We All Need To Eat

by Alex Leslie

  “Nothing, it’s just—”

  “Always what?”

  His voice goes whiny, like it always does when he knows he’s losing. But he can’t stop. That’s the thing about him; he just never knows when to stop. “Well you know as well as anyone. You two were always so different. She was just so much louder. You know?” Then he says the worst thing. “Maybe it’s better this way.” He breathes and says, “Anyway Dana says to come here for as long as you need, the kids want to see you and? They want to see you.” He waits. “I want to see you. Do you see anybody?”

  By the time she makes a pot of rooibos tea and checks her email, he’s already sent her links to articles cautioning against daily weightlifting for women. You just never know when to stop, do you, little brother? She scans the cautionary paragraphs: not enough testosterone to build muscle as quickly as tissue breaks down, the websites inform her. She clicks on a link in a sidebar to an album of female bodybuilders; she scans for the dykes, scrolls through the stomach muscles and linebacker shoulders, sipping her cooled tea, the tears rivering down her cheeks. Everybody had known. Everybody had seen but her. And this is the part she cannot tell anyone, even Josiah—she does not understand why Melanie left, cannot explain it to anybody, how Melanie raged at her that things had been off for a year and she’d had no idea, how could she have known nothing at all. She texts Josiah: I feel so old.

  She’s among the last ones there at night. This small group, buff stragglers. A staffer flickers the lights: library manners.

  Soma blasts her body with scalding water in the showers, the steam pressing cloud formations against the walls, her knuckles tense. She checks her shoulders. A faint string of burst blood vessels again. Is this how it starts, she wonders, people who get into pain? Backslide, wander, trip into it. No, I’m not like that. I’m not one of those people. When she pulls the towel around her body, her skin is red. The burst blood vessels stand out in dark purple, a kitchen tattoo. She checks her right shoulder and, yes, there’s the string of erupted blood vessels. Tonight, the damage reassures her.

  In the locker room, the last women are half-naked, benches draped with yoga pants and rain jackets. While she dresses, Soma cannot help but inspect the other women’s marks and scars. The tattoos. Soma would never get a tattoo. Too permanent. In undergrad, her roommate got a tattoo after she got a call from home that her childhood dog had been run over by a car. The tattoo was her dog’s licence number, printed across the back of her neck. “You look like you have a barcode,” Soma had told her, surprised when the other woman had burst into tears and rushed from the room, then for the rest of the term communicated with Soma only through Post-it notes. Melanie had leaned forward and whispered with a kind of awe, “Oh my god, I think that’s the most insensitive thing I’ve actually ever heard. You’re amazing.” Soma had never been able to tell whether Melanie was making fun of her or

  praising her.

  Both and more.

  Long-term rented lockers are decorated with family photographs. Melanie would have made Soma rent a locker, stock it with protein bars. Her thoughtfulness could be controlling. “I’m kind of insidious,” she had once told Soma proudly, and Soma had thought, I want that.

  “Hey Melanie.”

  Soma looks up from unhooking her bra, shocked, to see George, her mild smile, and, startlingly, missing a tooth.

  It’s too late to correct her about the name. And, she realizes, she speaks to so few people these days that not being called by her own name isn’t even really very surprising.

  “Hello, Georgephine.”

  “Smoke?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Seriously.”

  Outside the building, they lean against the brick wall.

  “It’s so warm,” she says, and George laughs.

  “You never smoked before?”

  “Just not for a long time.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “I’ve smoked.”

  “Sure you have.” George smokes evenly, perfectly. “Anyway, look at you, the dedicated gym bunny, and I’m ruining your perfect health.”

  Soma smiles into the darkness. It’s been a long time since anyone has flirted with her. “Gym bunny. Ha.”

  “Seems like you’re here even more than I am.”

  “It’s just recent.”

  “Is it? Lifting?”

  “Yeah, and even the gym. I’d actually never been in a gym before.”

