Ryan Teitman

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

1

The songbird that escapes

from a burning house

will build its nest

in the shape of a cage.

2

This is one thing

we know: song begs

for the places that make it

grow from seed to starling,

3

places that put the heart's hemlock

in an empty rowboat

and heave it from the shore.

4

We only praise what we cannot

keep: violin strings berried with rain,

teacups overflowing with brandywine,

radios sickened with static.

5

Glass tossed out with the tide

will come back smoother and stranger,

but never to the same person.

6

This is something we want

to know. The woman in love

never touches her ears.

7

The man in his house is always lost

without her.

8

Morning pulls light

from the dark like a boy

hoisting a trout from the lake

by its clean, pink gills.

9

When the woman escapes

from a burning house

she will know the path of the wind,

10

how it writes its scripture

in peach blossoms blown

into a baby's empty pram.

11

She'll feel it compose its words

against her body, against the night,

against the water, in an endless, artless psalm.

Smut

(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

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

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

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"?!