Month: December 2020

William Snyder

Me, my father, nurse Joanne—the blue 

carpet, the clean fluorescence, the open 

rooms. And inside those rooms, 

people with gift-wrap paper, soda cans, 

TV remotes. My father doesn’t look, 

though days ago he would have, would’ve 

asked, even strangers: How are you? 

Beautiful day, isn’t it? But now it’s his 

feet—if he can align them properly, 

one foot in front of the other. His arms stiff, 

tremulous, his fingers too, gripping 

the walker handles. Legs, knees, hips—

stiff. Head, neck, shoulders sagging. 

Joanne says, Lean back on your heels. Try 

to stand up straight. But his feet

lag and she says, Step, step up, step up 

to the walker. He tries, his slippers 

toeing the carpet like a toddler’s might. 

I walk behind, watch the gown sleeve slip 

from his shoulder, the gown bottom open, 

his flattened butt, the serrated veins 

like tobacco leaf. I push the wheeled, silver 

pole he’s tethered to—plastic bags 

swaying there like translucent fruit. I stop 

when he stops. He’s tired. Or it’s just his 

stubbornness. Food, water, medicine 

slosh in the bags, seep down 

tubes to the hole in his side, cut 

there for drips, for funnel spouts the nurses 

use when time is important. Time is 

important, even on this walk—how long, 

how short, is anybody’s guess. 

Addison Rizer

The morning I put my dog down, a love letter skitters across the sidewalk. I can tell by the flashes of pink scribbled onto the thick envelope turning end over end as it dances with the wind. On a bench, across the street, I wonder if it’s real. If I am real. I’m half-convinced, too late now, that I should have kept him alive.

Yes, there was the tumor. Yes, there were the seizures, two and then three times a day, but only when he got excited. His tail was wagging and then, all at once, it was stiff and soaked in his urine as he yelped on the floor. Yes, there was the heart murmur that the overweight vet said was a six out of six. Not a murmur—a pause, a giving up.

But he was coherent most of the day. Sleeping underneath the television, walking, skewed sideways by his growth the size of a baseball, then a softball, then even larger upon his ribcage. He followed me to the kitchen when I came home with his favorite tortillas from the Mexican food place down the road. Yes, most times he was himself. 

But then for an hour after the seizures, he was walking into walls. He was staring at nothing. He was unaware of his own name.

Though 90 percent of the day he was himself, the other 10 percent he was empty, and the balance was growing ever more to the hollow side. What percentage was I waiting for? I told myself not yet. Not until it felt right to say goodbye. Until it didn’t feel so selfish to say enough was enough, knees aching from cleaning up his pee from the carpet for the third time in a day. 

It was convenient to consider putting him down. Horrible to admit to when he still slept curled against my side every night, chasing the neighbor’s cat through his dreams. When he still knew the smell of fresh tortillas. It was selfish of me to want not to worry so much about him. To want him to be his old self. To be easier—my entire shift at the gas station spent counting how many stains I would have to scrub when I got home, carpet marks pressed into my skin permanently, it seemed.

But the seizures got worse. Still, I couldn’t be certain. I couldn’t be sure. Not with a decision like this. I asked the vet what he thought, and he only looked at me with sad eyes. He couldn’t make this decision. In every universe I existed in, this was the one in which I was the loneliest.

I nodded. I nodded. How could I have nodded?

I’m convinced now, as I watch the love letter slide away, that I was wrong to put him down. He could have lived a few more years. He could have walked sideways into the kitchen and bit my fingers as I fed him tiny pieces of tortilla broken from my own quesadilla, warm from the oven. He could have been happy and alive and dreaming, still.

But the seizures. The tumor. The way his heart was giving out.

The love letter slides against the sidewalk, drifting farther from the mailbox glinting sunlight into the eyes of everyone who passes. Farther and farther away from me. The love letter will waste away. It will find a puddle and sink into it. Pick up boot-print and mud-streak and deteriorate beneath the sunlight.

Surely, someone else will pick it up. Surely, a passerby will make sure it reaches its rightful place.

But no one stoops to pick it up off the ground. Eyes glance, mouths frown, but still, no one touches it.