  “Really?” George’s muscular body is a lean shadow in the dimness. “What made you go from zero to sixty?”

  Soma hesitates. “Just a stupid breakup.”

  “Ah. Bad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ah.” George throws her cigarette at her foot, grinds it slowly. “Well then, that makes a lot of sense, Melanie.”

  “What?” Soma’s neck snaps to the side. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The way you lift. You know, like you’ve got something to prove.”

  Soma stares at George’s profile but sees no hint of satisfaction—just her mouth set and calm, as if she’s just read out the price of an item for sale. After a few minutes of silence, Soma realizes that George isn’t going to say anything more. She leans back into the wall and watches traffic. Rain begins to fall, hooks at her lip.

  The streets are dark, empty. Houses and houses and houses, stuffed with their hosts. The weights made tunnels in her. Dug her up again. She will go home again to the empty condo.

  A white fish cruises along the side of the dark road. The bicycle drifts in its lane.

  Soma swerves slightly.

  The cyclist jerks, bends outward, pulled by the magnet in the centre of Soma’s steering wheel.

  She swerves gently again, hears the bellow of surprise from the cyclist this time, how she can press herself gently into him.

  She swerves again, comes back to centre.

  His yell comes clear through the glass: “CRAZY FUCKING BITCH!”

  This time she slows down as she swerves. Looks across the passenger seat and sees the cyclist’s face. Not the hardened urban cyclist she’d expected but a teenaged boy clinging to the handlebars like a tree branch he’s climbed too far out on. His fearful hunch, face angled across his neck, eyes stretched wide.

  She swerves one more time and watches him go over into the ditch.

  When she gets home, she huddles in her bed, the whole quilt around her body. Her body shivers so hard her knees knock against her chest. She pulls her laptop from the bedside table, opens it, and there’s her Facebook page.

  She types in: your body was my home. She presses Post. Sucks in her breath when she sees the words float there.

  Hurriedly clicks her cursor in the blank space again.

  Types in: it isnt over if theres nothing left something was there then nothing

  Post. A tiny red 1 appears in the top right corner of her screen. She doesn’t recognize the name of the person who liked her first post. Her body is still so cold.

  Another blank space and she fills it in: breaking open

  Another blank space.

  She types: nighttimes are worst when you sleep alone every night you feel alone all day you go back every time

  She types: you planned it for so long and i had no idea. HOW. Post.

  She types: this is so poignant are you watching?

  She types: can a person actually just fall in love with a

  cipher?

  She types: blood vessels break down very easily did you know I didnt. Post.

  She clicks the white camera icon to take a selfie. There she is, startlingly lean. Eyes large, the hard arch of one arm, the muscles visible. She clicks and the selfie stabilizes, unfocused and luminous.

  A stranger gazes back at her from her new profile picture, jaw set, unmoving.

  The image pops up besi
de each of the posts, a row of her, shrunken and staring, beside her words, the only true words she has spoken since Melanie left.

  Sleep takes her down.

  She prefers the gym late at night. The bodies and wheels. The low hum. The feeling of this day, and that day, and the next, and the next, entering and leaving her flesh. Her limbs pressed into rotations deepening their paths. Joints; grindstones. Her breath under one hundred pounds, two hundred pounds. The soft hammer against the front of her throat, marking out time. She is so strong now. Stronger than she has ever been. People rise and move from one machine to the next, busy with their private reasons for hardening.

  Every day parts of her shift and tighten. Parts of her slacken. Soma presses herself until her bones bloom, her arms arc and make more room for more blood. There are gulfs and channels in her body, open spaces she has never known before. She enters them.

  Stories Like Birds

  she is told to never go into the ocean alone. of course, she goes into the ocean alone.

  Remote: they drove hours past a post office and then a tree covered in bras, nailed into the bark by loggers. Soma watched the D cups, stained by rain and the gold inner bark, flock past the windows. Nailed through, their savage steel nipples make her lightly finger her flat chest. She is twelve.

