like something you could publish as a YA book? Some of them are incredible right now...'

OH and I responded,

"thank you sooo much! it really means a lot to me. and I agree with your advice. i wish you luck with all of your future writings!

~michelle"

I could kill myself. I didn't even capitalize things! And "sooo"?!

2010-02-07T22:36:00.002-05:00

24
You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves
you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terr-
ible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself
a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy,
and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to
choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and
he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your
heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you
don't even have a name for.

-The last stanza in You Are Jeff by Richard Siken. I've talked about him before, but I'm just the sort who fixates. His poems inspired a lot my writing this year, and I'm sure if you read his book you'd see how unoriginal I can be (but still not plagiarizing. I bet). He just kills me and I can't wait for his next book.

I have such a tenuous relationship with poetry. I can't write it and I'm very picky about other people's. And sometimes I have odd taste. When I was 10 I read this poem in a YA novel and fell in love.

Dirge Without Music

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,

They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Like, wow. I think I read that aloud in my 4th grade class. Later, I found a really old (I mean like 1920s) copy of a Wordsworth collection that belonged to my grandmother. I hate him now, and I probably did then too, but I loved going "Mooooommmmm, how can you NOT get what the moon symbolizes????"

Now I like Marty McConnell, Frank and Mr. Siken, plus a few Emerson poets. That's it.

I'm feeling sad tonight and I don't know why. So I guess I'll read more poems. It's like this commenter said, "even though this sounds a bit emotional and silly..i’ve been on the verge of tears all day and this finally opened me up. It’s beautiful. Thank you Richard Siken."

Updates!

2010-02-05T20:18:00.006-05:00

Hi whoever has this on their blog reader! I have some news.

The issue of Gauge with my story "Crush" is out. It looks nice, so yay! But I had made the choice when I wrote it to use italics instead of quotations marks (douche-y? maybe.) Gauge didn't use italics or quotations so now it looks confusing (douchier? yes.) WUTEVA I'm just happy being published in an Emerson publication.

I have an internship at The Strothman Agency. I love it so far! It's only four hours a week because of my schedule. It's a swank building and I have a little desk where I read proposals and manuscripts and write reader reports. I pass on to Lauren what may have potential. I've learned that little does. I thought this would discourage me, but it's done the opposite. People are... dumb? misguided? delusional? I know that if I at least spell my proposal correctly that an agent will at least read it.

The internship, my book publishing class and Emerson Review really confirm that I want to be involved somewhere in publishing. Probably in editing. Plus, I love being bitchy with other people about submissions.

Other Fun News:

I've started to really like owl tattoos.

I'm saving up to buy a hedgehog.

I just ordered these shoes. CAN'T WAIT.

There's a lot of lot of shopping I need to do. But I'm not allowed to because I'm "poor" as in I work >10 hours a week and am at my parent's mercy.

But, oh Anthropologie being all French. And this bedspread would be perfect in my room.

Competition

2009-12-03T12:36:00.000-05:00

Sarah Hanley flying from portland to miami at 6 a.m. tomorrow. yey.

Lines for Fortune Cookies

2009-12-01T21:37:00.000-05:00

By Frank O'Hara

I think you're wonderful and so does everyone else.

Just as Jackie Kennedy has a baby boy, so will you—even bigger.

You will meet a tall beautiful blonde stranger, and you will not say hello.

You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.

You will marry the first person who tells you your eyes are like scrambled eggs.

In the beginning there was YOU—there will always be YOU, I guess.

You will write a great play and it will run for three performances.

Please phone The Village Voice immediately: they want to interview you.

Roger L. Stevens and Kermit Bloomgarden have their eyes on you.

Relax a little; one of your most celebrated nervous tics will be your undoing.

Your first volume of poetry will be published as soon as you finish it.

You may be a hit uptown, but downtown you're legendary!

Your walk has a musical quality which will bring you fame and fortune.

You will eat cake.

Who do you think you are, anyway? Jo Van Fleet?

You think your life is like Pirandello, but it's really like O'Neill.

A few dance lessons with James Waring and who knows? Maybe something will happen.

That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.

I realize you've lived in France, but that doesn't mean you know EVERYTHING!

You should wear white more often—it becomes you.

The next person to speak to you will have a very intriquing proposal to make.

A lot of people in this room wish they were you.

Have you been to Mike Goldberg's show? Al Leslie's? Lee Krasner's?

At times, your disinterestedness may seem insincere, to strangers.

Now that the election's over, what are you going to do with yourself?

You are a prisoner in a croissant factory and you love it.

You eat meat. Why do you eat meat?

Beyond the horizon there is a vale of gloom.

You too could be Premier of France, if only… if only…

Little Beast

2009-11-16T20:57:00.004-05:00

In a metal bathroom stall, a week before my wedding, I trace the graffiti carved into the paint with my fingertip. It all makes sense—this girl loves that boy, J.L was here, this boy died, a cluster of names misses him. Some other people took a ski trip, H.G + S.E, end of story. This boy is gone and people miss him. But what about her? She will call the boy, wish away her cracked past, wish to go back to when the book’s spine wasn’t so crooked.

Please, can we write a new book? Can we give it an ending that hurts no one? Is that even possible?

I dial Asa’s number on my cell phone.

“This is the last time we will ever speak,” I tell him when he picks up. “I’ll be married soon. I can’t do this anymore, I never could. You have to stop calling me when you know I’m with him.”

“Ok,” Asa says. “so you’re through with me? Right, got it. You’ve said that before.”

“So you don’t believe me? Well, Asa, just you—”

“Do you believe you?”

I hang up and flush away slightly crimson water. In the age-flecked mirror I swipe on another coat of lipstick, swing the door open to a roadside diner. Sunday morning’s litany: sunlight like lemon juice (but not nearly so acidic), the gum-snapping waitress (does she know she’s in every diner?), the fiancé in a plush booth (love, love and all that.)

“Eat the rest of my pancakes, I’m really full,” Fletcher says, holding a forkful to my face. A blueberry drops onto his syrupy plate.

“I’m stuffed too.” I laugh, “Hey, you have some egg in your beard.”

“Oh, good, just what I was going for.” He wipes it away with his fingers, “I hope it looks like snot.”

“No, no, leave it, it’s wildly attractive. In fact you should have snot all over your face for the wedding too. And forget the suit, how about something velour?”

“Ellen, I’ve got it!” he says, smacking the formica table. “What if you do the eighties bride thing? Blue eyeshadow, puffy sleeves, and teased hair. What do you think?”

I drain the rest of my orange juice and say I think it’s time to get back on the road.

In October, Vermont glows. As Fletcher drives, I trace a timeline of fire and wish I could paint it—cadmium-yellow, ochre-red leaves with the zinc-white birches peeking through. It’s been a while since I’ve painted though. I fall asleep and wake up miles later to my phone ringing again. I slam it shut.

“Who was that?” Fletcher asks.

“No one you need to know, sweetheart,” I say and he sighs heavily, causing the air-freshener to sway on the mirror. “Are we almost there?” I ask.

“Pretty soon,” he says and spins the radio dial when the music crackles out.

This is always me, always dropping hints into thin air, alluding to a present past. “Don’t say ‘for what it’s worth.’ It reminds me of someone.” “Don’t buy that hat. Someone I once knew had it.” “Don’t hold me like that. Someone—well, you know.”

The first day I met Fletcher, when I spilled into the sugar packets I was thinking about Asa. It was autumn and he had just moved out a few days before. The afternoon at the coffee shop was the first time I had left the apartment since he had given me his key. It would take another week for me to throw away the things he had forgotten, to change the pictures on the walls, and, finally, to dismantle the bridge I had built in my mind to his new place, brick by brick. I tried to forget his phone number and middle name. It took longer to forget his scent (laundry soap), the words to his favorite song, the slickness of his teeth under my tongue.

Every time after Asa and I fucked, I bled. It was what I woke up to—clotted blood the color of rust, a small amount but no less troubling. I thought there was something wrong with me; I thought I was sick or broken. After a while, I went to the doctor. While removing the rubber gloves he said there was nothing wrong with me. It was Asa. He was too rough, a car crash on repeat. The doctor wanted to know why I never said anything to him. “Why didn’t you speak up if he was hurting you?” I told him then it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t tell the doctor that I didn’t want it to stop hurting. On the way home, I cried.

