I lie in our bed staring at the drapes. He kept them closed, fearing exposure to the sore light of Los Angeles might cut through to reality, or even worse, fade the fabric of the bedspread. I wanted the fake rays, but I couldn’t reach the shade pulls.

It was a permanent state of near-death in our bedroom, the downcast curtains dripping off their rods and folding over each other like rounded sheets of mint and flesh-colored icing.  I wondered if he dreamed that one day, those generous bolts of fabric would fall. Maybe the curtains would grow lungs and the caterpillar tracks of a tank, and roll across the room and up the side of the bed while I was asleep. Maybe they would cover my mouth and nose.

If he didn’t think about it, I did. A death by drapery, the headline would read. With the Gorgeous curtains kill amputee sensational subhead rolling beneath it on the seventh page of the newspaper. I would no longer be the “twilighted film star“ or the image of those slim cigarettes my face used to peddle on the backs of magazines. I would be the amputee with nice home interiors.

 

He was a clean, traditional man. He thought about things like bills, organizing them by date and folding over the right-hand corner of each after a payment was made. He thought about quarterly reports, insurance benefits, and meter reads. He didn’t think about ending my life. If he did, it was in a mechanical way. A conventional way. Not in a supernaturally occurring, velvety curtain-suffocation kind of way.

If you pulled back the looming drapes, just below the windowsill in our bedroom, you could see a kidney-shaped swimming pool. He bought the house for the pool, for me. For my hands and my arms. I used to swim in the pool. Now it collected bugs, and petals, and varying debris from parties that had long since passed on.

 I dreamed of the pool. I couldn’t see the pool from the bed. I couldn’t open the drapes. But I dreamed of my imaginary arms and hands pulling the curtains back. I saw my fingertips cutting through the stagnant water in a perfect breaststroke. Maybe he thought about drowning me.

It wasn’t the studio lighting of Los Angeles he hid from. It was the pool. If he could see the pool, there was a way out. He didn’t swim anymore. How could he swim in the pool he bought for my hands and my arms? He couldn’t. The pool was as useless as my own form.

 

Pulling back from the daily swimming dream, I scanned the bedroom. Drapes covered every window and wall, floor to ceiling, leaving no empty space but above the bed. The deteriorating popcorn ceiling was littered with pushpins, each tiny head holding a piece of fishing wire attached to a cardboard mobile. Paper planets hung over my head, individually cut two-dimensional circles dipped in glitter. Strung over the length of the bed, clusters of tiny parchment stars were woven between the planets to form a sprawling galaxy.

 He made the mobiles for me after I had hurt myself.  After the accident, after the pool stopped being of use. I stared at the groupings of balsa wood and thin cardboard rounds, counting the divots and punctures pressed into the planets for texture. I wanted to touch his handmade divots and punctures. But I couldn’t, even with phantom hands. I thought about lifting my chest and torso toward the sky and grabbing the planets with my teeth. I wanted to feel the rough, expensive paper with my tongue.

 He was in the bedroom now. I squeezed my eyes closed so he wouldn’t see me.  But I was nervous. I was lonely. I wanted to see him. I unclenched my eyelids. He appeared in the doorway, standing in the back of the room, staring at the mobiles. He said nothing.

 He looked at me. He looked at the planets. He looked at the drapes.

Then he lunged at our bed and ripped the strings and blue-painted wood dowels out of the ceiling. He tore through the paper planets with his hands, glitter and planetary waste falling into my face as he reached for the next mobile.

 

“I’m not the same anymore! So why do you blame me for it?,” I yelped with a closed-up throat.

 

 I screamed, and he said nothing. Planets crashed to the ground, paper meteor showers falling all over my face. His rough skin bled from a dozen paper cuts and broken darts of wood, bleeding on me, bleeding on the dismembered mobiles, bleeding all over the rolling waves of our embroidered bed spread. He clawed at the mock galaxy until the ceiling was full of pin gashes and all the stars were gone.

 He stopped. He shook the paper and glitter from his hands. He exhaled. I could see a breath rise in his chest. Then it fell. He knelt over me, straddling my legs.

 His red hand reached up and grabbed my hair, wrapping my blonde ponytail around his fist as he pulled. We both rolled off of the bed, hitting the floor in one solid lump. He spoke for the first time.

 

“There is something holding me back,” he said. “And it’s holding me from holding you again.” He was breathless with the obvious words.  

 

I stared at him. We had stopped acknowledging my missing hands and arms. They became a something. A bloody, white, dismembered elephant in the bedroom.