I have to be at work in 20 minutes. I have to dry my eyes. But I take seven steps after the letter even as it takes seven steps more away from me. I lurch for it. It lurches for someone else. I understand that. I wish I could lurch away from myself, too. I killed my friend just hours ago. I held him as he died.

I crash into the shoulder of a man walking in the opposite direction. I don’t even apologize. I notice the throb in my shoulder only after he has already disappeared. I look back and wonder if I collided with a ghost. That doesn’t matter now. The letter needs to find its home. It would be a tragedy to expect a letter on Saturday and find only an empty mailbox. What if it’s the last love letter that person will ever receive? What if it’s the last love letter in the whole universe? I can’t let it stay lost.

I have suspected for a while now that love letters are only ever about one thing: regret. Regretting leaving, regretting staying, saying the wrong things, never saying the right ones. Attempts at righting wrongs, even the simple wrong of the universe’s distance between two people. Who am I to witness the destruction of that? Who am I to enable it by my inaction?

I’ve waited too long. I should have started running when the letter hit the ground. I should have caught it before it fell. Now, it will have wounds it doesn’t deserve, scrapes picked up from the ground.

I run. The letter catches air, envelope shining in the light. The suggestion of rain clouds on the horizon. My shift is starting, and I’m still running. The sun shifts, and I’m still running. I slip on sidewalk cracks and push off passing people and bruises bloom on my biceps. They ache with my reaching.

Still, I reach. I lunge. My lungs burn. My legs go numb. The sun begins to set, and the suggestion of clouds becomes the reality of rain.

I miss the entirety of my shift. I miss dinner with my mother. I miss 10 phone calls from my boyfriend. I miss my dog—my  friend—and I picture his face as his eyes went dull. I miss the letter, over and over again, hands always empty.

Still, I inch forward. The letter slows, in my eye line but ever out of reach. Midnight nears. Rain falls. Is it fair to stop running now? Now that I’m soaked and starving and have missed all my plans? Now that the water is ruining the letter, smearing the words?

When the sun comes up, the letter is half-sludge, crawling upon the sidewalk. The name on the envelope has disappeared in the night. Should I keep running, now? When can I say I tried hard enough to be satisfied with failing? With losing?

If I scoop it up in my palm, it can’t be delivered. The mailman won’t try.

What now? A trashcan sits nearby. Should I throw it away? A letter once so full of meaningful regret? A letter that meant something to someone? A tragedy thrown in with orange peels. That feels wrong. It all does.

In a patch of grass, I dig with my hands, nails broken and fingers pruned. I slide the sludge into the hole. I cover it up with damp dirt and mark the spot with an uneven heart and say goodbye aloud. I cry.

I’m not convinced I shouldn’t have put him down. I’m not convinced, sludge stuck to the crevices of my fingers, of the suffering I had spared him. Too early or too late. I tried for so long to catch the letter. Tried until my legs gave out.

It’s impossible to know if, had I tried harder, I could have caught it in time. But I did what I could. I did what I could. I promise, my friend, I did what I could. I hope I can be forgiven for that.

I hope a tree grows from this place. I don’t know; I don’t know. I was only trying my best in this loneliest universe, and more than anything I am grateful for the body that slept beside me, for the fact of the love letter at all.

Nathan Mann

            Before Teddy’s mom goes, she teaches Jacob and his mom three signs. 

1. Thank you.
2. You’re welcome.
3. More. 

Teddy can lip-read. But his mom worries. This is his first playdate. She leaves, turns onto the logging road, disappears.

            Jacob leads Teddy inside to his action figures. They play quietly with the men, pointing to talk.

That man.

That man.

They should fight.

They play until all the men are dead. 

Jacob wants Teddy to have fun because their school can be mean. He gives his friend a thumbs up. Teddy nods, signs thank you. Jacob’s heart is happy.

            The wallpaper in the living room is faded. Teddy likes it. Climbing vines. Blue flowers. He traces the leaves with his finger and then taps Jacob’s mom. He gives her a thumbs up. She says “thank you” with her lips and then remembers to sign.

You’re welcome, he says. 

            Teddy feels like the house is perfect. It is warm with sunny windows and wallpaper, and he wants to explore every room and stay forever. Maybe Mom can, too. He wants to ask Jacob. 

