The Melting

by lize Spit

  I’ve never asked him what he hopes to find with all his research in Leuven. I don’t think it can be explained in layman’s terms anyway. He once told me that when he removes the locusts from their terrariums, they poop on his gloves out of fear of death, and when the experiment is all over, he snips their heads off with scissors.

  Every time I see him, I can’t help but picture it: a worktop full of convulsing, decapitated insects.

  I never told Jolan what happened at the end of that summer. There was no gossip, so he didn’t hear about it through the grapevine either. Elisa, Laurens and Pim never breathed a word about it to anyone. The only rumors flying around were about how Laurens got that gash on his forehead. But it was enough to explain the visible damage.

  Those first few weeks of the new school year, I left home as late as possible in the morning, later than Laurens, so he wouldn’t have the chance to make a show of catching up to me, or—even worse—try to bike next to me. I knew that he would try to make things better by talking, by asking how Tessie was doing now that she’d been admitted. But I had nothing to say to him, and definitely not about her.

  Every day, I biked past those blue panties with the white skid mark on the inside slowly disintegrating on the side of the road.

  Once I’d passed them, the twelve kilometers left to school seemed to last an eternity. I used my savings to buy a Discman and forced myself to reach my destination before the end of the CD. As long as I was able to do that, it would be an okay day.

  Of course, I wanted to ask Pim why, while he was jabbing me with the hole poker, he mentioned Jan. Was it just a coincidence or had Jan told him he thought I was pretty?

  But I never spoke to him or Laurens again after that summer day. Nobody thought anything of it. In our town, it wasn’t that unusual for old friendships to end without a lot of discussion. I hoped they’d at least find me a little bit hard to ignore, but even that was in vain. We were already drifting apart before the summer even began.

  Every day, I saw Laurens at school, somewhere in the distance, usually in a sea of hundreds of other kids. He had a new backpack and had stopped parting his hair down the middle. He still had a Band-Aid on his forehead on the first day, but eventually he stopped covering the thick scab. One time, a bunch of kids gathered around him on the playground to cheer him on as he pulled a strand of red licorice out of his nostril. I moved closer too, not because I wanted to watch but because I wanted to see just how ugly that scar was. Laurens’s mom didn’t take him to the emergency room for stitches, she just glued the open flesh back together herself with a few strips. I saw it as a gesture to me: she had seen the blood on the floor in the butcher shop in the exact spot where I’d passed out. She must have had her suspicions about what happened and wanted to punish Laurens by making sure it left a scar on him too.

  Sometimes I biked past the butcher shop just to watch her serving customers from a distance, sometimes helped by Laurens. Often, I’d be clutching a cobblestone in my hand. The choice was mine: throw the stone through the shop window or slowly disappear into the back of her thoughts.

  Three months after the first day of school, the panties on the side of the road disappeared, well before they’d reached their estimated decomposition time.

  My guess is that I’ve been standing here for about an hour and a half now. There’s a lot of stuff I could’ve done in that amount of time. Water the plants in my apartment. Answer all the emails Dad’s sent me over the last few years. Respond to his comments on the family website. Suck off the neighbor fifteen times in a row. Walk from my apartment to the Marolles, give money to every vagrant I pass along the way, take the elevator up to the top of the Palace of Justice. Clean the mold in the corners of the bathroom.

  But I wouldn’t have done any of these things if I hadn’t come here. I’m deluding myself. I would’ve just been sitting at home by the window, watching how the snow sticks to other people’s balconies better than it sticks to mine.

  Maybe I should have looked up how long it takes for a block of ice to melt. Obviously, I had no way of knowing that today would be the coldest day of the year, that I’d only have one small heat source. I can already feel the rope tightening around my neck, but maybe that’s just because my legs are getting tired from standing, and I’m starting to sag a bit.

  I try not to picture myself from above, to see what Miss Emma would see, but I can’t help it—here I am. A young woman in flesh-colored hose, standing on a block of ice under a light bulb with chattering teeth, hoping to become a riddle once and for all.