We miss Orchard Hill Street twice before finally turning onto it. It’s a dirt road; the car shakes. I haven’t left the city in months. This isn’t even our car; it belongs to a guy from Fletcher’s firm. Suddenly I’m hesitant. All around us, fresh air, real maple syrup, singing birds; I can see myself drowning out here. I can see myself in that big house in wintertime when it gets dark at four and the snow buries you in. I can see myself wandering from room to empty room, waiting.

The car turns a corner. Outside, everything smells like sweet apples. We read in the open house listing that there is an acre of orchard in the backyard, but even in front there are a few— twisted bark and shiny dots of red. Then a porch, the wood worn with so many invisible footsteps. There are rockers set out, and on the door a wreath made of pinecones and miniature pumpkins. Before we even open the door, Fletcher wraps his arms around me and says, “We could live here.”

Sorry for thinking about you too often. Especially now with my wedding so soon. We were done with each other a year ago, and I forgot you for a while, I did. And then I got everything I’ve ever wanted with someone who isn’t you and my fingers remembered your phone number. Sorry I still call you when he is at work and it’s a rainy afternoon and I’m feeling lonely. Sorry you’ve crossed bridges, real and otherwise, to get to Fletcher’s apartment. Often I can still smell the wind in your hair and see the hope in your eyes. “Is it over, Ellen? You’ve left him?” I say no, but kiss you to let you know “I want you too. My heart is split.”

The realtor releases us to explore on our own. From the foyer we find the kitchen.

“It’s very pioneer woman meets fifties housewife in here,” I tell Fletcher, looking at the oak floors and hanging copper pots. On the table there is a vase of crowded wildflowers, snapdragons bashing their heads against daisies.

“In a good way?”

“In a very good way. I could take some cooking classes in the city, make nice dinners?”

He tests out the gas stove. There are times when I look at Fletcher, the old boat shoes, the cardigan, the tumble of brown curls that just kiss at his thick glasses, and I am so overwhelmed with a love that doesn’t hurt. He’s good for me. I’ve been telling myself I deserve someone who’s good for me. I once thought anger was a part of love, the way kisses are—I thought that myself in love was a little beast, sharp-clawed and wrath-tongued. I know now that, really, love is the only thing that does not hurt.

I cannot explain why Asa and I fell together in the first place. We spent weekends in bed, letting apple cores turn brown. If he was sad, I had to be sadder, and for better reasons, most of them made up. After a while I stopped recognizing myself in mirrors and shop windows.

I had forgotten how to be happy, and I wanted to be something other than sad. So I became angry and I wanted Asa to be angry, too. I threw things: books, clocks, palette knives. Ours was a love streaming out the wrong way, sinking its teeth into any tender spots, driving its hands inside our bodies to tear out hollow spaces. Darling I will slap your face before I kiss your cheek if you’ll just shake me until my bones rattle and eyes roll. And he did; it took three years from our first date for me to leave him.

“I don’t know, I’ve never had a room all to myself.”

“Don’t be stubborn,” Fletcher says. “This is yours. Look at this light, it’s begging to be a studio.” I look out the windows at the orange leaves dotting a rolling lawn. Behind a sugar maple the sun is sinking and light falls down around us, something to wade through. “You could be the next Picasso if you wanted to be.”

“I’d rather be Frida Kahlo,” I say and try to open the window. It is painted shut.

We leave the studio, wander around the master bedroom and find ourselves in another small room with arched ceilings. When Fletcher asks me what I think, I bite my lips and try not to smile.

“The nursery?” I ask, ready to run to the car, flee to the city and hide under the covers if I’m wrong.

“What? Clearly babies are gross, Ellen.”

“Very funny, my friend. So hilarious.”

“Yes, this is the nursery. As long as we name the little one Billy Bob or Gertrude, I’m there.”

I’m sorry I keep myself from every happiness. I’m sorry we both do that to me and sorry that I always come back for more. Sorry that I can’t say, “I’ve never wanted you to be anything but happy.” It’s just not true. I’m sorry that I only want Fletcher to be happy, and is that love? Maybe my love for you has always been dirty, always tainted because I’ve wanted you to be jealous and afraid more often than I’ve wanted you to be happy. I wanted you to feel the way I did.

We leave our phone number with the realtor and look around at the house once more. Most of the owner’s furniture is already gone, but in my mind I fill the house with antique cherry-wood tables, flowing linen curtains, iron beds. I want the chipped teacups, the crayon art on the fridge, pies cooling on the windowsill. At least, I always have, and it still sounds so good. Still, when I think of all the things I will miss—the possibilities that line up outside doorsteps, the voices singing somewhere, and myself on rooftops, squinting until all those lights splinter into diamonds—I’m not sure I can get rid of the thing inside of me that wants to ache.

Last spring, right after Fletcher’s proposal, I called Asa for the first time since we split. There was something pulling me back, small yet strong—a chain-link fence. History is a spiral, not a line: somehow I wasn’t done with him yet. He came to the empty apartment, commented on the oriental rugs and crown molding, said something about hitting the jackpot. I told him I was engaged. When I held up the diamond to prove it, my hand shook. “I’m glad for you. Good job, Ellen.” He started to cry. I touched his face. His cheeks took the shape of my palms, and it was so familiar.

I made rules for our affair. First, there could be no crossover effect: what existed in the darkness of the rainiest summer I’d ever seen would live nowhere else, not on our tree-lined street, not in restaurants, not even in our afterthoughts. Nothing could be left behind—no toothbrush on the sink or shoes at the door. Second, he could not kiss me hello or goodbye. Especially never goodbye. Third, I could not tell him that I wanted him to want to love me in a way I could understand—that would be unhealthy. I never told him any of the rules, not like it mattered.

Yesterday Fletcher was working late so I decided to spend the evening learning how to cook salmon for him. I had just gotten it out of the fridge when I decided the apartment was too quiet to cook in. Even though I wasn’t sure what time exactly Fletcher would be back, I called Asa and asked him to come over anyway. I had thought it was worth seeing him, even for those few hours. In the past month I could feel him getting nervous—he wanted to tell Fletcher. He wanted to ruin everything so that he could have just me and I couldn’t let that happen.

We fucked in the shower, then sat in the kitchen, flushed and sweet-smelling. He wound his fingers in my wet hair, and pulled a little. He kissed my neck, hard.

“Don’t leave a mark,” I said and pulled away.

He sighed. “What time do I have to leave tonight?”

“Let’s say seven. Take the stairs, not the elevator though. I’m not sure when Fletcher’s coming home. Do you want to help me make dinner?”

“You mean his dinner?” he said and went to the liquor cabinet. He poured himself a highball of Fletcher’s aged scotch, sipped it slowly. Then he was quiet. He set the glass down and sank into a chair. Outside an ambulance howled past. I realized then that we were both shaking.

“You need to make a choice,” he said. So here it is, the part in the night where the world splits in two. Here is where it should be simple. “Him or me?”

“I’ve chosen him. I choose him. We’re getting married next week, for God’s sake.” My eyes sting.

“No, you’ve chosen distance. You’ve chosen country farms. You can’t even be alone for an hour while you cook your husband’s fish. When you’re alone there’s no one else to blame.”

“Goddammit Asa! Leave! Leave right now,” I screamed.

“If I leave you’ll just be with yourself. Then you’ll realize how disgusting you are.”

I picked up the dish and hurled it at the wall behind his head. The glass shattered and rained down to the floor. Some of the pink salmon and silver scales stuck to the wall.

Then I was on the floor, crumpled and wailing. He came towards me and I kicked his feet. He gathered me in his arms and I bit his hands. Then I gave in. I surrendered to the fact of his body, to his eyes like almonds. I let him carry me to my bed. He drew the blanket to my chin and wiped the hair away from my sticky, wet face. He kissed each of my eyelids and shut the door. I heard the scratches of a broom and the tinkling of glass falling into garbage. Laying there, I could feel the blood leaking from between my legs, crawling onto the sheets like a snail. I heard him lock himself out and hurry down the carpeted stairs. The timing barely worked out. Fletcher was home minutes later, saw me feigning sleep and microwaved popcorn for himself.

In the backyard’s apple orchard I run from Fletcher like a child, buzzing in and out of the lines of trees. The rows are as perfect as telephone poles, and he catches me at every turn, a friendly monster. I’ll be twenty-four next month, and I know I’ll never give up hiding and seeking.

While running from him I trip over a tuft of meadow grass and fall flat on my stomach, cushioned by mushy apples.

“All of these apples have fallen,” I say. He sits beside me among hundreds of rotting apples. “There are more on the ground than in the trees.”