  Don’t go into the ocean alone, and she does.

  The water yawns its black mouth wide, leaving a space to enter.

  There is no hospital for hours, no phone reception: these are the reasons. This isn’t swimming water. Open water, sweepings.

  She goes in. There are no witnesses.

  Feels the pull, her body throttled in a turbine, her salt-stung lungs, her body going deeper and deeper, beyond any decision.

  The wave turns her; all that remains is the mute hold, inside the rotations.

  Then she is spat out. The feeling that overcomes her, for the first time, the humiliation of the ocean’s indifference.

  No one has seen. The first thing she does is twist around, beached, soaked and prone, the ocean withdrawn to a silver crawl below her drooping eyelid. Voices carry from behind the truck parked beyond the dunes.

  The ocean’s sound that a minute ago she was just one part of. Now she knows that it is made of tunnels.

  When the friend throws himself from the bridge, this is what she knows: he was spared the sound of his own dying.

  She walks slowly up the white beach. She hears her brother’s voice, high and rubbed bright on the dunes, and she begins to run toward it.

  When Soma is in her late thirties, she dates a woman with a four-year-old boy. The kid is terrified by the city’s rapid-

  transit system, carves his fingers into Soma’s palm, wraps one sneaker around the inside of her calf. This is the only time he claims her as his own. Soma doesn’t drive and when she sometimes picks the kid up from kindergarten, she dreads these trips, blank-eyed commuters taking in the silent theatre, the kid grasping marks on the insides of her arms. The automated voice chants names of stations down the buried spine of Vancouver—Marine Drive, King Edward, Broadway City Centre—and the numbness enters her bloodstream at the place he is anchored.

  One night in her girlfriend’s apartment, Soma clicks a video on a work acquaintance’s Facebook page and plays it once, twice, and the kid, always watchful of her, runs over, demanding, “What’s that! I want to see!” The video shows a flock of birds travelling above a lake. The birds move in a sheet, spreading and folding, a surge of interlocking triangles that tents the lake, opens a slow, flurried eyelid over the furious blue, the sky. The kid stares at the video, transfixed, his fingers on Soma’s neck. He has his mother’s habit of lightly touching the person he is talking to. They are both nervous, tactile.

  “Again. Again. Again,” he chants.

  The video solves Soma’s problem with the kid’s fear of rapid transit. When he begins to clench, she announces, “Birds!” and he repeats with anticipation, leaning into her, “Birds birds birds.” Passengers watch, a few always peering at the screen to see what the kid responds to instantly, his head flopped to one side, his smile spreading. She doesn’t know why the video works: she accepts its magic and repeats it endlessly. The kid’s eyes tunnel into the morph and sway of the bird cyclone. Hypnotized, he nods when she whispers, “Again?”

  They get through the video six or seven times before their stop near the girlfriend’s apartment. She always puts the phone on mute because the soundtrack is the filmmaker (in a boat in the centre of the lake, she assumes) bellowing, “Oh my god! Oh my god, here they come again!” and she knows that the voice, its mock alarm and adult lack of awe, will turn the kid off. The internet is full of videos intended to transfix you, Soma knows; everyone has a little digital spell to fall back on. Reluctantly, she comes to love the small warm stone of his head on her shoulder, the whirling silence of the video, how completely she can fulfill his request.

  “Birds, birds.”

  When the kid’s mother breaks up with her, Soma sits on her bed in her apartment, slips her phone out of her pocket to text a friend. Instead her thumb pilots itself to the internet icon. Then to the window with the bird video, always kept there for the kid. She presses the Play button. The birds fill her hand. The sound from her throat falls into the black-and-blue core of their endless turning. Her hand is full of shifting wings.

  It is the video she watches when she loses her job to government cuts the following year; when her oldest friend dies six years later in a car accident. The video is bookmarked between a news site and an online dating service she never checks and never stops paying for. She never shows the video to anyone else. She wonders how the kid survived without it after his mother asked her to disappear, and how she responded to his requests for birds.