  August 10, 2002 (2)

  IT COULD BE seen as a bold move or a statement, showing up at Laurens’s mom’s butcher shop not wearing any underwear. But in this case, it’s nothing more than a chain of events, driven by a lack of alternatives.

  Something switches on inside me that allows me to record everything I encounter with extreme precision—fishermen, trees, houses, mailboxes, clothes lines, garden sprinklers—without any of it becoming a permanent thought; my brain refuses to make memories.

  There are no customers in the shop. Laurens’s bike is nowhere in sight. I park mine right in front of the display case. The kickstand sinks into a mossy crack between the cobblestones. The handlebars clatter on the ground. The little bell rings. I want to pick it up, park it neatly, but the pain in my abdomen won’t let me. I just leave it there. Laurens throws his bike on the ground all the time.

  Slowly, I inch closer to the shiny veal sausages on display. They’re strung up like bunting in the shop window, tied three at a time.

  I have to walk slowly. The ground beneath my feet is like a sponge. The sound of the doorbell lasts longer than usual. I can see the spots of blood on my crotch reflected in the window.

  Laurens’s mom is standing with her back to the counter when I walk in.

  “Hello,” she says after the bell’s gone silent. Her voice is neutral, suitable for all ages, for open houses and funerals.

  When no one replies, she glances up. But her eyes are fixed on the log of cheap pink bologna wrapped in bright red plastic casing that she’s gliding across the sharp blade.

  “Oh, Eva, it’s you,” she says over the sound of the machine and the radio.

  Was she hoping it was somebody else? Would she wonder why my breasts have suddenly disappeared?

  On her moving hand, she’s wearing a white latex glove that’s a few sizes too small. As the hunk of meat gets smaller, the pile of plastic casing gets bigger.

  The soft, processed meat doesn’t make a fraying sound when it’s cut. It’s the cheapest kind there is. It’s not made of real flesh, not from thousands of threads.

  When there are no customers listening, Laurens’s parents have a different name for this stuff. I can’t think of it right now. It’s irrelevant, but I keep searching for it. Somehow it makes my thoughts less volatile.

  I read the names on the little signs in the fancy salads. Martino, Spring Salad, Meat Salad. Each black plastic tray is filled with a different pastel color. I can’t retain these names for more than a few seconds either. The name tag for the cheap sausage on the slicer is lying on the counter.

  I want to know what it says, but I can’t quite make it out.

  The cold air in the display case is leaking out through a crack in the glass; it smells like all the stuff it’s touched along the way—teddy bear sausage, chicken wings. The air blows straight between my legs. It seeps in through the zipper on my pants, fanning the flame underneath it. My labia are pulsing. The wallpaper glue is starting to harden. My pubic hair is drying up in tangles, pulling at my skin.

  “Here you go, Eva, sweetheart.”

  Laurens’s mom hands me a rolled-up slice of the suspicious-looking meat. I can smell it. It’s sour-sweet. Offal with flecks of pork in between. My mouth fills with saliva. It runs out the corners of my mouth. I wipe it away with the top of my hand. I lay the sausage back on the counter. It rolls open. Laurens’s mom looks at it, surprised. Then her gaze sinks down
through the glass display case, stopping at the height of my crotch. Maybe she’s trying to figure out whether the blood belongs to me or to the reflection of the tenderloin.

  I’ve hardly eaten any solid food today, but I’m not hungry. The only thing left in my stomach are the few sips of sugar-free soda from this afternoon. The Coke comes up first, lukewarm and grainy—lubricant for the throat.

  The rest of the vomit comes from much deeper. It had already followed previous orders to exit via the other end of my body, and it didn’t have time to return to its liquid state. I start gagging and take two steps backwards as I cough it up. The puke, solid and sausage-shaped, gets caught in the prolongation of my body, like it does with cats who eventually end up eating it afterwards for the sake of tidiness.

  You can’t tell what kind of food it was originally.

  Laurens’s mom stops what she’s doing. The blades on the meat slicer come to a halt. All that’s left is the sound of the radio, far away, in the back of the shop.