 I had no hands and arms to hold. I was a torso with legs.

 He untangled from my legs and lifted himself up. Now standing, he pressed the wrinkles out of his suit coat. I lay on the ground face down with a bloody lip, red seeping into the floor. I felt him grab my ankles.  I was turned, face up.

  

“I’m not the same anymore. So why do you blame me for it?” I spit it out the obvious question again.

 

He dropped my feet.  His only response was a swift punch to my left temple. I was tired.

He turned and took my legs in his hands again, pulling my body toward the bedroom door. My head bounced off the edge of each shaggy step of the second floor stairs, the nape of my neck rubbing raw on the acrylic fibers of the carpet. My eyes went pink, blood seeping into the pair of milky way whites of my eyes. He pulled my body toward the back of the house, and left me alone on the landing for a moment to bask in the artificial sun.

I heard the vacuum seal of the sliding glass door open up. He came back to the steps, pulling me through the hall and over the lip of the doorframe. My head took a final hit as we reached the pebble and epoxy-covered outdoor flooring. It was a soft tan color, meant to look like a sandy beach surrounding our pool.

 I couldn’t see anymore. But now, he answered me.

 “I know you’re not the same anymore.”

He scooped my armless body up into his chest and kissed my forehead. The he tossed me into our kidney-shaped pool.

 

 

*This story is based on/inspired by "Crashing Your Planets," by Possum Dixon.  

 

Thankful for restraint, even if it doesn't appear until long after the punch.

Thankful for grace, because beauty can't carry you everywhere. 

Thankful for patience, because nitpickers are never satisfied with a single tawdry poke. 

Thankful for precociousness, because it's not just little girls who need that kind of fervor to survive.

Thankful for a shine on this pair of patent shoes, so I can see if what she's got under there is just as as lascivious as what I'm hiding.

Thankful for insight, because I wouldn't know how else to remember when we were young. 

Thankful for sleep, because it is the only place I can load a gun. 

Thankful for brown hair, because there is only one way to navigate flawlessly -- with intelligence, perceived or otherwise.

Thankful for observation, as those gestures seen from across a table can mean more than you're willing to give up.

Thankful for precision, because rules are rules and there is no reason to break them.

Thankful for depth, even if it means saying something three times in dead air and waiting for the rest to grasp it. 

Thankful for heart, because there's not enough room for all of that ego in a mind or a sleeve.

 

 

 

Thankful for guts -- because to be gutless is to be trite, irrelevant, boring, infertile and cursed. 

 

 

Now, 2012, if I could have you please step away from the giveaway shoebox, it would be greatly appreciated. 

* All items/memories taken from the shoebox are non-returnable. New owner assumes all responsibility regarding activities/judgements made after aquisition of materials — human, fictionally emotional, or otherwise.

I want to crumple you up into a receipt, like a piece of over-chewed gum. Put you in my purse and never let you out. Then your life will become a universe of guitar picks, bobby pins, loose change and wrinkled wads of other receipt coffins. But these coffins have words on them — words on the back, dummy. Not the ones printed on the heat-sensitive side, though I do like it when they say the word tender. 

Tender is a such a greasy, daddy word. A word best only at describing steaks and youngish girls. But those paper pine boxes aren’t talking about that kind of tender. I know that. Cash sounds boring. It is boring.

The words on the other side, the non-potentially-tendered side, are mine. They are probably about you. They are probably about how you don’t call (enough, though you call me all of the time, almost daily, and tell me all sorts of day-to-day stuff you think I don’t want to hear but sigh so secretly every time you tell me because it feels like you are telling me things all of those other people who follow you around like puppies will never know, and for the record, I am mostly jealous of those puppies).

When you do call, it might be 78% what I want to hear (but the other 19% of what I want is so much more than one-thousand coffee dates and three-hundred dinner table conversations about previously opened legs you’ve seen while examining the television over her head while I, back in the saddle across from you at a boring and half-empty restaurant, not on the floor where her head butts up to the television, am staring, from your patchy beard to your zipper, and thinking gross thoughts about meeting relatives and little spoons and a of slew bossy allowances I will take involving folding your laundry, and the other 3%? I wish it was just nasty, repeat-offender phone sex). But I can’t blame you for anything. Especially when I have you cornered and coddled at the bottom of my purse in a register tape prison. 

