Two Stories

Possibilities

I don’t blame them for what they want to do to me. Sometimes I myself have to make deals in my head to stop me from doing it, too.

Do not put your hands around your own throat to commence choking.

Do not stare in the mirror until you envision yourself as a blank slab of meat.

Do not look at that hammer and know all you could do.

Do not think of the possibilities.

When I go into a frat house on a Friday night I like to pretend I’m an abducted countess stuck in a horrendous dungeon and I’m going to have to fight for my life this time. Jimmy at the door is supposed to ask me for ID, but he didn’t even look at my face as I slid right in. You cannot have over a maximum of six beers on your person, but if you bring two handles of vodka and a liter of cream soda you are suddenly the life of the party and they’ll never let you out.

I’ve been known to wake up down the street with bite marks rimming my ears and toes. Sometimes, three sheets to the wind (as my mother would say), I’ll be losing myself in the carpet at one of these things and see a friend’s body fall perpendicular through the air beyond the windowpanes. There is nothing to ever break the fall.

Just smile. Smile, and they look at you like you are big and special and want to eat you right up. Gulp you right down, like you are top shelf and there’s no way you’ll see this night through without their stamp of approval.

By the time Jimmy leaves his post to find me I’ve taken six shots in the kitchen and spilled the cream soda down the drain.

Just to see the fizz, I shout into a freshman’s ear over the music.

You want to drink my jizz? he screams, and I laugh like I am having the time of my life, like this is good as it gets, like this is the man of every woman’s dreams.

Jimmy pulls me by the back of my belt and hauls me upstairs to the Loft, which is a second story balcony holding an army of bunk beds and absolutely no railings. He tells me go down, but when I try to scramble away he breaks his beer bottle on the bedframe and slides the edge down my glittering shoulder until a small river is flowing and says he will rape me. It’s true they don’t even use euphemisms anymore.

Sometimes I think about how I’d do it to myself—I become another person in my head and decide where I’d slice versus stab versus flay versus tear. I think I’d cut my nose off and feed it to a dog right in front of my peeled back eyelids. Or I’d snip my pinkie finger and gnaw it like a chicken bone. I’d remove all my clothes and start licking away very gently, and then bam. I’d stab myself in the back.

Afterwards I walk barefoot out onto the lawn to catch a glimpse of the moon and count each star to fall asleep by, but my head is a rage of fury that won’t stop screaming, and the next vision I have is no vision at all—it is the very real instance of Sam and Nick standing in a kiddie pool of urine and puke with their fingers down each others’ throats inducing the other to vomit. Then they lick it up off their hands, their chins, delicately, tenderly.

Somehow I make it home.

There will be quiet nights when my boyfriend—my real one—tells me he whispers wishes into my ear as I sleep.

What do you wish for? I ask.

I wish that a flock of vultures would rise from a carcass and carry you off.

I wish that in your dreams there is a man with no face who makes himself a terror to you.

He says, I wish you went to sleep and this time never woke up.

I look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and realize the only thing separating me and her is the glass itself. We can become one, I purr in my head, because one of us is a warm angel and the other one is cold death, but it’s possible to be united and never have this war inside again. She is death, and I am the angel, and there’s always a bottle of Tylenol, a quick little reach, right there in her throat.

You look like somebody, I croon to myself as I pop a white pill in, my legs splayed out on the floor like crazy straws. I shake out the bottle like it is candy, I am young and optimistic again, I am alive and full of vim, like that morning over breakfast when I was little and my mother told me about the lady with God in her heart and who wasn’t allowed within fifty feet of the clinic, how she derailed and then escorted my mother away, and paid with her own money to buy supplies such as diapers and tearless soap. All the while I was there growing inside my mother, some terrifying new world, unmapped and featureless, and the woman took her out for pancakes afterwards and put her hand over my mother’s fingers and told her you have options, sweetheart, to think of all the possibilities, how she wasn’t making a mistake.

Leftovers

Daddy’s at the stove making something. He drops it on my plate and it’s a greasy little stone.