  “Eva? What’s all this?” At the sound of my own name, I bend over and start gagging again, but there’s hardly anything left in my stomach. Now comes the real lump in my throat. I burst into sobs, but there are no more tears.

  Laurens’s mom dashes out from behind the counter with her fat knees sticking out under her shorts. She grabs a bucket with a couple inches of cleaning solution sloshing back and forth in the bottom. She shoves it under my face, to catch the tears maybe. She dabs my forehead with the rag that had been sitting at the bottom of the bucket.

  “Come here, sweetheart.” A piece of eggshell lands on my eyebrow. She plucks it away. She leaves the unrolled piece of meat behind on the counter, helps me up and leads me out of the store. But I refuse to move. My knees buckle beneath me. I clamp my legs together under my body. I want to sit here until I’m dry, with my butchered flatfish stuck to the floor. She can’t know that I’m not wearing any underwear.

  She walks over to the shop window and tilts the wooden blinds down halfway. I keep an eye on the driveway and hope that Laurens hasn’t lost too much blood. If he shows up now, he’ll snatch his mother away from me. Then he’ll leave a trail all over town.

  Laurens’s mother scoops up the vomit with her gloved hand and, as if it were a dog turd on the street, pulls the glove around it inside out and ties it in a knot at the wrist. Since there’s no trash can within reach, she throws the glove into the cleaning water.

  “Is there any left?” she asks, pointing to the space between me and the bucket.

  “No,” I say, rubbing my eyes.

  She squats down beside me, caresses my neck, and looks down at the blood between my legs. I didn’t know she could squat. Her bent knees are almost as wide as my thighs. You could fit two of me in her. She gently rocks me back and forth. She must be able to feel that I’m not wearing a bra. She’s got to be wondering.

  “Could it be that you’re having your first period?” she asks. “Don’t cry. I’ve got all the supplies in the house.”

  She places her hand on my forehead. Then she stops rocking and looks at the T-shirt I’m wearing. Only now does she recognize it.

  “Why are you wearing Laurens’s shirt?”

  I don’t respond.

  “Where is he, by the way? Wasn’t he at your house today?”

  Again, I don’t respond. That cut on Laurens’s head might be pretty big. Who knows, maybe he needs stitches. I start feeling nauseous again. I lean back and rest my head against the cool display case.

  Laurens’s mom is the only person in town with any idea about how bad things are at our house, but she’ll never intervene, not as long as my parents are alive, she’s too polite. If I were to tell her about this summer, about all the girls I humiliated with Laurens and Pim, she wouldn’t be worried about me anymore, she’d be worried about all those other girls.

  “Did something happen at home? Do you want to tell me about it?” She pauses dramatically after each question. But I shake my head.

  “Some people have a hard time talking about their feelings, Eva. Maybe we can work it out together. Let’s try another way: if the answer is ‘no’, you don’t have to say anything, if it’s ‘yes’, squeeze my arm,” she says. “Should we give it a try?”

  I squeeze her arm.

  “Did something happen at home? With Jolan? With Tessie? Or was it your father?”

  At the word “father”, I grip her arm almost automatically.

  “Did he do this?”

  A half squeeze isn’t an option, so I clear my throat. In one long sentence, I blurt out that Dad’s already got a noose hanging over a ladder at home. I make it sound like it’s not such a big deal, which it really isn’t to me anymore now that my vagina is on fire.

  “Eva, a father who does something like that needs help.” She keeps stroking my neck.

  “Not from you, not from me, but from a professional,” she adds.

  I feel her heart beating against my cheek. I can’t remember if I’ve ever heard my mom’s heartbeat like that. The detergent in the water smells like lemon. There are little bits of minced meat floating in it. My skin softens under her repeated strokes.

  In the distance, I hear the clatter of a bike chain. It’s Laurens. I can tell right away that it’s him by the creak of his broken pedal. He races up the driveway and tosses his bike down on the cobblestones, next to mine.

