by Andrew Hood
This woman wonders what it was JB wanted so badly that he would kill himself in its absence. Her problem is that she can only imagine JB as giving, and can’t even begin to conceive his wants. As a girl, she took for granted that he would be interested in her. She wanted him, really, only because he was dreamy. Her pimpled eighthead, her shyness, the speech impediment from her retainer, all this would not factor in his love for her. He would just love her.
Her initial shock didn’t come from finding out that Jonathan Brandis was dead, but from finding out that he had been alive, that he had continued to exist long after she lost interest in him.
Unable to stand the heat any longer, this woman gets up off the couch and opens the window. The sweaty air in her apartment rushes past her, is sucked out into the cooling night, lifting up the tails of his shirt, giving the city an eyeful. The rush slams her bedroom door behind it like a teenager throwing a tantrum and nearly sucks “The Shrew’s Dilemma,” in progress, from its easel.
A bird flies into the window this morning while they are fucking, just as the tendrils of orgasm are beginning to curl up her spine. This woman will not say make love. She finds the phrase misleading, like fast food restaurant: a stab at glamourizing and romanticizing something so sloppy and inexpensive.
The bird collapses the house of cards she has built and nabs the concentration needed to build it back up again, so this woman makes a loud, writhing show of getting off, for his sake. In the residue left by rain and dust on the window is the imprint of the bird, which looks nothing like a bird.
This woman has read on the internet about oxytocin. She knows enough to know that she is biologically predisposed to fall in love with whoever makes her come. It’s the same hormone she will release if she ever gives birth, is what will supposedly endear that child to her for the rest of her and its life. Maybe in this way only is making love a workable term. Except now, having skipped that release, this woman is not so fooled. She is not blurry like usual and sees the smug smile of satisfaction on his face.
“How long should fruit be kept out on the counter?” she asks. “Should it be pitched before or after it has gone rotten? Because by the time the signs of decomposition start to show it’s already too late, right?”
“Stop that,” he says. “Don’t be weird.”
From here on in, she knows, their relationship will only get worse, until the time comes when the pain of being together becomes greater than the pain of being apart. It’s childish, this woman thinks, to think that anything will last forever, but it is craven, she knows, to avoid something only because it will end. What he thinks, about this or anything, she can’t say. He’s just lying there, smiling.
“What’s the problem?” he asks. “I think it works.”
“It’s not really what I was aiming for.”
The problem is that the shrew is a hideous little thing after all. There was not a human enough face she could fit on it. Its scraggly dun fur, its wrinkled, pointy snout, its eyes too beady to contain even a pinch of thought or emotion. A beast doing a beastly thing is not as meaningful as this woman hoped it would be. For the shrew there is no pickle. He gets peckish, he eats.
The problem, she realized finally, lay in the shrew’s captivity. A desperate enough shrew will hold its breath under water to kill a fish over twice its own size by nibbling out its eyes and finally its brain. This is comparable to a regular-sized man battling an elephant with a plastic bag over his head. This is all on the internet. Working against the shrew is what a dolphin lacks, that invisible grip on its scruff that will yank it to the surface regardless of desperation. Maybe there is no apparent danger when there is another shrew to eat, but left finally alone, that last shrew would make some attempt to free itself before resorting to its last resort.
This woman’s solution was to add, to that last bloody painting, a dainty index finger holding the cup in place. A finger from a graceful, fluid hand—not dissimilar from the finger of Michelangelo’s God that sparked life and thought into his reaching Adam. Only, added weeks after she thought she finished the painting, the finger stands out as what it is: an afterthought.
No painting of hers ever seems to come out the way she intendeds. Realizing this and not knowing how to turn back, completing the thing becomes a cinch. With no real investment she can give the painting what it needs instead of hopelessly trying to force onto it what she wants.
“Who cares what you think?” her boyfriend says. At least he’s dressed.
“How bad would your life have to get for you to kill yourself?” she asks later that night.
The question comes in the soggy silence following almost two hours between the sheets. Through perseverance and jelly, she was finally able to finish him off.
“What?” He’s genuinely winded and she’s glad for that.
“Under what circumstances would you, you know, end it?”
“I don’t know,” he sighs. “Don’t be weird, Emma.”
“Say you were paralyzed from the neck down, or say you had your arms and legs blown off and couldn’t talk and were stuck inside your own thoughts, like in that Metallica video. Or everyone you cared about abandoned you and you were left with absolutely nothing in your life.”
“Do we have to talk about this?”
“We do.”
“Then my answer is I would never kill myself. Simple as that. Suicide is the most selfish thing a person can do.”
“Okay,” she says, and nuzzles her head back onto his shoulder, spreading her hand on his chest. Past the bracken of his chest hair, past his skin, past his meat and past his ribs, there is the faint flutter of his settling heart, his beating heart, something she can only feel if she is quiet enough, and patient enough, and knows what she’s looking for, something that, when finally found, she can easily verify by that same obvious cadence she sees in his fading erection.