“You didn’t notice before? It’s pretty far past apple season,” he says.

The grass must have hidden most of them, I tell myself. I lift a red-green one and upon turning it over I see the other side is slick and brown. When I try to toss it, my hand sticks.

“That’s why the air smells so good,” he says, crushing one with his heel until pulp squirms out.

I laugh, “Because everything is dying?”

“Oh, Frida, must you be so morose?”

Fletcher’s never had the same concern for the past that I did. I asked him everything about old lovers and girlfriends, and he told me honestly, everything I wanted to know. But still the ghosts that slid across our bedroom walls with each pass of headlights made me want to dig through his boxes and sock drawer figure him out.

Then one day I realized they were my ghosts, and how upset I was that he wouldn’t pay attention to them, even when they were whispering in his ear. If there is one thing a ghost hates it’s when you ignore it. That’s when they clank on the pipes, or hide under the bed. That’s when they creep inside you, a filmy layer beneath your skin bleeding something so strong, they can smell it in the streets. You’re certain your newest lover can detect it, too. But it seems his nose is stuffy.

In some ways, I wish Fletcher could see the haunting, add up the facts, set this ghost free. But he never does. So here I am, always at the brink of a great reveal, waiting for the violent exorcism, with all its gore—me writhing on the dirty ground of the place we once lived. Scream at me, because I deserve it. Hit me, because I deserve it. But, oh god, if you leave me, well then we’ll both be sad. But I’d be better off than Fletcher—I’d be ghostless. So I keep my mouth shut, make Asa call before he visits, wash the cotton sheets because this isn’t about me.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to stitch up my heart by the ventricles, seal it for only Fletcher. I don’t know if I can build walls and tear down bridges like I did before. But somehow I’ll find a way to escape Asa’s photon flash. Maybe I’ll come out clean and new, draped in white lace and crushing an aisle of rose petals as I walk. Sure, I’ll have to hide my singed toes in shoes, and push my burnt hair under tulle, but Fletcher won’t see that from the alter. Then I can follow that dirt road, trace those telephone wires to the orchard house. All so that one day I can hopefully drown in the husband who looks at me like I’m magic, the babies’ gummy mouths, and the apples on the tree always within my reach.

Class Exercise

2009-11-15T13:04:00.000-05:00

Description

She had the face of a girl who was always just missing trains, always peeking around corners, only to be cast out onto the streets and into the rain. Her eyes were flecked with amber, like dead leaves on a pool in autumn. They were always filled with expectation, and her hair was always windswept. That girl is going somewhere, people thought, watching her high-heels stab concrete and the macramé of her hem flutter.

Actions

Most days, time is an endless vase which needs to be filled. She cleans her apartment half-heartedly, brooming hair, dust and lint into corners or leaving water spots on all the glasses. When she tires of the paint-sealed windows and sounds of a man singing, somewhere, she will put on her coat and walk the streets.

She goes into bookstores and glides her fingertips over every spine, but never buys anything. She sits in cafes, stirring artificial sugar into black coffee, loving the hiss noise. Often she will dig through her purse, past gum wrappers and a just-in-case umbrella, to find her phone. This is a test. Who would she call if she was sure they would want to talk to her? Upon deciding that everyone is busy, she’ll go into the old-time record store, looking for sounds to fill the quiet.

Dialogue

And there he is, near the health food restaurant they had used as a meeting point a couple times. It was in the middle of their places, before he moved into hers. Then out of hers. Then somewhere else she never let herself learn.

“I believe this is my neck of the woods,” she tries to make a joke, tries to smile. He tries to smile back at her.

“You have all the good restaurants. Hey, give me a hug, it’s good to see you.” She does and could drown in the sandalwood. She bites her lip, looks away, to somewhere distant. He shuffles his feet.

“How’ve you been?” he asks, serious now.

“Insanely busy, not a moment to think,” she checks her watch.

“Well, that can’t be good.”

“You’d be surprised. In fact I’m late. It was good seeing you though.”

After wandering in a shoe store for half an hour, she wishes she had stayed a little longer, just to talk.

Crush

2009-11-15T13:02:00.002-05:00

I can’t sleep without you here. I’ve never told you that.

So when the ceiling started slipping down the walls and you couldn’t stand being in the house, especially at night, neither of us was happy.

At first the slightly lower ceiling wasn’t so bad—we just felt taller. A few inches later you became restless, speeding through the halls, playing the television too loud or sitting on the dyer during spin cycle instead of in your favorite chair.

Please, sweetheart, come to bed. It’s late, I’d say as you paced so fast that your socks made electric sparks on the carpet.

I’m just going for a quick walk around the block. This house is driving me crazy, you’d say. So I’d wait by the window, looking for you in the moonlight. As soon as I saw you coming up the street, I’d crawl into bed and pretend to be asleep until you wrapped your arms around me beneath the blankets.

One day I noticed the house was slightly darker. The ceiling had sunk down to cover the top half of the window. I told you and we looked at it together.

Well, fuck! What are we going to do? you asked. I said I didn’t know. There was no one we could call to raise the ceilings, and who knows how much that would cost, even if there was a specialist. I told you we would have to live with a slightly less light and just see what happens.

Actually, I was okay with the ceiling falling a bit. The house was a little warmer and cozier. I learned how to knit and made us matching sweaters. I cut bruises from apples and made pies. I snuggled myself into a ball on the couch and felt wonderfully tiny. Maybe you knew that I once wanted to be small enough to fit inside your pocket, next to your keys and your worn-out sticks of gum. But it didn’t matter. The ceiling was falling and that made you angry.

Soon I’ll have to stoop down just to walk around! you shouted.

Darling, calm down and curl into a ball with me. It’s delightful!

But you refused and decided to go for yet another walk. You tried to open the door but couldn’t. It smacked right into the ceiling. I’ve never seen you so angry. It took days to clean up all the things you threw around, and by that time we were both stooping down to avoid hitting our heads.

You said you couldn’t live like this anymore and got your red toolbox from under the bed.

Please be rational! I said. Don’t ruin this for me! I’m happy here. I’m happy like this.

Of course you didn’t listen. You punched a hole through the living room ceiling with a hammer. Then another, then another. Plaster fluttered down into your hair and matted your eyelashes, turning them white. With each blow of your hammer our house filled with awful noises. You cracked away the sheet rock like it was a rotten tooth and tore at the metal pipes until they burst and streamed out dirty water.

I watched the hole grow in the ceiling, cried and pulled at your hands but you pushed me away. It was late so I tried to sleep but couldn’t, either because of the hammer pounding or because you weren’t there.

The next morning when I went into the living room you were just finishing up. You had gone through the roof, gnarled shingles were everywhere, along with plaster and piping, and I could see a circle of blue sky.

Ready to go? you asked. I looked up and shook my head.

Are you kidding me? Let’s go. I shook my head again and began to cry. The sky looked big enough to swallow me. You have to leave here! If you don’t the ceiling will crush you.

But I wouldn’t move. I couldn’t. So you climbed out of the hole and away from where we lived. You left me sleepless, with a hole in my living room, my ceiling sinking down, and me pulling myself along the floor, a nightcrawler.

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

2009-10-29T00:24:00.003-04:00

By Richard Siken. For the exact line breaks go here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177722

Also you should buy his book. I did, and everyone should be like me, amirite?

Every morning the maple leaves.

Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts

from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big

and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out

You will be alone always and then you will die.

So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog

of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I couldn't come to your party.

Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I came to your party

and seduced you

and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.

Your want a better story. Who wouldn't?

A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.

Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.

What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.

Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly

flames everywhere.

I can tell already you think I'm the dragon,

that would be so like me, but I'm not. I'm not the dragon.

I'm not the princess either.

Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down.

I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,

I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow

glass, but that comes later.

And the part where I push you

flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,

shut up

I'm getting to it.

For a while I thought I was the dragon.

I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was

the princess,

cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,

young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with

confidence

but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,

while I'm out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,

and getting stabbed to death.

Okay, so I'm the dragon. Bid deal.

You still get to be the hero.

You get the magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!

What more do you want?

I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you're

really there.

Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?

Let me do it right for once,

for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,

you know the story, simply heaven.

Inside your head you hear a phone ringing

and when you open your eyes

only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.

Inside your head the sound of glass,

a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.

Hello darling, sorry about that.

Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we

lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell

and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.

Especially that, but I should have known.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together

to make a creature that will do what I say

or love me back.

I'm not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not

feeding yourself to a bad man

against a black sky prickled with small lights.

I take it back.

