Fiction (III)

We fucked something like three times before I realized that I wanted him too much. I could tell because I started craving his stories, too, not just the rest of him.

I tried to be diplomatic, socially acceptable, to coax the stories out on their own. I asked questions, played games, but they wouldn't come. So one day (because it was the only way, really), hair in my eyes, I looked up and told him: I wanted his narrative, god, his anecdotes, oh, fuck, his memory-molded past, god, yes, yes. He knew I'd give him anything in exchange. I would've given him money, but money was easy. You could pick it up on a street corner, rumpled and gutter-stained and covered in other people's fingerprints. He didn't want my money. He wanted something tender, something soft to sink his teeth into. He wanted me.

So now, sometimes, he calls me over. And after a few hours, I rub the carpet marks out of my knees, sit at the foot of his bed and listen attentively to things I do not understand. Absentees and stand-ins and fights and scars and love and guns and girls who lie. But I know enough about his anger to follow along.

"He talks to you?" my roommate asks when I come home bruised and sore, because that's what I told her in a moment of weakness. Tell her you're having maniacal sex; tell her he's beating you up. Not that you're whoring yourself for his stories. But I was tired. "That's it?"

"He talks to me," I say again, twisting my head from side to side, examining the damage done to my neck.

"I mean...well, shit, is it good?"

Catching my eyes in the mirror, I hesitate. I do not understand how so much can live inside one person. I don't have the space. I stop eating, breathe less, just to give him more room to fill me up, a better canvas upon which to transpose. And I want more, more, all of it, while he wants only my real pieces. If he were to ask me why (he never does), I would tell him about my life, my unchanging life, my tiny life in a nightmare box. I would tell him how I feel, sad, missing, like the gap left behind on a coat when a button has fallen off. But he never asks, so I never speak. I suck the stories out of him, and it hurts, because words don't just disappear. Real words, true words, his words, they hit your ears and stick. They burrow into your chest. He is inside me, and I want him there. It hurts, but I am hungry for his pain.

So, "yes," I tell her. "Yes, it's good."

Suspension

I was waiting for the subway. My jaw sore, my legs aching, I pulled out my phone to check the time, but the screen was blank. I wondered if I had lost service or if there was simply no time left to pass, if I had used up all the seconds allotted to me standing in this crowd of people, lined up, militaristic. I didn’t remember falling in. It must’ve been instinctive. Most of them stared straight ahead, but few of us were weak; we shuffled and glanced around, searching casually for information or entertainment. The woman next to me in line took out a cigarette with shaking hands.

“Does anybody mind?” We might have minded somewhere else, but not here. Relieved, she lit up, and smoke hung still in the closed air.

Finally, a train approached. As it screeched to a halt, I tried to move forward. But those waiting with me seemed to pull me back. I was tired of perpetual idleness, tired of not knowing how long I had been trapped underground, inside tan concrete. I contemplated walking up the stairs and out onto the street, hailing a cab or taking a bus, and I felt fingers on my sleeve, clutching, holding me in place.

“Why can’t I go, too?” I asked, despising the whine behind my voice.

The woman smoking at my side shook her head. “That’s how it is,” she said, choking on a leftover bit of emotion that the others had disposed of long ago. “They choose, but they never choose us.” Four of the stoics detached themselves from the group and boarded. The second the doors shut, they were sucked down the tube.

The next train came after a while, but only one got on, a blond girl wearing a long white dress. The crowd expressed no outrage and offered no explanation, besides a small mutter from deep inside: “She’s related, the bitch.”

My legs shook, hurting worse than before, and I had to fight the urge to scream. I was trapped. But he was not. The man in a yellow jacket, smelling like mint and leather, walking slowly in front of us all, hands in his pockets, ignoring the order of things. When he saw me, he smiled mockingly and licked his lips. I longed for motion. But he did not.

Suddenly, another train came, faster than the last, rushing on and on. Eventually, I could no longer tell whether it was made up of many cars, connected, or if it was one long, solid mass of metal. I tried to step back but couldn’t; I was surrounded by a mass five people deep.

Calm, unafraid, he approached the silver blur and extended a hand.

“Don’t!” I shouted, and the heads surrounding me, more than ever now, whipped around to stare at me. He didn’t notice, kept reaching, reaching until finally, in one whiplash motion, he grabbed a bar on the window of the car and was carried away. The train ended, finally, leaving behind a rush of sound like a broken wave. He was gone. But I was not.

My heart ached. Whether for him or for me, I couldn’t tell. The wide, dead eyes turned away from me, back to the tunnel. But it was no use. It was empty. I was empty. I wanted to take a chance like him, to stretch out and grab or maybe just to lie on the tracks and wait down there. Either way, I would at least have the promise of action. Instead, I straightened my spine and stared. And waited.

Enough.

So listen, she told me, I'm trying not to go too fast. Because I've asked for a lot of advice on this subject and gotten in way too much trouble by asking and the overwhelming response has been not to rush things too much. Fools rush in. Wasn't that what they said? Except I'm not sure, because the rest of life is a race that the rabbit would win, where biding your time is for the vengeful and the criminally insane. Slow means stupid, but here, all of a sudden, it equates to wisdom. So I guess I must be stupid, then, because I'm having trouble taking my time.