  His mother hasn’t heard anything yet. She’s sitting with her face towards me and her back to the shop window. The more I let my shoulders slump, the faster she moves her hand back and forth.

  I lay my head against her chest one last time.

  Laurens, divided into spaces behind the blinds, freezes at the sight of me. Between the wooden slats we make eye contact. There’s blood running down his temples. He’s wearing Pim’s T-shirt and holding mine against his eyebrow. It’s full of bloodstains. His eye is thick and blue. He walks with a slight, but still exaggerated, limp.

  “Laurens? Son? What happened?”

  Laurens walks into the shop. He points at me, shaking his finger until his mom is looking at me too.

  “Whatever Eva told you is a big fat lie.”

  Laurens blinks his damaged eye, which sticks in the corner from all the clotted blood.

  “She did this. She abandoned me at school at the start of the summer, and today she hit me with a shovel. Pim saw it. Ask him.”

  Her eyes jump from the blood between my legs to the blood on Laurens’s temple, then back, as if she’s playing eenie-meenie-miney-moe. But she’s not impartial. Her eyes will always land on Laurens in the end. I can feel the spot where she was stroking me just now. She takes a step towards Laurens.

  “Is this true, Eva?”

  I shake my head. I don’t know what else I can do to make her believe me.

  I pull myself up on the display case and try to stand, so she can see my blood too. It hurts even more than before, like muscles that only really start to hurt after you’ve allowed them to relax. Maybe the wallpaper glue hardened while I was sitting still for so long, maybe I tore something loose.

  As I clamber to my feet and search for my balance, it all comes back to me, starting with the things revolving around me right now.

  Suddenly I remember what that cheap bologna is called. Monkey head.

  That’s the one thing I won’t miss.

  Laurens lowers his finger and wipes away the snot under his nose. He doesn’t look at me. His blood mixes with the mucus and tears, taking on the same pink color as the trail of wallpaper glue I left behind. He leans against the display case.

  We’re both in pain. Neither of us got to have Elisa. Neither of us have Pim. Maybe none of this would have happened if we had just settled for each other.

  Laurens’s mom wipes his hair to the side, inspects his eyebrow and makes soothing noises.

  “This is going to leave a scar if we don’t get it taken care of.”

  She kisses Laurens just above his wounded temple. He looks at me over her shoulder.
There’s a yellow clot in the inner corner of his eye. I grab the bucket beside me, though I don’t have to puke anymore.

  “Monkey head,” I say. I aim straight for his face, but right before the dirty water hits him, he lowers his eyes and I’m already wondering whether this is really going to help my case. The water splashes against the glass case, all over his mom’s sandals. The puke-filled glove bounces off of Laurens’s chest. His mother looks sheepishly at the empty bucket in my hands. Is she wondering where all this water suddenly came from? Then she looks at Laurens. The blood has been washed off his face. The minced meat sticks to his hair. Next to his feet is the inside-out glove.

  She grabs me by the upper arm and drags me to the door. I’m still holding the bucket.

  At first, I resist. I stand in the doorway so the doorbell keeps ringing.

  Then, the ringing stops, our struggle is over. We stand there for a second, facing each other, she on one side of the door and me on the other. I can’t feel the spot where she caressed me anymore, all I feel are her nails digging into my upper arm.

  “That bucket belongs to us. Leave it there.”

  I look around. Everything here belongs to them, except the things you pay for.

  I set down the bucket on the doorstep in front of her. The bell rings one last time.

  Was Laurens right? Was meat really just a bunch of threads waiting to be unraveled?

  I turn around and pick up my bike. In this moment, my greatest source of pain is not my naked crotch rubbing against the zipper of my pants, or the wallpaper glue drying in my pubic hair and tugging at my skin, but their eyes, weighing down on my back, on my shoulders.

  Those eyes will follow me until I’m gone, out of their sight. Only then will they take the bucket from the doorway and close the shop with a sigh of relief. And when that door finally closes, something will be taken from me that I have been saving up for my entire life.

  I don’t know if I should bike fast or slow to make this hurt less.

  Pasta Tongs