The wooden halls likes caskets. These terms from the lower depths.

I take them back.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

Crossed out.

Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something

underneath the floorboards.

Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle

reconstructed.

Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all

forgiven,

even though we didn't deserve it.

Inside your head you hear

a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you're washing up

in a stranger's bathroom,

standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away

from the dirtiest thing you know.

All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly

darkness,

suddenly only darkness.

In the living room, in the broken yard,

in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport

bathroom's gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of

unnatural light,

my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.

And the the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view

of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.

I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,

smiling in a way

that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,

up the stairs of the building

to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,

I looked out the window and said

This doesn't look that much different from home,

because it didn't,

but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.

We walked through the house to the elevated train.

All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful

mechanical wind.

We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,

smiling and crying in a way that made me

even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I

just couldn't say it out loud.

Actually, you said Love, for you,

is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's
terrifying. No one

will ever want to sleep with you.

Okay, if you're so great, you do it—

here's the pencil, make it work . . .

If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window

is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing

river water.

Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it

Jerusalem.

We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not

what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,

a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over

and over,

another bowl of soup.

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.

Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time.

Forget the dragon,

leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.

Let's jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,

in gold light, as the camera pans to where

the action is,

lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see

the blue rings of my eyes as I say

something ugly.

I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,

and I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way.

But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.

There were some nice parts, sure,

all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas

and the grains of sugar

on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry

it's such a lousy story.

Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently

we have had our difficulties and there are many things

I want to ask you.

I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,

years later, in the chlorinated pool.

I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have

these luxuries.

I have told you where I'm coming from, so put it together.

We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .

When I say this, it should mean laughter,

not poison.

I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.

Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.

Quit milling around the yard and come inside.

PLAIN FACE

2009-10-25T22:53:00.003-04:00

Didi: Stu, what are you doing?
Stu: Making chocolate pudding.
Didi: It’s four o’clock in the morning! Why on earth are you making chocolate pudding?
Stu: Because I’ve lost control of my life.

This is so legit right now, I cannot even tell you. Except I'm not making pudding.

Ok, I've just lost control of my life. Get it?

No? Whatever, you're an anal cock. Get it?

My only rainbows are oil slicks

2009-10-18T15:22:00.006-04:00

Iiiiiii don't want to do my homework. I just got in from work and walking in the freezing rain, had veggie soup and am so ready for a nap. Junior year is serious business. But I would rather just galavant around.

So instead of doing homework this weekend I have gone to a couple parties and walked around Davis Square. It's one of my favorite areas of Boston-- lots of vintage shops and handmade things, plus cupcakes and an old theater. Ok, travel blog done. Tonight I am going to Grasshopper. I don't even mind the hour long trip in this weather. The No Name is amazing.

This is my first horse, Pebbles (isn't she pretty?!). I randomly found her picture on some girl's facebook. Not too many people know that I used to ride and show. I used Pebbles for games (like barrel racing). Sometimes I miss riding, but it's complicated.

According to Vonnegut, my parents must want to disown me

Where the Wild Things Are tents: see the rest here: http://www.booooooom.com/2009/10/10/wild-things-forts-iii-booooooom-com-weloveyouso-com/

Let's Hope it Lasts.

2009-10-11T12:18:00.006-04:00

This weekend I:

Went to the ICA, watched Away We Go, had a breakfast in Beacon Hill, wrote a story in a cafe, saw a drag queen show, danced at a rooftop party, shopped in Harvard Square, ate at Veggie Planet, and played board games. Tonight I am going to a horror movie, then a small party. Tomorrow I'm going to enjoy the changing leaves and autumn air in the gardens and esplanade, then go to Bodega for the first time. So, basically, this long weekend was amaaaazing.

This website makes my ovaries (or whatever it is that makes bitches think about weddings...the heart?) ache. And that girl's dress is my ideal. http://www.oncewed.com/

PS my best friend is GORGEOUS and I miss her. She's blogging from France here: http://americainparis.blogspot.com/

How to Become a Writer by Loorie Moore

2009-10-07T07:52:00.004-04:00

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age--say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is tough and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She'll look briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a donut. She'll say: "How about emptying the dishwasher?" Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Accidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters.

Read the rest: http://www.bridgewater.edu/WritingCenter/Resources/102in-class11.htm

My favorite thing to have happened on my wall.

2009-10-06T19:21:00.001-04:00

Sarah Hanley Lol hope ur havin a good day and a cup of coffie / if that's ur fancy lol class till 6 today hit the cell in or any other u know to get ahold of me heh :)

The Breakfast

2009-10-06T10:38:00.006-04:00

*So Green Beans flew but didn't soar. That's fine. We can't always have our D S'd in workshops. However the conversation was mostly abstract so I don't know how to fix what I know needs fixing. One boy who used the sentence "I found Sam curled up in a ball of alcohol, pills, pain and death" in his own story, wrote "Dumb!" and "Dude it's [a description of] fruit loops, restrain" and "there are few characters if any who can get away with what happens on page 11." I was like, haha K thanx, kid who's whole arm is bandaged.

SO ANYWAYS, the following is a story the professor jizzed himself over. Is it a lot like The Hours? Yes. NOTHING IS ORIGINAL ANYMORE. Yes, I'm bitter, but in a funny way. *

1/20/10 Update: This'll be in Stork.

The last time I saw Fin, four years ago, he was getting sicker. He wouldn’t say anything about it, but it hung there like a heavy overcoat in June, pervading what would have been a pleasant breakfast. It was all I could think of—his vaguely medical smell, sort of like mint, but heavier, and his skin so pale I could see the roadmap of his veins.

“Fin, how are you feeling?” I hoped he could only hear half of the meaning in my question. I was lucky to get him out of his apartment at all. Since the first round of treatments hadn’t worked he was taking no calls. By chance I ran into Fin’s boyfriend, Paul, in the supermarket and told him I would not let another month go past without seeing my old friend. Paul looked rather flustered, but when doesn’t he, and said that Fin was still under the weather. I told him that I understood; of course I did, but that it would be good for him to see his friends. Paul had melting ice cream in his cart so he had to dash but promised me he would talk to Fin.

Back in college, when Fin first found Paul (at a discotheque, of course) I wasn’t sure about him. He seemed like just another boy with stars in his eyes that would enchant Fin for a while before moving on to the next thing. But he stuck around. They got an apartment together in the springtime and filled it with potted plants and chipped teacups. Every night they rolled up the living room rug to dance, and they spent each Sunday in bed, reading the newspaper. I remember it was rainy that year, and their fingers became stained in violet from the soggy paper they bought from a woman on the corner. She smiled so sweetly, was just so compelling, selling newspapers in a downpour, that they bought them even though could never read a word of it. I still pass her today. On rainy days her wet, inky fingers remind me of Fin, but I still don’t buy a paper.

After they moved in together, I was lonely for a while. I had no one to talk to, no one to tell everything to late in the night, like I used to with Fin. I’ve seen Fin now and then throughout these past twenty years, at reunions and parties. We’ve traded off interest in each other’s lives, always disappearing when there was nothing new to tell, anything to save ourselves from a boring phone call. I suppose it’s taught me that there is no one out there who wants to hear everything I have to say.

“Oh, I’m fine. Just a little worn out I guess,” he said. Sitting across from me, picking at his sunny-side-up eggs, I see that so much of what I adored about him has melted away. His golden hair is duller, his lips chapped, his green eyes are darker, somehow, and hollow.

“You’re not very talkative,” I said and shifted in my chair.

He laughed and looked out the window. It was Halloween-time and raining. Our coffees steamed in curls and wet orange leave smacked the café’s windows from time to time. “I haven’t been a chatterbox in years.”

“That’s not true,” I purred. “I saw you at Molly’s party, what was it, a few Christmases ago, and you were the life of it. Everybody’s friend.”

“Well, those days are over. I’m happy to be a little quieter.”

“Has it been like that since…well you, know, you got sick?”

“Mallory, can we talk about anything else, please? How’s your husband doing?” Fin said.

“Oh he’s fine, same as always. But please Fin, satisfy my curiosity. No, that’s the wrong word. I’m sorry, you know me, always saying the wrong thing. I just—I just want you to know I care.” The waitress came by with the check. When she left I whispered to him, “Does Paul have it too?”

“Of course he does. What would make you think he doesn’t? God, Mallory.”

“I’ve upset you. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve never understood anything,” he said. “But you think you understand everything.” I watched him pick a piece of lint off his argyle sweater. I watched it fall the rustic wooden floor. He folded his arms and waited for me to speak.