And I'm worried, she said. I'm getting worried because there are things I do not know. There will always be things I do not know, and this concerns me to no end. I do not know if it is worth it. I do not know if I will regret the shift. If the change will matter down the road. I am worried that I do not know, and I am worried that you do not know, either. That you've never looked past the second that I finally....

She sighed, and the wind kicked up. My fingers shook inside my glove, which she noticed, and when I looked back down she was holding my hand.

Fiction (II)

No pattern in their breathing,
shared breathing
unfamiliar meetings
revisited.
She licks her lips
combs her teeth
he watches
something underneath
laying, lying,
turning.
Do you see me?
Breathing,
beating, beating.


breathing.

Clutch

I am not safe in his arms like he tells me I am. He plants his promises inside my chest, and they germinate and thrive. They surpass expectations. My expectations win blue ribbons. He doesn't want his prize. Heaviest, biggest, most. Superlatives tied to his hands and feet, pulling him down. I indulge in his uncertainty. "But what if you're my girl?" I revel. I am not safe in his arms because he will let go when we start sinking. But he doesn't know that yet. He is the champion of three small words, repeated three hundred times over, dubious. He doesn't know that I am a tornado, full of hail and wind and broken bits, accidental but damaging nonetheless. I hurt him, so I hurt myself in turn, indulging in small pinches and the clarity of starvation. I am his selfish consolation gift, screaming, needing what is not my place to need. The smallness inside of me wants him to take me away. It wants to take him away. It wants him to lay next to me, to be small like me. I am my smallness. And what strong arms could hold me?

Snapshots

I don't know how to be properly autobiographical. I guess it's an acquired taste. Like snake.

Today, some girl on my floor burned popcorn in her microwave so badly that the alarms all went off and the firetrucks came, but not badly enough that the sprinklers went off. Funny how that happens. Everyone stood around on the grass because the three firemen apparently had to use the entire sidewalk, and I wanted a cigarette desperately. It was only once I had smoked one that I realized taking deep breaths, not nicotine, held all the appeal in making that decision. They were Newports, cheap ones, and the smell they left on my fingers reminded me of my ex-girlfriend.

I listen to my local classic rock station online to remind me of home in an unfamiliar city. I suffer through every single stupid song just to hear a trace of the DJs' Philly accents. Even the ones by a band named Hooters with random religious references. Even the hair metal. In the end, though, it doesn't matter, because Weezer has impeccable timing.

Lucy

She sits awake some nights and wonders. But not in the bedroom, for it is small and occupied and not conducive to wondering. She lies there for the allotted amount of time, staring at the hairline crack in the ceiling, the one that unsettles her when it's dark. It's never been filled. No one minds it in the daytime, when worries are less useful. Then, when his breathing is steady and his hands are still, she shifts slowly off of the mattress and onto the floor, dodging squeaky boards and walking on the outside of her feet, like an Indian, like she's seven again. That's how she knows it's alright to slip away. Because she feels seven and not seventeen.

Outside, on the small balcony attached to their kitchen, she lights incense and plays with the smoke. It tangles when left alone, but she sorts it with a few waves of her fingers, like a small child's hair. The night-bugs, cicadas and moths and big, green beetles, buzz around her as she closes her eyes and wonders again if she's a bad person.

It's such a subjective term, 'bad person,' she tells herself, even though she knows that this argument is crap. I mean, when you say bad, you could mean anything from your Irish Catholic grandmother's idea of bad to Charles Manson bad. But that's the worst thing about having a conversation with herself. She can't use (or rather, utilize) her dual degree in English and 20th century literature (or rather, wordy bullshit). She can't dodge the question and go of on a tangent. Well, she can, but it's not particularly effective, because there is only one of her, and she knows what she means by bad (and that people who are Charles Manson bad are typically referred to as "murderers" to do away with the need for distinction).

Well, she revs up warily, if you asked most people, I would probably get a fairly positive response. I mean, they'd have their complaints, of course. Everybody has complaints about everybody. But I think that the consensus would be, yes, good.

But then she has to wonder how much of what they know is real and how much of it, exactly, is layering and creative placement. Because there's always something. No matter what she does. There are always so many little failures, especially with him. She tells him her feelings, that she loves him, like she's supposed to, but no matter how true it is, she can't kill that tiny, persistant animal that squirms uncomfortably in her chest every time she does. She tries to be as kind to him as he is to her, but moments still exist in which she wants to wound him. She goes to sleep next to him and wakes up there, too, but she finds herself screwing someone else in the middle of the night. Her control only goes so deep, and it kills her.

So what is she, really? Kind and loving, or a decent approximation of the two? Committed, or just well-trained? Does consensus matter when what they see is just a white sheet, draped over the ugly crime scene to appease and comfort?

She can't decide anymore. So she stops moving. She stops breathing. Uninterrupted, the smoke wraps around her, caressing her shoulders. She closes her eyes and listens. But the promised realization never comes.