            Jacob puts on the album that Teddy selected from the CD rack. The speakers crackle. Jacob turns them up halfway. Jacob sits on his bed and listens for the both of them. Teddy copies him, holds his head sideways, and signs more. 

            At full volume, the bed shakes. The window squeaks against the A/C. Jacob’s mom yells that he’s in trouble, but he can’t turn it down. Teddy is dancing. He bobs his head to the thundering bass. Teddy can hear. Jacob will show Teddy’s mom the impossible. Teddy can hear.

They go outside. Jacob tugs him around and points. The birds?

No.

The chimes?

No.

The whirring AC?

No.

They stand by the road and wait for a logging truck. Jacob holds up a finger, touches his ear. Teddy knows patience. 

A truck bounces by, and Jacob pumps his arm. The truck tumbles on. 

Did you hear that? 

Yes. 

The horn?

It was fainter than the rumble Teddy felt in the bedroom. The happy buzz. But it was there. He points to his chest. Here.  

            They find a dead deer beside the road, its chest caved in. 

The truck? asks Teddy. 

Yes, says Jacob. His mom would be angry if they touched it. 

Rain comes and goes and leaves puddles in the logging road. Jacob and Teddy play. They splash, fling mud. Jacob’s mom is angry. She waves them inside, and Teddy obeys.

Jacob sits in a puddle alone, his eyes closed, his fingers in his ears. He needs to understand how Teddy hears so he can tell Teddy’s mom. He sinks into the mud, opens his heart to the world. A buzzing fills his chest.  He pushes his fingers deeper.

More.

Pebbles shake.

More.

Jacob sinks into the mud, feels the music in his body, as the logging truck nears. 

J. Howard Siegal 

I stop into the gas station the other day to pick up a pack of smokes, and I see him there, that kid who once saved all of humanity from a looming catastrophe, or just found himself really bored at a party, or possibly both of those things at once. 

He sits behind the counter, his dark hair and narrow features folded into the crease of a newspaper, his limbs rumpled in his work overalls, framed by plexiglass and impulse-buy offerings, slouching through time. 

“Hey,” I say, “box of Darts.” 
His hand reaches up to grab the pack and, bringing it down, flips it into his other palm, where it momentarily disappears. He produces the pack from under the counter, then looks up, and his face softens in recognition. He gives me a weak smile. 

“How do you like it here?” I ask. 

He laughs. 

“It’s better, right? Than people dying in the streets or something?” 

“I’m dating Marie now,” he says. 

 
     I meet him for the first time at Marie’s house party, waiting in line for the bathroom. Lydia spills out of it, shouting into her phone at her boyfriend, and then as soon as she closes the door behind her, that kid opens it from the inside and peeks out, eyes darting above his slender nose and chin. 

He just stands there for the longest time, saying nothing. Then he turns and walks straight into the kitchen. We all bust up—what the hell was that about! 

I go into the bathroom, and the window is still nailed shut, from that time that creepy dude was arrested in the park.  

Marie says, “Okay, I’m going to talk to that kid.” 

We find him in the kitchen, looking through the cupboards.  

Marie says, “Can I help you?” 

He starts going on about orange soda.  

She says, “Why were you in the bathroom with my friend, huh?  What were you doing in there?” 

The kid shrinks into his clothes and starts apologizing. 

Marie grabs Lydia and drags her over. “Were you watching my friend?” She backs him up against the screen door of the kitchen.  

Lydia swears the dude was not in the bathroom with her. 

Marie pokes the dude in the chest and says, “I’m watching you, skinny.” 

Lydia puts her arm around him. “This lamb is clearly lost as fuck. Let’s get him a beer.” 

Marie tails along to surveil as Lydia sells the whole beer line on the idea that this kid has taken way too many drugs and needs a drink, like immediately. She liberates the tap, pours three beers, and whisks us out of the kitchen. 

In the living room, Lydia and Marie sit the kid down in an arm chair and flank him. 

Lydia: “Where are you from, honey?” 

Marie: “What were you doing in that bathroom?” 

Lydia: “Are you a student?” 

Marie: “Hold on, I’m going to take your picture. Sit still.” 

Lydia: “Are you, like, on the spectrum?” 

Marie: “Do you even know anyone at this party?” 

Lydia: “Did someone give you something to eat?  Was it, maybe, mushrooms?  A little piece of paper?” 