I told you today on the telephone, before I wrapped you up in a minty parchment blanket, that I was thinking too much about sex. I’m a catholic. I’m too catholic. I say things, desire penance almost immediately, and then wish I had never said them, let alone thought them. Dirty cans of worms are the hardest for me to open, mostly because I do it with my eyes closed (like when I turn in a piece for final edits, knowing I haven’t run even the single obligatory spell check). Luckily for me, you let the dirty words bounce off my tongue and right back into my throat. You’re an ace at knowing when I’ve unleashed something I should only share with a pen and a grease-stained piece of paper. You pretend not to notice. I pretend I haven’t just thanked you. With an inner dialog that couldn't use the word tender without laughing, externally, if it tried.

How can two people talk so much, when one of them is being held hostage inside a piece of paper that isn’t even folded nicely?

The cord wrapped around her foot, corkscrewing up her calf and pressing into her thigh like a rubber band. Skin and telephone wiring swirled together, the twisted electrical fibers leaving red indentations in her smooth white flesh like a peppermint stick with a faint map of blue veins underneath. A cheap and scuffed pair of heels sat under the desk next to her bare feet. One tacky crimson block of plastic stood upright against the rotary dial cradle, the other on its side like a fallen game piece. Her toes felt their way up the bottom of the metal office chair as she shifted her body to the edge of the seat.

 

Faye Pascal was not a terribly fancy or well-mannered girl, but she knew the importance of good posture in the work place. Her spine pushed into an upright position, chest out, her smallish belly protruding to let the air in as she gripped the receiver. She moved her foot over to the base of the red telephone, using her toe to open up the awaiting call. "Hello, hello and thank you for calling Berkshire Industries. How may I direct your call?" Her repetition of the word "hello" was a secretarial signature. She thought she invented it. 

 

Faye sat seventh in a row of a dozen operators, three telephones at her feet. She liked all of the desk space to be free for her to take necessary notes, and to collect and stack papers appropriately. The red telephone was the general line for incoming calls, the green one was a direct line to Mr. Lancer's office, and the third was a yellow telephone, the Yellow Line. The Yellow Line only rang for deaths.

 

When bodies were brought to Berkshire Industries that did not meet the required parameters, a Death Allowance Technician would pick up the Yellow Line. It rang directly to the yellow rotary telephone at Faye’s feet. Once a call was placed, the proper paperwork would be dumped from the ceiling chute onto her empty desk. Exactly six minutes after the call was concluded, Faye was to process and file away all of the necessary dropped documents.

 

The defective body’s file was then sent to Mr. Lancer for final appropriations. Mr. Lancer was a very thin man, but a handsome one. He didn’t like to leave his office except to use the restroom, and he had a tendency to act overly concerned about the dead bodies when it was entirely unnecessary. Faye watched his body language through the wall of glass between their desks. She found his compassion attractive.  Once Mr. Lancer approved the Death Allowance Technician’s diagnosis, he would raise one finger, signaling for Faye to call a car to pick up the defective body.

 

As Faye processed the last body of the day’s paperwork, a call from the green telephone startled her. It was too late for any bodies to come through. As she stared through the glass at Mr. Lancer, she could see his knuckles gripping the green receiver with force. She hoped he was calling for other reasons. She hoped he wanted to see her outside of the glass.

 

“Faye, I have some bad news. I, I…” Mr. Lancer’s voice trailed off. He was not calling to ask her for dinner, like she hoped.

 

The Yellow Line rang, the green receiver still hanging from Faye’s ear.

 

“Please excuse me for a moment, Mr. Lancer. It seems the Death Allowance Technicians still have one more body to process before close of business today.”

 

She held the green handset in her right hand. Mr. Lancer watched as Faye leaned down to pick up The Yellow Line with her left hand, his face crumbling into a red mess as her head ducked under her desk.

 

“This is Faye, may I have the name of the defective body for processing please?”

 

“Faye Pascal,” the technician responded.

 

 

 

The dirt was the cool kind of damp, just enough to make his fingers uncomfortable with the slightest breeze. As he dug into the cottage cheese-textured soil, her heard her voice. Only the key phrases rung out enough for his ear to catch.

“Satisfaction,” she said.  ”Is withstanding,” she said.

His head hung heavy over the collar of his shirt for a moment. 

“Gratuitous gestures,” she said.

He craned his neck, peering through the rose bushes, catching the angle of her chin between two buds. His fingers sunk deeper. Her jaw moved so gracefully, dropping with strong syllables, bouncing back up as her lips met. 