“No I don’t. I thought I understood you. I still think I can if you’ll let me.”

“You can’t just come back into my life when you hear something went wrong. It’s not fair. You have to stop doing that.” He rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses and sighed. I bit my lip and tried to think of something else we could talk about. But all I could think of was hospitals and blood work and what would happen to both of them. So I told him I had a busy day ahead of me.

We settled the check and I hugged him before for getting on the train. I had the feeling, even then, that we would not see each other again.

Last week I found out Fin outlived Paul by three years. I never would have guessed.

This.

2009-10-06T10:28:00.001-04:00

100

2009-10-01T17:47:00.003-04:00

An amusing, hip movie about an abortion!

Obvious Child from Gillian Robespierre on Vimeo.

FRIDA KAHLO TO MARTY MCCONNELL

leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.
— marty mcconnell
“Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.”
— Richard Siken

Green Beans and Other Impossibilities

2009-09-24T21:32:00.003-04:00

I edited this (mostly the beginning) because it's being workshopped in a week. By the weirdest people I have ever had in a fiction class. My God. The professor looks like a muppet. There are 3 girls who look like 90 pound 12 year olds, and all the boys look like the just crawled out from a Star Wars convention. One pimply boy's entire arm was bandaged on the underside..like he tried to..kill himself.. over the weekend. There's one girl who only wears turtle necks and brandless fleece zip ups and has a mom haircut. And (besides my two pals, thank bby j) NO ONE talks. So I don't really know how much they will help my writing. But here it is:

Green Beans and Other Impossibilities

A month after Scarlet moved in we were robbed. When I left the house for work that night she was standing at the refrigerator, either trying to cool off or deciding what to eat. She was dressed for her shift at Alabee’s Ladies, her hair teased into a mountain, her skin matted with the glitter gunk she smeared on every night. I said goodbye and she popped her head out, drawling, “See you later, Kid.” She never called me by my real name, only Kid. I’m not sure she even knew it. But that’s fair—I never knew her legal name either. She was Scarlet the Starlet in one of Oklahoma City’s many strip clubs and in the rundown house we both happened to rent.

I returned hours later, worn out and in need of a drink, to an unlocked door and a missing television. I turned on every light in the house, somehow moving through the fear that a man was hiding under my bed, ready to rape me or kill me or both. Once it became clear that I was alone I saw that besides Scarlet’s jewelry box, nothing else was taken. I’m not sure which made me sadder, the fact that they were gone or the fact that those things were all we had that someone else would want to take.

I had a police officer come out to the house. He considered the space where the television used to be and told me we should have kept the house locked.

“We usually do. I don’t know why my housemate didn’t.”

“Well, not too much we can do now. We’ll give you a call if something comes up.” He talked for a while longer about home safety and then how swamped they were at the station. Summer’s heat always causes a rise in the stabbing rates.

“Folks just snap, ya know?” he said, heaving his pants higher around his belly.

“Yeah, I know. Thanks for coming by.”

I stayed up waiting for Scarlet to get back from Alabee’s. The place was too quiet without the television and I was afraid. I managed a cocktail out of vodka and ice and I felt a little braver.

When she walked in at two in the morning I could hardly contain myself. “We were robbed!” I shouted. My voice sounded like a character’s in a sitcom, ridiculous and wavering.

“What?” she asked, cocking her head to the side and tossing her purse on the pleather couch.

“You left the house unlocked and we were robbed! They took my TV!”

“Kiddo, I swear I locked the door. Calm down, please?” She touched the top of my head, dragging her manicure along my scalp. The effect was immediate. I explained the situation in my non-sitcom voice.

“God, I’m sorry, Kid. Back in Georgia I never used to have to lock the doors. Everything was so safe. I’d forget in the city, too, but oddly enough we were never stolen from. I’ll buy you a new TV real soon.”

It was the longest conversation we had had thus far. All I knew about her before then was that she was twenty-six and that her wardrobe consisted of a lot of leopard print.

I had been in bed half an hour, swaddled in the pink sheets my mother had given me as a house-warming gift (endless attempts at getting me to act like a girl), when I heard a knock on my door. A triangle of lamp-light spilled onto the floor, illuminating Scarlet’s halo of red hair.

“I know this is weird, but can I sleep in your bed tonight? I’m absolutely terrified, just a big baby.”

I thought about it a minute. I had never shared a bed in my entire life. I hated sharing a house, to be honest. I liked being alone. I wanted to be a person who needed no people, like those green beans that grow on wet paper towels instead of soil. But she was standing there, biting her lip, so I lifted the blankets for her and she fell asleep without another word.

The next day I left Scarlet sleeping in my bed and went out into the yard with a six-pack of Pacificos. The weather was nice so on my days off I had taken to drinking while nestled in the dry prairie grass our shack stood alone on.

I had been working as a line-cook in a fake Mexican restaurant since I left home. It was a square building next to a dollar store made to look like an old saloon. I was there forty hours a week reconstituting the same five ingredients into enchiladas or burritos with men who spoke no English. But I got to wear my dirty T-shirts and the tiny scars I got on my arms from the hot grease made me feel tough.

Eventually Scarlet wandered out yawning and asked for the time. I told her I didn’t have a watch.

“It’s eleven a.m, Kid. You know?” and she pointed to my beer. I didn’t say anything. “You drink a lot.”

“Not really,” I said and shrugged. I’ve been told this before, but never by a woman who spent her night opening her legs inches from stranger’s faces.

“How old are you anyways? You look twelve.”

“I’m nineteen.”

“Then were do you get your booze?”

“There’s this girl at the liquor store who’s never carded me.”

“A girl, huh? Maybe she likes you. If she lets you buy booze and all. That’d have to be the reason; you got a babyface,” Scarlet said and sat in the grass across from me. I rarely know what to say to people, but this time I really didn’t know. We listened to the cicadas hum for a bit then Scarlet said, “You’re awful quiet, you know?”

“Yeah I know.”

“Are you a lesbian? I mean, I love cock, but I don’t care if you are. My uncle’s gay.”

I laughed and tried to figure out since when a lack of verbal finesse equaled lesbianism. But, really, people can probably look at me and guess. “Um, I don’t know. I’m--” and I waved my hands in the air to explain what I had never given too much thought.

“Oh, okay.”

A few times that week I woke up to find Scarlet in my bed. She would crawl under my covers late at night, when she came home from dancing. She told me she hated sleeping alone, especially in a place where even little shacks get broken into. I told her I didn’t mind. And surprisingly I wasn’t lying—I liked having her there, having something warm to hold. Nothing more than sleeping happened, just my arms around her, even though I was smaller and my arm always went to pins and needles under her neck. She was just the type who needed to be held. She filled the air with her vanilla perfume and my bed with glitter. When the moon hit it just so, the whole thing sparkled like a starry night.

This happened every night. And every morning the sun was bright in my room and never allowed us to sleep past ten. After we had woken up we would stay in bed for hours more, shifting in and out of sleep much like the sunlight through the oak leaves which sprayed patterns on my walls. Scarlet told me stories about working at Alabee’s. There was one bald guy who always requested that the DJ play “Venus in Furs” or any Nine Inch Nails songs so Scarlet could pretend to kick him or choke him while she danced. There was another she called “The White Knight” because he was always trying to save her from her life. He would tell her she was better than this as she gyrated in his lap. Most interesting to me was a man who goes to Scarlet for advice. He wife became paralyzed from the neck down in a car crash and though he loved her he wasn’t sure how much longer he could survive in a sexless marriage.

“What do you tell him to do?” I asked, wide-eyed.

“Well, I tell him the only thing I can think to. I tell him to stay with his wife. To keep coming to Alabee’s, paying me to dance, and to keep jerking off in the bathroom in between songs.”

There were many mornings Scarlet could not get out of bed. The first time she was sick I did not know it was only a rampant case of hypochondria. I figured out her stomach pain was all in her mind because the more I cared for her, the sicker she got. Scarlet was horribly dramatic about it. She believed in her illness the way some people believe in Jesus or the weather reports. Though I knew it was imagined, I would push hair from her clammy forehead and bring her warm ginger ale. I rubbed her back to help her fall asleep and sometimes I would hum to her whatever I had heard on the radio that day. My heart would leap when I would hear her calling me, “Kiiiiid? Kiiiid?” her voice pained and whiney. I would rush to her beside, happy at the thought that she needed me, really needed me. I knew it was all an act; even her needing me was part of it. But oh, how I soaked it up.