Marie: “What the fuck were you doing in that bathroom?” 

At long last, the guy mumbles something about air, then gets up and walks away. We lose sight of him through the crowd in the hallway. 

David Hu says he talked to the kid. He also relates the curious phenomenon of walking into a seemingly empty bathroom and having this guy breeze out of it. 

All David can think to say is, “Keep the door closed.” 

A while later, we come into the kitchen for a refill and find the kid standing by himself, looking around. “Hey man, are you okay?” 

The guy shakes his head, looks worried. 

“Follow me,” David says, and we all walk out to the back porch. “Hey, this is, uh, some guy I just met. We’re gonna smoke this joint.”   

“Nice,” someone says.  

David puts flame to the joint and passes it. “Ever smoke this before?” 

The kid shakes his head. 

“No pressure,” David says. The joint goes around several times, and David and the rest of us lapse into giggling reminiscence. 

Stories begin flowing, the evening air is cool, and everyone huddles closer. At some point, the kid reaches to intercept the joint, puts it to his lips, and inhales. He coughs out a billow of smoke. He hangs around the circle, smoking and smiling, chuckling at the borrowed stories. At one point, he lets out a deep sigh that halts the conversation. The kid looks around. Everyone starts laughing again. He phases out of the circle some time before we notice he’s gone. 

He pops out of the bathroom, turns hard for the kitchen, and bashes straight into the back of some huge guy, spilling beer everywhere. The guy turns slowly, with a scowl. The kid shrinks. 

Then we hear a voice, “Hey, it’s the Bathroom Dude!” 

Lydia emerges from the crowd, puts her arm over the kid’s shoulders, and scolds her man. “This dude has now arrived at this party three different times, and you barely even got your ass here once!” 

Bathroom Dude says he’s been too early. 

The next time he shows up, we’ve adopted him. 

“Bathroom Duuuuude! BD!” 

He’s walking down the hallway. The crowd parts. 

“Are you, like, an internet magician? Is this gonna be on YouTube?” 

BD brushes past rims of plastic cups. Fingers pat his shoulders. 

We follow him into the kitchen again, where he leans against the counter. Everyone looks at him, waiting for a trick. Several people hand him beers. 

Suddenly he looks up. Someone else is parting the crowd in the hallway, holding aloft a trophy of stacked white boxes. 

“Pizza’s here!” 

Marie slides in next to BD at the kitchen counter. His eyes are locked on the pizza. 

“Gonna grab a slice, BD?” 

BD shakes his head. 

Marie looks up at the side of BD’s face. “I don’t like you, Bathroom Dude. I don’t like you. I’m on to you. I think you’re full of shit, that’s what I think.” 

She drinks half a beer in three gulps. “I think you’re just a tricky kid. I gotta be honest with you, man. I’m sorry if you, like—you know, have difficulties or whatever, but I gotta tell you, Beeeee Deeee, I think you’re here for a reason. And you know what else? I think you’re just a fucking scrawny lonely kid with poor social skills.” 

BD tells her this is all true. 

Marie rolls up her T-shirt sleeve. “You see this tattoo, man?  You see that eyeball?  I’m watching you, dude. It’s watching you. All the time.” 

BD takes his eyes off the pizza, just for a moment, to look at all of Marie’s eyes. 

BD is thronged in humanity. Someone has turned on music, loud, and all of us in the kitchen are moving. The floor bows in and out of rhythm. He keeps his eyes on the pizza boxes, trying to catch, in his periphery, what is going on with these moving limbs. People press and jostle him, but he smiles. The music is pulsing and articulate. The room smells of cologne, sweat, and beer. Marie is over there, dancing with Lydia and her boyfriend. 

Someone bumps him. A laugh spills out. 

A beer is pressed into his hands. 

“Yeahhh, Bathroom Duuuude!” someone yells. 

A chant starts. A hand guides the cup to his lips. A cup is pressed into his other hand. 

We are patting his back, rubbing his shoulders. He drinks down the cups. 