And what is love, really, this woman thinks to herself, if not selfish?
Unburdened Things | 3
I don’t think I want to be the kind of person anymore that brings tears to things unnecessarily.
Like, say, “Belly’s missed us,” I’ll say when our cat returns from a week off exploring, hunting mice, probably, in the few condemned factories in the neighborhood that haven’t been turned into condos yet. “Look,” I’ll show my boyfriend, “She’s crying.”
Cradling her, making a slim ghost of his finger with a tissue, Kim will wipe away the line of goo in the corner of Belly’s eye. “The Bully’s been fighting is all,” he’ll say. Belly will not allow herself to be held by me, will writhe and twist until she either falls or I drop her. “Bullies never cry.”
Or else, we’re under the trees after a summer rain, say. Kim and I will be on a stroll and a breeze will ruffle the leaves, and we get sprinkled. Like the tree’s sobbing all over us.
I can bring tears to pretty much anything without having to try.
And I gather from this that I’m either overly emotional or underly creative, and I’d really rather not be any of those ways.
Because it’s not that those things don’t cry; it’s that they can’t.
And it’s not our business to burden unburdened things with ours.
So:
Kim comes in from the courtyard with drops of water hanging from his earlobes in no way like teardrops. Maybe more like earrings.
They’d ambushed him.
A rush of water balloons and those pump action deals that can soak you from fifty metres away while he was having a beer on our steps after work.
Kim turned the garden hose on them and wrestled their guns away. Turned the tables on those kids.
“We’re going to get a phone call,” he says, walking into the kitchen, struggling to peel his sopping shirt off his skin. His shorts come off and he’s down on the kitchen tile, which is the coolest part of the house during early August. A
secret he learned from Belly.
The tongues of his steel-toed boots droop out like the tongues of exhausted dogs in this heat.
When he fights with the neighborhood kids, Kim loses with a stink. They clobber Kim like clockwork and he’s such a sore loser. On purpose, though.
Because for a kid nothing’s more insulting than having an adult let you beat them. There’s no joy of triumph. Only that weird feeling of being patronized. Like the feeling of wearing a shirt backwards. Upon losing, Kim throws a tizzy and won’t talk to them for days.
The following afternoon, the kids show up hugging basketballs to their chests and balancing ball bats in their palms.
“What’s Kim doing?” they ask.
“Don’t tell him I told you,” I’ll say, “But he’s upstairs. Crying. Can’t you people take it a little easy on him?”
And they scatter away, triumphant, miffed and still needing a third for Suicide Squeeze.
Of course Kim is really at work, building cookie cutter houses on the crusts of town. These kids think that because they’re off of school he gets a break, too.
But I’m afraid if I called them on their oversight, accused them of not knowing how the world really works, probably they’d ask, Well, then what are you doing home?
Days later, those people will be on the court behind our house and see us on the roof killing a bowl at dusk.
“Kim, come play!” they call.
They don’t even know my name.
Kim’s over the fence. He takes the lead, but then falls back by a few points. And that’s when he becomes a flurry of elbows, inevitably opening up a young chin under the boards. Kim runs home and hides, leaving me, high as a spooked cat in a tree, to assuage the inevitable moms that will come knocking.
Kim has no problem being fucked up around children. But I can’t abide that. If I had a child I would never let it see me drink or drug. Never let it see me cry. Never let it see me rolling pennies at the kitchen table. If it saw me doing any one of those things and asked, Why do you do that? there’s no way I could tell it the truth.
Because it’s hard sometimes.
Belly flits in through the kitchen window now, sniffs at Kim’s sock balls on the floor. She curls up on his bare stomach.
There’s a knock at the door.
Kim, lethargic like he just woke up, is running his finger over the grey down on Belly’s nubs. She lost most of her ears to frostbite before she was our cat, back when she was someone else’s kitten.
Another knock.
Belly will only let you play with her ears until she feels she’s being made fun of. She’ll try and twitch her ears away from you, only they’re too stubby for this to be actually evasive. A bellicose growl and a chomp at your finger if you don’t lay off.
A rapping now.
Something I’ve noticed about cats: this threshold they’ve got. Comfort is their primary aim. When they’ve established a cozy place, they grab on firmly with both paws. Like Belly has this way of stretching out across our bed at night so that there is no way for Kim and I to sleep comfortably.
We skitter our hands around her like chaseable critters, trying to tempt her appetite for the hunt.
We tug the blankets.
Mumble, mumble, she goes, ticked but immovable.
Bark, bark, we try, tired and desperate and getting weird.
Jumping up and down on our bed like it was a motel bed is what it takes to get to sleep most nights.
Pounding.
Kim stays put, but Belly looks over at me. She says, Are you going to get that or what? Keeping in mind that cats can’t talk like they can’t cry.
I do.
Three of them, arms raised, gripping swollen, sweating balloons.
The phone rings. I bet you some irate mother.
The kids see that I’m not Kim and they lower their arms. Then off they scamper.