“You should go to school and become a nurse. You’re good at it.”

“I’ve thought about that actually.”

“No shit? Well, you should go for it. Otherwise I think you’d be good in porn,” she said. I stopped rubbing her back and laughed, “I’m sorry, what?”

“Yeah, you with your babyface. They use girls who are legal but look like they’re underage. I think it’s for pedophiles who don’t want to break any laws.”

“Eh, I’ll stick to cooking for now.”

“Suit yourself.”

We did not own a lawnmower so the grass got overgrown and came up to my knees after June’s rains. By August waxy weeds and yellow wildflowers poked through the knee-high green grass. Vines started growing up our wooden shack of their own accord and the whole thing looked like a lush jungle house in the middle of Oklahoma’s prairies. The sunlight glittered on the shards of our broken windows and made rainbows of our screen door. It felt magical and it felt like ours, the only reason the two of us existed as ‘the two of us,’ whatever that meant.

Sometimes Scarlet would join me outside and drink some of my beers but mostly she hated drinking during the day. It made her feel sleepy and she preferred to feel alive when the sun was out and her stomach wasn’t hurting. I, however, liked the heavy, drifting nauseous feeling that came with getting too much sun and drinking too many lime-flavored beers. Years ago, when I started drinking, I had not intended to make a habit out of it. In the past I was waiting for something interesting to happen and I had thought that a beer buzz would help that along. All it ever really did was make hours melt away and the television glow more personable.

One morning I stayed in bed with Scarlet very late. She was feeling ill again. “Have you ever kissed a girl?” Scarlet wanted to know. I thought about lying. But I didn’t. I told the truth.

“No.”

“Have you ever kissed a boy?”

“No.”

“I don’t get it. You’re pretty. You look like a boy. Like a beautiful boy.”

I laughed. I said something about being a misanthrope. How could I explain that I was a green bean who needed no soil? She slid her head across the pillow and pushed her mouth against mine. I didn’t even have time to close my eyes.

“I just did that so you could have your first kiss already.”

“I know.”

I had asked her about the photo album she kept in her room. She handled the album gingerly and had a narrative for each picture. There was one of the ocean with a circle of rough grey breaking the water’s surface.

“That’s a whale’s back. We went on a whale watch one summer. Up in Massachusetts.”

I have never seen the ocean. I have never left the state. I have never gotten close enough to a real whale to take its picture.

“Whales sing to each other underwater. I’ve heard recordings. Scuba divers or something must record it. It sounds like crying, but I think it is just them talking or singing to each other. It’s the most beautiful thing. I’d dance to it at the club if I could,” she said laughing. “But mostly they just play ‘My Humps.’”

“Who did you go whale watching with?” I asked. But what I was really asking was ‘who came before me? Who took you out of these state lines, these horrible borders?’

“I was married for a little while. I was so young, about your age, but that’s just what you did in Georgia. He was a really nice, rich guy. Here, this is him. We were going to have a baby and everything, but I can’t. Like, my body can’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, Kiddo.” As Scarlet showed me more pictures, her and her ex-husband eating lobster on the same vacation, a few of them in front of their first house, I thought of the incompleteness of all the unions the two of us would have with other people or with each other. We could spend our whole lives with people we loved never leave behind something we had created.

Scarlet was putting on lipstick in the bathroom mirror. I made a funny face and she smiled at my reflection with her berry-red mouth. I remembered it was her night off.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I have a date with an old friend.”

“You do?”

“Yes. To dinner. And I’m late. See you later, Kid.”

Scarlet did not sleep in my bed that night. She slept in her own, alone. She isn’t mine, I told myself. That’s when I knew that I wanted her to be. I put a pillow over my face and shouted Fuckshitasshole! into it. The next night after work she slept alone again. On the third night I did not have work so I took shots of gin, which I rarely do, until I fell into a deep sleep and did not wake up until eleven the next morning. I wandered into the kitchen, my stomach sour with gin and emptiness, my short hair standing on end, and sitting at our folding table was a man. To me he looked like he was around forty. Gaudy gold rings choked his chubby fingers and he wore a wrinkled button-down, but nice slacks. He looked at me and spooned the fruit loops he was eating through his chapped lips.

Since he wasn’t saying anything I said, “Hey. I’m Scarlet’s roommate.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Bill.”

I made my own bowl of fruit loops and sat across from Bill. We both looked into our bowls, watching neon colors bleed into the milk like subdued fireworks. I could hear Scarlet moving from her room to the bathroom, getting ready. I felt like a little kid with a freshly divorced mom who brought her boyfriend home for the first time. I also felt like a boyfriend, jealous and angry. Hey, buddy, she kissed me, I attempted to tell him with squinted eyes. As Bill and I chewed our mushy cereal, I began to understand that I had never been someone who needed no one. I had always been someone who needed one person, specifically, Scarlet.

I put my bowl in the sink and changed into a bathing suit in my room. I put on the giant sunglasses I had found at work and took a bag of cherries from the refrigerator. I went into the front yard and made a nest of the tall grass, spitting cherry pits with exaggerated force. Look at me, I thought, not drinking, eating a full breakfast, and tanning outside like a normal girl. And then I got a terrible urge to be naked. I get these socially unacceptable compulsions sometimes, like the need to vomit in public or to pluck out my eyelashes. They really shatter the image of normalcy I’ve got going on. However, there is no getting around them so I slid my bathing suit off. Where it usually covered, my skin was white and alien, I hardly recognized it. The sun was hot and soon I smelled like burnt almonds. The wind, though, had the sting of autumn.

Scarlet and Bill walked out. He averted his eyes, but Scarlet’s scanned my body. She had never seen me naked before.

“Fall’s coming. I can feel it,” I told her.

“Bullshit,” she said and joined Bill in her Honda. And they drove away.

Scarlet came home the next afternoon and lowered herself onto the couch without saying hello or anything to me. Her face was crumpled in fake pain and she curled her body up like a question mark.

“Kiiiiiid, will you make me Tummy Tamer Iced Tea?”

“No, I will not make you Tummy Tamer Iced Tea,” I said and darted into the bathroom. I turned on the shower and got under the warm spray. I knew she wouldn’t follow me because she had probably had enough of seeing me without clothes on.

I thought of it as I shampooed my hair. I thought of what I wanted to say to Scarlet. I wanted to tell her, “You are not sick. You are so alive it hurts.” It was the truest thing I had ever thought of and I repeated it over and over myself until the water turned cold. “You are not sick. You are so alive it hurts. You are not sick. You are so alive it hurts. You are not sick. You are so alive it hurts.”

I got out of the shower and stood between her and the TV she had bought for me. I had thought to put a towel around me, but I was soaked and I stood there, silently, long enough for a puddle to form around my feet. I tried, but I couldn’t say it. It seemed silly and I thought she wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t even true about her. That’s when I realized I wanted nothing more than for her to say it to me. I wanted to be told what I knew was not exactly, but almost, true about myself. I wanted to cry and be held and need people the way I hoped they needed me. I wanted to stop feeling bigger than my town and bigger than my life and I wanted to feel like a speck in the universe like everyone else does. The impossibility of it all filled the room, thick and suffocating.

“Is something bothering you?” she asked, snapping me back to reality.

“No, not really. I’m, um, I’m just really drunk,” I lied.

“Well, go take a nap. Jesus H., Kid.”

“Yeah. I think I will.”

Scarlet practically moved in with Bill the next day. They had dated after her divorce and she told me that he was the sort you could not see for years and then love all over again. I rarely saw her until she woke me by getting into my bed after a month of me sleeping alone. She curved into me and flung an arm around my stomach. Stubbornly, I continued to feign sleep until I realized that she was shivering. I turned around and looked at her.

“Hey,” she said, her voice sounded like it was about to brake. I flicked on my bedside lamp.

“Holy shit, Scarlet! What—”

“Shhh, I’m okay.” It was clear that she was not. A purple bruise bloomed around her left eye and her lip was split. Blood had pooled in the wound. It looked like a ruby, or a shiny beetle. I reached out and touched it gently with my thumb. She winced.

“Who the fuck did that to you?”

“It’s a long story,” she said. I asked her again.

“Bill,” she said. I sat up and she grasped my arm.

“It was stupid, I’m really okay. I just want to sleep here tonight.” She told me that her another ex-boyfriend, the one who violated his probation, had shown up at Alabee’s and watched her dance. When Bill came to pick her up Scarlet showed him all the money the ex had given her. A lot of money, for a lot of lap dances. Bill figured they must have been fucking so he hit her face, her beautiful face and then dropped her off.