An energy seems to well in him. He throws down the plastic cups, pushes the crowd away, staggers forward, and knocks down the pile of empty pizza boxes on the table. He then attacks them, pulling them apart in strips, intoning to no one in particular, “I came here from a long time forward. There is a fungus that gets made here. It is catastrophic for humanity. The orange soda gets left out with the pizza boxes and some cigarette ash and the rotting wood of the balcony. It makes the mold.” 

BD looks up at the partygoers, strips of pizza boxes in his hands. “Everyone gets sick. Few survive. Please, my friends, dispose of your food, your drink, your trash, responsibly.” 

Everyone dies laughing. This kid is too much. We love this guy. He must be high as fuck. We beg him to stay. He admits he does like it here, but he has to make sure he finishes with these pizza boxes. And where is the orange soda? 

Someone runs out to grab some. 

After a time, the party flags out. The crowd thins, and stragglers condense into addled little clusters of conversation. BD sits on the couch, his eyelids closing and opening, Lydia breathing into his ear about her boyfriend. 

The diehards sink into snoring poses all over the apartment. 

The next morning, I get up to piss, and the bathroom door is locked. I lean against the wall of the hallway, rubbing my face. The lock of the door clicks, and the latch turns, and out stumbles BD. 

“Hey, man,” I say. “No trick this time, huh.” 

He looks pale and sick, totally lost. 

I pull out my phone. “Can I get you a ride home?” 

He scowls and shakes his head, then slowly turns and shambles away from me, down the hallway and out of the apartment. 

I head for the kitchen to scrounge for a forgotten cigarette among the abandoned cups and party debris. As I push open the screen door, I have a momentary fright, that I’ll look down at the rotting wood of the back porch and see an open pizza box, slices going soggy under the drips of an overturned bottle of orange soda, and a greenish grey spatter coming to life on the crust. 

But I find no super-mold, no evident aftermath of heroism, just the same old planks of the porch, the same old haze of the morning. I pick up an empty pack of cigarettes from the window ledge and rip it open. Inside, with a pen from my pocket, I write, “Here the world was saved.” 

I let the paper monument float down into the future. 

Eloise Schultz

Morgan finds the first louse on our bed.

I pinch the second in a piece of tape, drop it in the trash.

Our long-haired house is understandably horrified.

Jess won’t share her hair dryer. I borrow Gaia’s but don’t say what for.

Shir advises to drown my scalp in Cetaphil. At the pharmacy she waves, keeps her distance.

Drugstore woman murmurs, Good luck, sweetie.

TV detective shouts, We’ve got them cornered now—

At home I wear a plastic bag & think unwelcome thoughts.

Translucent droves descend the shower drain, clinging to licesaving rope,

Floating to lice afterlife while I wash the bedding

            & my friends watch Italian art dramas.

True beauty, says Anđela, wavers between vulgarity & sensuality.

My mom used to check my head at breakfast. She pulled the brush so hard, I cried & begged for her to stop.

Now Morgan stands behind me & searches my hair.

Glides her comb through each curl: pronounces me clean.

M.M. Kaufman

The itching came with the sun one morning. I had torn open my slip from scratching in my sleep. Standing naked in front of the full-length mirror, all I could see was a patch of red, raw skin stretched across my left side. I winced when I put my fingertips to it. Taking a deep breath, I pushed on it. My body gave where it shouldn’t and pushed back in unexpected places. My lower left rib felt larger and softer than bone ever should.

I wasn’t worried then. I’d lived in the country my whole life and had enough sense not to panic over one itchy spot. I slathered on calamine and threw on my loosest housedress. As it fell over my head, I saw something out of the corner of my eye and gasped.

I’d taken the mirror, tall and stark in the corner of the room, for a person. But there was no one here but myself.

As I headed downstairs to make coffee, I swayed in the doorway, off balance. A wave of nausea hit me. I shook my head and hung it between my knees.

My hands traveled back to my side. I scratched harder and harder. I pulled my hands away. Red crescents bloomed under my nails.

            My parents raised me in this house I now call my own. I clean it that way, too. Four bedrooms may seem like a lot for one woman, but I think it’s right. Each room cleaned like the last. There is nothing spare about my life here.

My parents died the day of our high school graduation. They made it to the ceremony all right but got hit by a truck hauling eggs on their way back home for the party. My brother, J-boy, and I were riding with friends to guide them down the tree-lined roads that lead to our farmhouse. We found our parents crushed at the last bend—a mix of egg, blood, and dirt.

