All in Fiction
It wouldn’t be like when I was in high school in America, coming out of a bathroom stall to the sound of girls talking about me, why does she dress like that, why does she act like that, why doesn’t she just shut up. It would be more like the moment they fell silent, the moment they realized I’d heard, heard it all, heard everything, gazed coolly back at my reflection in the mirror, washed their hands. Brushed against me on the way out, oh, excuse me, the only thing they ever said to me.
Dead Mort could care less. What he would give anything for is to get out of here: the Grand Canyon or, more accurately, a wild burro trail that Burt, Todd, and Mort had deliriously veered onto after running out of water and sucking juice from their final can of peaches. “Hold on, boys,” Burt had said before they stumbled their way to the Colorado River and all the water they could drink.
And then she looked me in the eye and smiled. The corners of her mouth crested against her cheekbones, her lips gliding apart to reveal her teeth. Her smile both shined like a beacon and glowed like a fireplace on a cold night. It was a smile that put to shame the tight-lipped smirk of that white devil Andrew Jackson, who was now in my pocket three times over.
Sometimes, like now, the girl detective will reach into her purse and stroke the side of her honorary deputy’s badge. Her thumb goes over and over the rub of it. She looks at the fish and they look back at her, bob to the tank sides, shimmer-float in the water. There is one with white spots on it. The girl detective thinks it could be sick. She thinks of saying something. The girl detective often thinks of saying something.
And we don’t hold the alive baby, not yet, afraid of that kind of power, our stomachs stinging with the fear of it, that kind of responsibility, afraid of the mewling in the alive baby’s throat. We think of the baby dolls we had as children (barely days ago we were still children) that would cry if you squeezed them hard enough, and how we grew tired of the squeezing and threw them on the ground instead, tromping on their little doll bellies till the crying sound became a slow wheeze.
Henry wanted to say he was depressed. He wanted to say he hated how he looked. He wanted to ask for the surgery his father so desperately thought he needed.
“I love them,” he whispered instead.
At night, the astronaut’s wife picks up the telephone. The astronaut likes old-fashioned things, rotary dial. The astronaut’s wife listens to the quiet buzz of the empty phone. She thinks it must be the same sound the astronaut hears too, in space.
After your death, the dolls will go, one by one, porcelain-faced girls in rustling dresses, brittle little hands, darlings, your darlings, they’re like my children, you’d tell anyone who visited, their hand-stitched silken hair, their hand-painted bow-pink mouths.
Breathe in, two. Breathe out, two. Now you’re sure, and now you will be able to take them all. Your own breathing is the loudest sound in your universe, and you realize it’s time to go. Your first step brings an indistinct pop, a lightbulb being crushed under a mattress, but you feel nothing underfoot. “It’s time,” you’re thinking. “It’s time to go.”
We danced anyway. The wedding band played our favorite songs and we danced the cha-cha, the boog-a-loo, the chicken dance, and the rhumba. Our feet, so heavy and still frozen all the way through made clanking noises on the wooden dance floor.
The night after the gold nail photo shoot, he came to the door of my room. He didn’t talk to me the way Scott had. He just walked over and held out his hand. I was wearing the plastic gloves he had given me for nighttime, and started to slip them off. “No,” he said. So I left them on.
I obeyed you for a decade as you bade me not to feed on them, your exes, their living breathing families. But you kept summoning those same half-dozen women to our farmhouse, which was supposed to appear abandoned. People were getting suspicious. So I picked them off, one by one. I ate the flesh of those women you loved before me, who were still alive after I was dead.
Amaranta opened the door partway and stood in the threshold to survey the pasture. Immediately the cold put its hands on her. The waxing harvest moon shone brightly—always the moonlight looked different, somehow clearer, on cold nights.
They keep talking about you as if you’re not there. You’ve always wondered how these types of people speak when no one like you is around. The moose’s eyes meet yours. You and him are buddies. Both of you life-like decorations.
Jodie, my danger, my hemlock, my orphaned sinking ship with me el capitan; Jodie, my reason, my treason, my equation for being; Jodie who left me after six months of wild bar fights, sex all night, make no money but don’t give a damn because her favorite cigarettes, her Red Dragons, had suddenly, for no reason at all, stopped selling in all of New York.
The bartender hands Jenny a fresh drink, and I stretch her hand out, taking it as I make her teeth sink into her lower lip in silent promise. Ah, sweet Gail, the side of her she never seems to remember. She wishes to have my charm and bravado. Only copious amounts of alcohol bring me out to play, but when I do come, she freely gives over the wheel.
It was a Friday. They invited me over to play games and I didn’t leave till Saturday morning. Their roommates, swimming in the pool or lounging on the couch, nodded their ‘hello.’ Where did you meet them? they asked. At a dog groomer’s, at the grocery store, on a hike, I said.
Dawn closed her eyes and envisioned herself putting her car in park, opening the door, and knocking on Jane’s passenger window. She would let Dawn join her, of course, Jane lived on the unpredictable; she thrived on chaos.
This event remains something of a Troy College legend. Many called the event anti-feminist (when not calling it something worse), and I supposed that was fair. But I would have also noted that the feminist crowd had less on offer. If they had given me a crack at free tuition, room, and board, I’d have participated in their Elizabeth Warren Forensics Competition or RBG Debate Forum or their Inner Beauty Pageant too. Until then, there I was.