“You don’t deserve that.”

“Kid, calm down.”

“You don’t deserve that.”

“I’m really okay. He’s honestly not like this.”

Maybe her hypochondria was gone, I thought. If a stomachache meant she was dying then I would have thought a split lip would mean her life was ending. But no, to her it just meant that shit happens, and that killed me. I let go of the bed sheets I was clenching and held her. After awhile she stopped shivering and I thought she had fallen asleep. I kissed her head, right above her ear.

Without opening her eyes, she said “You should ask the girl at the liquor store out.” I pictured the liquor-store-girl and I going on a date. Doing things normal people did-- seeing movies, sitting in cafes, holding hands. It didn’t look right. I pictured Scarlet and I doing those things. It looked appealing, but unrealistic still. I pictured me punching Scarlet in the mouth the way Bill had. I couldn’t even imagine it. I kissed Scarlet’s hair again in the same spot. She pretended it was sleep that made her roll closer to the edge of the bed.

“Let’s have a day,” Scarlet said, shaking me awake. I had not seen her for a week, she had been at Bill’s, and it took me more than a few minutes to believe it was really her. We had had two days before. On the first one we went to the matinee and hopped from movie to movie all day. We got to see three movies for the price of one and stuff our faces with salted popcorn. When we finally left the sun nearly blinded us. We were struck by it, as if we expected the whole world to be as dark as our cinema. Our second day was completely unplanned, and it only lasted an hour. Scarlet determined that I was too drunk to drive to work, though I was really fine, so she put me in her car. On the way we passed a small field filled with dying dandelions. We got out of the car and kicked our way through the white fluff, making wishes with each burst and blow.

On what would be our third and final day Scarlet wore a frothy pink dress that seemed light enough to melt into the air. She took me to the city, past the neon Sonic signs and towering cowboy boots advertising Western Wear Co. and right into the heart. We stumbled upon a restaurant call the Spaghetti Emporium. It had a giant Leaning Tower of Pisa coming out of the roof and the host was dressed like a gondola rower. Perhaps, I thought, this is Scarlet showing me the world. “Ciao, bella, we’re in Italy.” We both ordered giant bowls of penne pasta and when Scarlet noticed my hands starting to shake she got me a glass of white wine the size of a baby’s head. We talked about the things we believed as children. I told her that I once thought God looked like King Friday on Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, and Scarlet used to think that pee was all the apple juice you drank.

“Then what was your shit?” I asked.

“Chocolate, of course. I never ate or drank from the toilet or anything, but I just knew I was right.”

Scarlet told me she was moving out through a mouthful of sickly-sweet tiramisu.

“Bill asked me to move in with him. He’s just leasing out here, but he’s from Tulsa and he wants to move back.”

“Can you order me another glass of wine?”

“Oh, you’re just worried because he roughed me up a bit. You’re a sweetie to be concerned. You really are. But you don’t understand the menfolk like I do. If a man is jealous it means he loves you. It means he really needs you and will do anything to not loose you.”

“I can’t help but think someone like Bill, or your ex-husband or the guy who just got out of jail, or whoever the hell else, should never have you in the first place.”

“Kid, no one has me, if you want to know the truth of it. But Bill is good. We’ll get an apartment with a backyard in Tulsa and he has money to look into that thing where they stick more eggs in you. Part of me still wants a baby and like, a dog, or whatever. You know?”

I did know. I asked her if she thought I was the sort you could not see for a while and then fall right back in with, wherever you left off. She said she was certain. Then we talked about the bubbles in Pelligrino, we talked about the famlies we hadn’t seen and we talked about the twin-delima of space travel. We paid our check and we went back to what was once our house.

On the day Scarlet left I took a marker (it was grape-scented) and wrote her name on every part of my body. She was on every finger, she was on each leg and all the inches of my back I could reach. I would have written her name on my organs, my lungs, my liver, my spleen, if I could have. When I finished I looked in the mirror, I did not look any different. This made me laugh. I ran the bath and got in and stayed in until the water turned violet and I came out clean.

2009-09-24T21:20:00.002-04:00

From The History of Love by Nicole Krauss:

This post is super important. I hope it impacts your ~life.

2009-09-11T11:47:00.005-04:00

Apartment pictures are coming soon- I'm just waiting for a day when it's sunny so the windows are fully appreciated. Yes, I know how dumb that is. I also am learning to use a French press and I just bought some Italian roast. I consider it a thrifty move.

I should save this Insanity Wolf for a day when I am more insane, but I love it. I've been pretty happy. I wish I was more productive- either with a job or writing. But whatever. I get really anxious when I'm alone and I have to think about... well, I hate being vague, but yeah. SO:

KATY

They say I mope too much

but really I’m loudly dancing.

I eat paper. It’s good for my bones.

I play the piano pedal. I dance,

I am never quiet, I mean silent.

Some day I’ll love Frank O’Hara.

I think I’ll be alone for a little while.

Miniature Bridges, Your Mouth - Marty McConnell

2009-09-06T10:26:00.000-04:00

what we do in the dark has no hands. no
crossover effect, no good-bye kiss after the alarm.
what we carry in, we carry out, end of story. this
doesn't even want to be love. except in minutes
when your face has the shape of my palm and I think
lungful. let want out with the cat. returns
and returns, something dutiful. persistent.
hold your breath, let it build, let go. this is practice.
I'm losing weight, a bad sign, I'm happy. serious,
you say. contained, I think. the cat comes back
with a dead bird to the doorstep, an offering. bloodless
this should be easy. a two-step to cowboys. you're beautiful
but that's not the point.

x

I know my way back perfectly well. like the back
of my hand, as it were. but look, the labyrinth walls
are high hedge and green. this also could be joy.

xx

I literally don't know your middle name. does that
matter? what systems we arrange for intimacy, small
disclosures like miniature bridges, your mouth. not
what I'd anticipated. softer. to begin with,
I should tell the truth more. I could miss you,
and that's a liability.

xxx

I am not often off-kilter. but you're so silent, even
naked, and almost absent. I hush too, why
are we here. go. want to throw things, you, the clock,
break windows until something bleeds and you finally
scream. I tell you too much; we are not
those people. or nothing--maybe I say
utilitarian fuck. how would that be. I want you
to want to fall in love with me and that's
unhealthy. wrong. leave your shoes by the door
and pretend it's about the movie. it's love
in the movies it's casablanca and toy story
and water no ice come here. pockets need
to be untucked, drawers thrown open,
nobody's safe. there, I've said it:
someone I was could have loved you.

everything, everything, everything

2009-09-03T15:04:00.002-04:00

is making me really happy!

Oh god, it's wonderful.

2009-08-27T10:54:00.007-04:00

These Simply Breakfasts make me want to learn to fry an egg without breaking the yoke, and run out to buy avocados:

An artist who illustrates craigslist missed connections: http://missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com/

I really like Hello Bum's flickr. It's rare to see current photography with girls who are not stick-thin. She makes me want to get over my shyness and lounge around in '60s lingerie.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nudonudo/

I agree:

One Week Today

2009-08-25T18:35:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I drove past three old bikes lying on the side of my street. There was a large sign that said 'Free' next to them so I drove in reverse for a good five minutes until I got to them. I am now the happy owner of a Schwinn Collegiate. It has a basket (!) and three-speeds and is probably from, what, the '70s? Its sort of rideable.

Hopefully it will up my chances of being photographed by the Satorialist.

Also I got my nose pierced today. Unfortunately all they had was a diamond stud which I HATE but I really wanted to just get it done. I'm looking forward to switching to a form-fitted hoop.

Moving one week from today. I'm amazed I made it. But I'm not depressed or whatever I was so much anymore. I just kind of have this vague anger or bitterness, mostly before I go to bed.

Go watch all of these.

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=AgentXPQ&view=videos

Don't Be Vain.

2009-08-24T22:29:00.002-04:00

Though if love was an animal, Garret knew, it would probably be the Loch Ness Monster. If it didn’t exist, that didn’t matter. People made models of it, put it in the water, and took photos. The hoax of it was good enough. The idea of it. Though some people feared it, wished it would just go away, had their lives insured against being eaten alive by it.

- Tao Lin

Four Walls and Adobe Slabs

2009-08-22T16:01:00.011-04:00

2009-08-18T14:48:00.005-04:00

I'm going to make things like this today for my room:

Reoccurring Thoughts

2009-08-12T23:55:00.006-04:00

-This would taste better with salt.