“He has no presence,” she said.  ”He is in a perpetual state of insecurity” she said.

The P’s in “presence” and “perpetual” bubbled out of her lips like air from a deflating ballon. She had wads of spit for him from behind those lips too, he knew. She lobbed them at the gutter once when they were fighting outside of a drug store. But her listener now, the man on the other other side of the rose bushes with her, he would never have to see her saliva hit the tar and cement. She was reserved for him, the damsel card was being played at the moment, but soon she would retreat to his arms.

And he would watch from the ground, low beneath the flower bed in the park by their house.

“Tired,” she said. “Exhausted from his lovelessness,” she said.

The man was going to hold her now. With knees grinding into the topsoil, he watched as the other man held his wife. He held her so naturally. He cupped her thin figure in a way that meant he had done it before. This was not a stranger’s embrace. This was the embrace of a man who was familiar with someone else’s wife’s body. 

The thing about a myth is, beyond it, there is a truth.

And the truth about monogamy is, well, everybody fucks.

Head down, my hands press into the sticky pages of The September Issue. My eyes are secret, scanning the hard, plastic bench seat running the length of the train car. Her thigh hits my vision. Her imperfect thigh. Tallish, thinnish, with black eyeliner and boots. Symmetry and parallel lines, her skinny frame hides her imperfect thighs. I trade looks; eyes to the glossy paper, eyes on her legs. The legs in Vogue are bent and angled. No drips of skin, no puffs of health and fat. The legs, her legs, look like Vogue legs when she stands up. But on the bench, they are puckered. They dimple like mine. Her thighs and mine mirror each other. But when I stand, its easy to see my silly little gut push out. My western height and hands, my out-of-shape and tired glasses. My coarse and uneven figure burns bright like a sore thumb under the fluorescence and metal poles of the subway car. When she stands, the truths of our matching bodies disappear. Upright, her lines are clean. Her clothes are safely dark and textured. Her hair drops down below her chin, jutting out from her jawline and hanging over my normal, ratted ponytail. We stand close as the train car pours people in and trickles them out. I clench The September Issue with my bone-in fingers, and hide my eyes on the floor. Our puckered, dimpled, sunless, girl thighs are real. But she is not. She is gone.

I wonder what its like to sit inside a seashell. Down the cavernous opening, past the sea sounds is a turquoise waiting room filled with the sick and dirty, on a list to fill the needs of television hits and prayers. What if rapture brought an end to the senseless sound of crashing waves? 

Where the sea ends, the folding chairs begin. Down the hall with a checker-tiled floor, past the white hat reception desk, beyond a pile of magazines they sit. The hall is lined with burns and scrapes. Babies with croup and sand in their hair. Seaside pleasure and injury sit and wait to see the doctor. Propeller cuts, damaged fins, coughs and tears of skin. Everyone is waiting.

There are no pens and paper at the sea. There is no place for me. No way to write foolproof prescriptions for imaginary disease. There are no sign-up sheets or requests for care inside this seashell waiting room. Without a notebook, I'm left in salt water. I write in air, share a wealth of thoughts with the sand. 

When the shell has closed up for the night, and the tide has died down, will you still fight for my care? Three hots and cot is all I ask. Will you to reach across the desk and shake to abide by the ocean rules? Or are you content to stay in this seashell waiting room forever?

Boyfriends. Drugs. None of the above. No means no. No means maybe later when I feel less better, and I can say with my whole heart that yes, you are the binder. The holder, the manipulator, and the man who is a boy who is the supreme alienator. I feel sad when I want Rock with You, I feel sad when I want to Nights of the Living Dead with you. I feel bad when I want to  think that the Music Sounds Better With You. I see a dance floor in my dreams, and under the spotlight on the hi-gloss you hold one hand over my mouth. The other hand holds some obscure record that holds more meaning than a hand. A hand in the hold, your speech in the fold. If I lay your speech patterns out, if I tear them out from the fold, you can see why I thought you were telling me the truth. Your thought patterns were tests, ounces of strength to keep my mind in a vice grip and my heart at unease. Did you ever notice how our skin was the same color? Our body's freckles almost matched in size and hue. Our genetics were so close to the same, but my heart and your brain, they felt like unequals mashed together into a bloody pulp. The bloody pulp that wandered around like two pieces placed on a playing board as friends. There was me, and there was you, two pairs of glasses, a fight, the sex you had with all of my friends, and not enough control to keep the insides from hanging out. My insides are gross, as faded, curdled, and cellulited as my outsides.