J-boy cleared out with the dust from the wake. He visited a handful of times over the next year. Showed up on the front porch with a ham or a basket of peaches—a request for casserole or cobbler disguised as a gift. After a week or so, he left to sell tires or fix toilets, whatever filled his gas tank and kept him driving back and forth across the Southeast.

I stayed behind. I was a solitary girl, and now I am a solitary woman. The house is old but paid off. I work as an online transcriptionist to cover the few bills. I never could find a reason to leave this house except for groceries and books.

As a child, I dreamed of traveling the world, but it hardly crosses my mind anymore. I experience the world fine in the stacks of the Appleby Library every Sunday at eleven. I return what books I’d gotten the week before and pick out enough books for the week ahead. My church—a visit about as long as a service and more interesting.

Once I finished hanging the linens, I threw on a pair of my mother’s overalls. The calamine lotion hadn’t done anything to quell the itching, but the spot looked less menacing. I cut off a leaf from an aloe vera plant on the kitchen windowsill, prepared it, and slathered some on. As I rode my bike into town, I let the overalls hang open on the left side so the wind could hit against the aloe patch.

At Appleby, I nodded to Nancy, the weekend librarian. She mumbled a distracted, “Morning, Marigold,” from behind her Cast Iron Cooking magazine.

I set down her coffee, the bag of donuts, and my old books and then walked into the stacks.

With my eyes closed, I took slow steps and fingered the book spines. What comfort books gave me. The solidness of them, the tight binding, the weight of them in my hands.

Fifteen minutes into my survey of Science and Civilization, pain shot across my side. I braced myself against the shelves and breathed until it passed. I unhooked my overalls and pulled them down. There was now a large, dark-pink welt where, an hour ago, there was only a scratch.

I pressed my fingertips to it, and it burned them as if it were a lit stovetop.

“Lord almighty!” I hissed.

I wiped my damp forehead with the tail of my shirt and stuffed it back into the overalls. When had I started sweating? This wasn’t like any spider bite I’d had before. Whatever it was, it felt like it was taking me for a ride.

I left the books I had pulled off the shelf on the floor and walked back to Nancy’s desk.

She dropped her gold beaded chain connected to her glasses onto her bosom.

“That was fast.” Nancy stopped when she saw I was empty handed. “Something out of place again?”

I lifted up my shirt. “No, I— it’s nothing.”

“Pretty nasty wound there.”

“Did you say womb?” I asked, louder than intended.
Nancy shh’ed me and spelled, “W-O-U-N-D.”

I nodded and tucked the shirt back in. My eyes focused and unfocused across the myriad pictures taped around Nancy’s desk. They were all pictures of her daughter with her many sticky-faced children.

“Have you seen my newest?” Nancy pulled out her phone and flicked through shot after shot. “Here’s Lolee with the twins at the trampoline park. It’s a little out of focus ‘cause Presley-Ann was taking the picture.”

Lolee, or Tupelo Lee, was Nancy’s daughter, named after Elvis Presley’s hometown. She had been in my class all through school. Nancy had another child, Aaron, but I never heard much about him. Whatever he was doing somewhere up east, it wasn’t making babies.

Lolee had been as listless as I was when we graduated. Where I locked up my listlessness in my parents’ house, she took hers out for a joyride. She tried on different boyfriends, part-time jobs, and drug habits. I remember how, a few years ago, Nancy railed against Lolee’s latest bender on a given Sunday morning. She questioned why she ever had Lolee, why she hadn’t kicked her out.  

But then Lolee got pregnant. Everything changed. The world rotated around Lolee and her precious gift to the world. The unexpected fetus, named at what I estimate was 20 minutes old, was Gracelyn Mae. The name was embroidered and hashtagged on everything. Gracelyn Mae somehow turned Lolee into the Virgin Mary.

I was jealous of the respect and admiration. I hadn’t ever planned on having children. But my mother would have loved to be a grandmother. She would have been like Nancy here, showing pictures to anyone who walked by.

It made me hate Nancy.

She broke off into giggles at the next picture. “This was when Gracelyn Mae ate some of my face cream thinking it was frosting!”

I took the phone and looked at the toddler with the pained, beet-red expression. I handed the phone back and came up with my fifth iteration of the sound, “Ahh.”