Two separate from the third and unload on him. He stands betrayed for the length of a commercial before charging after his best friends in the world.
The phone rings and I actually can’t remember what it was exactly I was doing before Kim came in.
Are you going to get that or what? Belly asks. In her own way.
Once you could bike out to the limits of town to gander at the mostly unbridled night. The Milky Way was a drool stain on a cerulean pillow cover. Now stadium lights illuminate broad burrows and suggestive frames. A shopping centre with a library inside is being raised in anticipation of this burgeoning community.
Life is becoming so crowded and bright these days.
Kim was due there for five. He set the alarm for three.
Why does Kim get up so early?
“Because rolling out of bed and onto the job blows,” he says. “I need some allusion of having a life outside of work.”
Kim hides the alarm on the other side of the bedroom every night so he has to bound out of bed and scrounge around the laundry like a narcotics dog to silence it every morning. After that panic he’s wide awake. And you better believe me too.
Kim always confuses illusion with allusion. And for Kim the Pacific Ocean is Specific also.
For summer coffee we fill the ice cube tray with cream and leave it in the freezer overnight. My idea.
I’m brilliant.
Staring at the ceiling fan over our bed, trying to plan my day, I give Kim a head start.
Kneading the night kinks out of his neck, he’s hunched over his sketchbook at the kitchen table. On the counter he’s set out my mug for me, unfilled.
Our stove clock wasn’t changed when last we leapt ahead. Instead of adjusting it, we learned to read the time wrong. When we fall back we’ll have to get used to not correcting ourselves.
Kim squints at the page, trying to see a clear image through the bramble of other ideas. Already he’s begun sketches for the graphic novel he will make. He’ll be ready to throw himself fully into the project by the time it’s my turn to start working.
A few incorrect minutes happen.
I slurp my coffee, reminding him I’m here, too.
“So,” he asks perfunctorily. “What’re your plans for the day?” Patronizingly.
Kim will never tell me that he hates that I get up with him. Hates that because he’s working for me right now he has hardly a moment to himself. And the time he does have, I occupy.
He never says anything like Belly never says anything.
“The Bully’s at the window,” he says.
I look behind me and, with the kitchen lights on inside, only see me in the pane.
We cut this deal like mustard, Kim and I: for one year he works while I do whatever my heart desires. Then we turn the tables.
Jump back. Fall ahead.
Inside of me I eventually see Belly on the ledge, pawing, going tack tack tack on the window. Like a teacher tapping chalk to the right of an equal sign, pleading and impatient.
Like, Come on, kids. You know this one.
What I would say if Kim ever said boo, is that it’s difficult for me also. It wasn’t supposed to be difficult, this year was supposed to be a productive breeze, but there you go. His free time is the only time I have to be with him, otherwise I’m alone. He has too little time and I have too much.
Run a tap hot on your hand and it will become freezing to you in time.
I open up the back door and cluck for Belly to come. She stops pawing and looks at me. Her eyes flare spooky green. She turns back to the window and asks again.
“Belly,” I say. “Come on.” But she keeps at the window, so I open it. She falls inside and saunters towards her food bowl. I close the door and leave the window open for her to go back out.
I will sit with Kim, not bothering him, until it’s time. He will kiss me and split. I will go back to bed and sleep until ten-ish. I will wake back
up and have no idea how to get out of bed. I will think about how late in the day it is already, and that to start anything now is pointless because anyway I have to make lunch first. And maybe afterwards I will have to run out to the store for toilet paper, for anything. By the time I get home it will be time for the Sassy Judge Show that I like. It is the gift I give myself for all the hard work I do in a day. After which Kim will be home in an hour from his job. I will make him supper because he works so hard.
A year, and what?
I am no better at the drums, though I can twirl my sticks in a way that would make the ladies in the front row wet, the men hard.
Mr. Dumbface, my dummy, can’t talk without me gritting my teeth in a horrible, threatening way that would scare the children at the birthdays I was hoping to perform at.
There isn’t a play in my head that doesn’t take place at a bus stop or a TV pilot that doesn’t take place in a living room.
The pair of socks I’m knitting stay heelless.
A year, and that. And my time’s running out, the breadth given to my heart’s desire shrinking.
Full, Belly plods to the door and rises up on her hind legs to ask.
“Belly!” I scold. When she sits back down and looks at me I point at the open window. She looks at it, then back to the door. And then me.
Belly always looks at me like she has no idea what I’m talking about.
Kim has gone.
What’s that joke about the broken clock again?
The stream of eye goo runnelling along Belly’s nose catches the kitchen light and shimmers like a knife come out of nowhere in a fight you didn’t think was that serious.
Kim warns me not to give too much of a character to Belly. Like he tells me that trees don’t and can’t cry. Animals don’t think anything, he explains. They don’t mean anything. Or at least, they don’t think or mean anything that we can understand.
It goes even a broken clock is right two times a day.
There’s this rap.
Behind my kit, I’m holding my sticks like a fork and knife, waiting for a late meal to be served finally. Even though lunch has just been smoked.