-It's all in your head, no one else is thinking that about you.

-I want to do more drugs.

-I remember thinking the kids on the real world were a lot more ~wild when I little.

-FFFFFFF Why did I eat that?

-Is attaching my picture on the craigslist waitressing ads I answer "just to put a face to a name" desperate? Yes, yes it is.

-My mouth hurts bad.

-I'm drowning and flailing in this town.

-I like sunlight in meadows. Let's have a picnic in one. DONE.

-What if it isn't better in a month?

-Oh boy less than one month!

-Ikea is going to be a headache/ shit show.

-I like a lot people, but I never know what they're thinking.

-FFFFF why did I think going to a mall would cheer me up?

-This list makes me look like a glass half empty kind of gal. FALSE Y'ALL. The internet brings it out in me.

-I've been having good days, think we are the right age to start out own peculiar ways doo doo do do do do.

-I'm never cutting my hair again. 1 min later: Shoot, why did I just cut off that inch?

-This is the worst weather I've ever seen in a summer. Ever.

-I want a puppy.

-My job has no point. Also: I wonder if people judge me for eating a single chip, an orange slice and a cherry in rotation. Once every hour.

-Be brave.

-All I want is a room up there and you in it.

-So this rage is irrational and general.

-The theme of all my writing is "longing." Wait, no that's the theme of my life.

-I want "TMTH" tattooed on my inner lip.

-My back hurts.

-I hope people think I'm funny. It's not my fault I friends with hilarious people and can't compete.

-Oh no she's laughing TOO hard, I'm panicking.

-I have a lot things I want to do this autumn in Boston. Everything will feel new even if it's not.

-How do people survive the ending of things? I know I will have to eventually.

-I should go to sleep.

This world has a warm, sunny heart.

2009-08-09T12:39:00.008-04:00

"I miss you already. I missed you even when I was with you. That's been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing."

-Jonathan Safran Foer

Things I Want This Fall:

-Oxford shoes (and an Oxford shirt. I'm so nerdy?!?!):

-Magical princess hair:

-A black winter coat with a military collar

-Jeans that actually fit me

-A beanie hat

-Whatever I can afford to look like belong I in an Anthropologie catalogue.

Randomness:

Golden-Pony Boy!

BRB VOMZ EVERYWHERE:

It's probably the fur that anoretics get due to starvation and their body trying to stay warm. I watched part of the Top Chef with her on and she's a vegan who also doesn't eat gluten or soy...which leaves her with fruits, veggies, and...nuts?

2009-08-04T11:37:00.004-04:00

all i eat is special k, lean cuisines and butter. idk which of those three is making me OBESE.

"I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions" -Salinger, Nine Stories

Music: I recently went to a free concert and saw Ra Ra Riot, Passion Pit and Metric. I now really need to buy Ra Ra Riot's album. To do that I have to go the the "genius bar" and fix my itunes. I'd rather gargle anti-freeze. Metric's set was wonderful because they went acoustic so it sounded much more like Emily Haines' solo project, Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton.

I also need Deerhunter's new CD, and his side project, Atlas Sound. This song, Walkabout, features Panda Bear.

Books: I read a large part of Eugenides' collection of love stories. It has so many great names in it and I would love to own a copy. I liked Jon by George Saunders the best.

I also read Self-Help by Loorie Moore and adored it.

Now I am reading The Yellow House by Martin Gayford. It is about the last year of Vincent van Gogh's life in southern France when he lived with Paul Gauguin. I took a contemporary art course and I think my teacher read this exact book. I am still waiting to read about when Vincent would jump all over Paul hoping for cuddles and tickles fights.

This is Silly, But: An Update On My Mental Health

2009-07-25T22:26:00.005-04:00

All's well and has been for like 3 days. I credit friends and Woody Allen movies.

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

2009-07-19T12:35:00.003-04:00

Well, fine. It’s the end of July but I can never pass up Anne Sexton. And it’ true: I’m tired of being brave.

It’s a beautiful day, I’m on my deck stretching the wifi. I have nearly finished that story and I don’t hate it, which is rare. I’m seeing my friends in a few hours, and another friend after that. I honestly don’t know why I’m not happy. I felt like this last fall, but back then I had more legitimate reasons, which cleared up when I went abroad. Now I’m afraid it is just the brain chemistry I inherited from my mother. Which is terrifying. It is too soon to say though. I have a feeling that once I am in my own apartment and taking classes I will feel better. So who knows if it’s my location, my lack of serotonin or my situation, but I wake up feeling like I am still asleep. Then once I have a good time with friends (and when did I become this brat who needs constant attention and reassurance?) I am happy again and I feel stupid for ever feeling sad. I used to tell my therapist how guilty I felt for being sad when there were people who had really lost or been through more than I can imagine. I think she said something like “you’re only you. it’s okay to feel what you’re feeling.” Still, I hate that I am such a sensitive baby, I really do. Like, who cares if my mother is a child and tells me constantly “you don’t love me like you used to,” who cares if I feel left out sometimes, who cares if I hurt someone because I am selfish, who cares if I miss people all the time. It’s not a big deal. Sigh, maybe someone knows what I am saying, because I don’t. Maybe everyone feels like this.

I follow this girl’s tumblr http://rickahh.tumblr.com/. Her name is Rosey and she is certainly going through a rough time dealing with her depression. I read the following a month ago:

“i’m afraid to be honest here anymore, but i will be anyway. i’ve spent a good deal of the early afternoon on the kitchen floor, crying until i was about to throw up. it was nice and cool, it’s just so hot today. i am so fucking scared. this is always me, always in this position. i wonder if other people ever feel this way. if they do, they don’t tell me about it. i’m always the one with this look on my face. waiting for someone else to say something. making doe-eyes expectantly. i was screaming in my head, you know. maybe i can’t will things to happen after all.

the thing is, i probably have nothing to worry about. no reason to be so upset. no one’s going anywhere. in all honesty, i will probably read this in 20 minutes and think dear god, who said those things? because i am not this pathetic.

i can’t decide if the realization that it’s difficult to trust yourself or your feelings in love is frightening and sort of depressing, or if it’s empowering and sort of a relief.”

I am not at the point of crying on the kitchen floor, but relate to the rest of what she said. + I do often look back and think “who said those things?”- I am not that person. I don’t know. If only I could swallow the loneliness that lingers even when I'm not alone, if only I could not care that people who should not fuck up are fucking up, if only I could I always trust myself enough to say what I'm thinking aloud...This was uber-confessional. Apologies. Here's a lol-ish picture to even the keel.

how strange it is to be anything at all

2009-07-11T22:02:00.009-04:00

Oh No! Oh My!- I have no sister. A fun electronic song I can't stop listening to. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uNiim2PFYI

you look like Audrey Hepburn
when you get all dressed up
I have seen all your movies
'cause Audrey's a stone fox

so let's ride bikes into the sea
and catch a bus outside the reef
drive so deep where we can see
thinks that we have to get off
The bus driver laughs and he shakes his head
says, "You're okay, I drive this route everyday"
you're uneasy and you say you're scared
and if I die at least you'll die too

My Life:

I want to eat/ drink the following two pictures:

Thinking about my apartment. I got white sheets and a white duvet cover and I have really bright pillows. It feels like a cloud. Earlier in the week I hardly left it. I was being emo. I'm happy again though.

I want this bedspread so bad! Where did those freaks get it?!?!??!

I want those lights too.

Random Images:

Google Yourself When You Get Home

2009-07-07T00:52:00.003-04:00

Plz click on these so that you can enjoy them the way they were meant to be enjoyed.

It things like the above which remind me I'm no more manic or sadder or weirder than the next girl. The best thing I can do is never take anything seriously. I'll stop here and spare you the Almost Famous quote.
I am now reading My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead, a collection of short stories on love edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. So far I loved a story by Lorrie Moore, read one by Carver, one by Denis Johnson, and saw that one of my favorite Miranda July's was in there. I also took out Lorrie Moore's anthologie on childhood, I know some things.

Haha, my recent google searches:

intervention

tfln

tulsa

split lip

calories in semen

pimp

magnolia buttercream

rainbow cupcakes

dinosaur world route 66

my lyfe= exciting.
Also: Last night I watching True Life in the dark, like you do, and I thought I heard my phone vibrate. I was so excited and while reaching for it I almost fell out of bed and accidently threw my phone across the room. No one had texted me. It was my dog snoring. not.taking.myself.seriously #44.