  Soma is seven years old the first time she leaves home. She is seven and she is leaving. Later, much later, leaving will reveal itself as always more work than staying, but when she is eight and nine and ten and eleven, leaving is effortless, a matter of launching—whatever comes next is irrelevant.

  She is running from the rage in the house where she has grown up. Running down a hill, past cherry blossom trees in a row like cheering people, pink cloudy heads of blooms all the way down, and she is travelling down a very steep hill and oversteps, and for a moment there is no ground, the angle of the hill deepens, her eyesight bows down to the sky and she’s sure she is about to slam into the dappled pavement, the even squares laid down by the city with the date stamped at the end of every block. And her whole face will scrape off and require surgery that will leave her looking like a tire tread forever. But her back saves her, it whips up, and her knees are in front of her instead of her feet. She falls backward—falls vertically onto the hill made flat by the impossible thrust of her body, her shoulders pressed toward each other, her hair damp with sweat and blood and the bright pain of light through the cumulous cherry blossoms. This is how far she gets the first time she leaves home.

  Her scalp is soft in one place. She sees billowing fluorescent clouds for weeks. Nobody believes her except for her brother when she whispers to him, “I died.” He looks impressed, asks her what it was like.

  Her concussion is not a concussion: it is a confirmation. She ran away and it was just a mistake that she returned, a snafu on the road to her ultimate exit. She will go.

  At night she shuts her eyes and sees blowing streets of white light, sees her grandfather who died the year before. Leaving doesn’t happen all at once, but in pieces. It begins with running. Her brother nods fearfully when, once a day for a month, she tells him, “I died.” She relishes how in awe he is. He asks her what it was like, again, again, and she shakes her head at the pinky finger he holds out to guarantee secrecy. She shuts her eyes and remembers the footless step, her celestial headache blooming from the eyes in the trees, the people living everywhere in the air. She bargains with him to rub her temples in gentle hoops in exchang
e for news of death. Then she denies him, smugly.

  She knows she can’t describe it to him anyway. The impassive thundering in her body, how it holds her down. How she returned to earth with the understanding that it was temporary.

  She and her brother will sit across from each other in a restaurant in their twenties, after the friend’s death, each one older than the other, ages as interchangeable as their water glasses, and confess that they were both always afraid living in that house and both swallow sound and still leave their bodies on a regular basis. Both will have had lovers who argue with them, try to convince them to stay. Her brother will tell her that he’s marrying his girlfriend, his rich WASP girlfriend, daughter of a hotel-chain owner, because she’s pregnant.

  He will say to her, I think I can do things better.

  She will respond: People are people are people.

  He will say to her, I wish I remembered more, and she will say nothing.

  She will remember his face when she told him she knew how it felt to die, how expectant he looked, how excited, how she was the one going further and bringing back news of the future.

  There is a spot on Soma’s head where the flesh is still soft even now, will always be an entrance to defend, an indentation that she rests her palm against when she gets too tired. She places her hand on that patch as if in prayer, leaning into her elbow, watching the sunlight slip at an angle through the splayed fingers of the world. She watches the video again and again and misses the boy she grew up with and her head rings in this one place.

  When she’s halfway through her twenties, a friend from her undergrad degree jumps from the highest bridge downtown. A day after the hysterical phone calls from the friend’s father, comes a message from an undergrad acquaintance sent to forty-seven mutual friends on social media. She focuses on the flawless black print on the screen, the elements of print becoming small hard-edged men, the permanent bellies of d’s and the outstretched wings of T’s, the perfect straight tunnels of O’s. The screen has strobe depth; the blank spaces between the incisions of symbols, bubbles. She scrolls down the responses, a few OMGs. One person has written !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! followed by a jumbled string of emoticons—faces of animals, tiny houses, stars and knives and forks.