“This isn’t but a rock, you son of a bitch,” I point out, and Daddy turns and says, “Look around, darlin, because this as good as she gets. This is it, paradise, so quit your complainin.”

I put the rock in my mouth and pretend it is sausagefriedeggscountrypotatoesbacon, but all I suss up is maple syrup and iron. Daddy is beaming at my face, standing in Momma’s apron. “Like that, don’t you?” he says. “Made it special.” Daddy is practicing the art of rationing. The syrup is from before. There’s still plenty out in the world, eggs and beans and the good stuff, but Daddy wants us to prepare. Spends his days fluffing a bunker, getting ready for a great nothingness.

I take my lunch box full of maple-fried rocks to the bus stop and suck on one like a candy, spit it out like a sunflower seed. The other kids stare. They have chocolate bars and gummies and BLTs for lunch, I already know because I observe from across the cafeteria everyday and pretend my rocks is their cake. They catch me and dump their soda on my legs and I lick it up after they go. You need to look at the hard times like coded miracles is what I hear since Momma died in tragedy. But we don’t talk about that, Daddy and I. When it looks like we should Daddy does what he did this morning—preach gospel, the one he updated. An addendum, he calls it: “As Adam walked through the world naming, we will go backwards and forget all that was. That’s a metaphor, son, and I hope you get it, as the only thing worth its salt is language. So go out there and get you a book, one that ain’t trash.” Then he flips to PBS, still in Momma’s frilly apron, to watch a live version of the Nut Cracker while electricity and men’s leotards is still a thing for the world, I suppose.

At school I get sat down to a guidance counselor and hear their worries.

“It’s not right for you to be eating rocks,” one woman with a bush-fire of hair tells me, and I think she’s about to cry.

“Hey, listen,” I say, leaning on my elbows in the table between us, “fuck you.”

They send me back to homeroom and I feel my guts caving on emptiness. I can only sit there so long so I ask to go to the library, and no one cares because no one goes to the library except to use the computers, and only then when one desires cracking through security settings and into a bunch of nastiness.

I rifle a few books’ pages and get my notebook slapped out of my hands once, and only get called a faggot once, and only have to endure hearing Daddy referred as faggot twice. I do nothing because it’s easier to let slide than explain to a few hillbillies Daddy’s taken on being father-mother, man-woman, husband-wife, all rolled together so I don’t feel neglected as a child. He’s been watching reruns of Montell Williams and Maury when not working on the bunker or catching up on Masterpiece Theater.

I scribble something down I think would make him proud to know me as his son and hop on the bus for home.

Daddy’s back in the kitchen practicing his bar work, as he is now inspired by the Russian ballet.

I hand him the paper and his eyes tear up with sadness and joy.

Prunella slipper and calla lily.

That’s what I wrote.

Perhaps you would like to know how she died.

By lightening strike, walking amongst wildflowers.

Like fucked up and terrible poetry is how Daddy described it after I had said it was like God wanted to take her down for sport, He out on a hunting spree, and Daddy slapped my mouth saying there is no God, we got nothing but the empirical here, it was electricity, a cloud filled with positives and negatives seeking to neutralize, and I said yeah, but where’d the electricity come from, and the cloud? And the positives? And Daddy said, I’ll get back to you on that. He never got back yet.

Here he is now, old lug, huge shoulders shaking over my notebook—he’s got a snack of thistle going and the 24-hour news in the background blaring about a fifteen-year window before the sea rises to take up Florida, and the whole world crumbles, but I think I’ll be prepared because I already envisioned it inside from the tower of my mind.

“I’m sorry, son. If I’d known we was bringing you into this forsaken place, I’d never agreed to have you,” is what Daddy said after she died, as we leaned in the grass together against a stranger’s tomb, ripping up the dandelions. It’s what he says now with that TV news like diabolical white noise fighting to erase my inked scribbles, nuke the letters back into empty space like they never existed and the beauty behind them, but I know he means it as a kindness, not wanting me born, and I give him a hug and say, “Thanks, Pops,” which I’ve never called him but maybe it will stick, “now tell me,” I say, “what’s on the menu tonight, what you got scheming for the stove?”