I felt another sharp pain like a crack of lightning. A wave of intense pressure across my side followed it. “Christ on a cracker!”

“Get yourself home, girl. Have a bath.”

I nodded and walked out with my empty bag slung over one shoulder and both hands pressed to my side. There was hardly traffic in town to interfere with organ music as it drifted out of the church and across the two-lane road.

I rolled my bike over and peered through one of the stained-glass windows. I couldn’t see anything but the blue-and-green marbled shapes of the people as they stood to sing. I waved goodbye knowing no one could see me. I peddled up the hill until my calves burned and the asphalt sputtered into the sandy-red dirt that led to home.

           For some reason I imagined the pain would stop, or at least subside, when I got back to the house. Or that the solace I felt each time I came home would blot out any discomfort. But it didn’t. I felt the pain pulse like a racing heartbeat as I took the steps.

“Damnit all,” I cursed when I noticed I’d left my bag in the bike’s basket. I walked back down the steps, keeping pressure off my left leg. Something like an ice pick pierced my side. I sank to my knees and knocked the bike over into the bird fountain. Concrete smashed and slimy water ran down my chest.

“What in the actual fuck?”
No one but the birds answered.

The red rash had spread into a much wider circle. I called it a rash, but, it looked like a galaxy, like constellations made from blood drawn to the surface. And the mass, the wound, whatever it was, had grown so that it protruded farther than my fist. Lavender-colored veins threaded through it. It was strange and beautiful.

I can’t tell you why I didn’t call a doctor. I didn’t want to, and that had always been a good enough reason in the past.

Hours later, I woke up in bed exhausted as I had never been before. It was dark outside. I hung my legs off the wrought-iron bed frame and smiled to myself as my dream came back to me. In the dream the itch on my side had grown and grown until—

Another shooting pain rocked my body. I sat up, gasping for air.

I lifted my shirt to see that the spot had grown. As in my dream, it was the shape of a cantaloupe. I traced my finger around its edges, amazed that it seemed to be a perfect circle. It didn’t hurt when I touched it now. My touch felt like a feather. I traced the veins of deep purple.

I took off my clothes and stood naked in front of the mirror. I strained to see the spot in the moonlight through the window. I never felt so alone as I did in moonlight. I closed the curtains on the moon, put my clothes back on, and lay back down. I picked one of the blades on the slow-turning ceiling fan and watched it spin.

I hadn’t felt alone in my dream. I felt that my rib really was a something. It was growing and moving beneath the surface of my skin.

The spot itched worse than ever and burned like fire. I put socks on my hands to soften the scratching and pressed a cold rag to my side, but nothing helped. The itching wasn’t coming from the surface of my skin, but underneath it. Something was scratching back.

I made my way down the stairs. Walking was slow and painful. I don’t know what I wanted with going downstairs, but it felt like the right thing to do.

I kept walking to the front door, to the porch, to the clothesline. It was pitch black except for the moonlight. I used the scent of the tea olive tree to guide me. To what, other than the tree itself, I don’t know.

I sank down to my knees and tore my clothes off. I could feel the spot radiating heat. It grew away from my body. It grew until I could feel it pull my center of gravity. I held the mass protruding from my ribs in my hands as it grew, twisted, and took form.

The pain felt surreal and necessary. I needed this. It was tearing my body apart but fortifying my spirit. There was something guiding me, a kind of fire both in my rib and in my head. It told me to hold the spot gently but with firm hands, to lie down on my unencumbered side and take deep breaths. I inhaled so deeply I felt like I was bringing the tea olive’s small white blooms into my body. I gritted my teeth, got a strong grip on what felt like appendages, and pulled hard and fast. Whatever it was came away from my body so fast I almost let it fly.

Then I heard it: the first cry. I brought it close to my chest, pushed myself up to my feet and stumbled from the dark side of the house to the moonlight. I felt the absence at my side, felt the hollow of my missing rib. As fast as my fingertips had found the wound, the flesh had already together. My body was whole.

In the flooding moonlight, I made out that the wriggling something I held against my chest was a newborn baby. It was wet with the slime and blood of birthing. She cried to make herself known.

I was once a solitary woman. Then, there was you.