by Chris Vola
The sky bubbles rouge, a final breath, as the garden and patio gray into chalky monochrome. She feels a dew-mist begin to settle around them as the lights go on in the clinic’s adjacent main building and the staff bungalows across the stream.
“Am I fat?” Eric says, looking up. “Like, be honest.”
Dave looks at her, raises an eyebrow, waits for her permission to deliver a final punchline, a fatal blow.
She grins wide at neither of them, says, “We’re all fucked,” gets up and heads toward the main building and her room and a landline that, for the first time, she hopes won’t ring.
*
Her dark hair is gathered up at the back of her head in a sloppy bun held together by a ballpoint pen, wavy strands framing her round cheeks. She pulls the pen, the one she’s been using to sign the piles of wavers and confidentiality bullshit that will probably be incinerated once they let her leave, and shakes, letting the strands envelop her neck and shoulders.
A shroud rippling in the stream’s reflection.
She lets out an unspoiled laugh at the grim image, one the counselors would call “delimiting” or “problematic,” but she knows that darkness is transient, as much a part of herself as the thick eyelashes and eyes that flicker from brown and green to gray with the inconsistency of clouds.
It doesn’t matter.
She presses on the space between her eyebrows and then her cheeks, waiting for the blush that isn’t chemically regulated.
For a second she wishes the Ex or the bartender or anyone from school could see her like this, the way the flesh has spread and reclaimed itself, but she catches the thought and snuffs it like she’s been training herself to do.
She opens her fists, closes. She unfurls the paper bag she’s brought with her, empties its contents on the dock: a set of identical keys, the pills she’s been hiding under her tongue and spitting for weeks, a gold nose ring.
Scooped into the water, she watches them drift, washed out of sight.
A tree-muffled conversation is coming towards her from somewhere back up the trail. Maybe it’s her parents, uncharacteristically early to pick her up. She visualizes her father asking one of the counselors if the stream has any especially good fly fishing holes; her mother a few paces behind, nature-dazed and wary. Or it’s Greta, her neighbor from down the hall who may have been prominently featured in several Nerf commercials two decades ago, and whose practice conversations with her PR team (using her Naltrexone bottle as a speaker phone) usually end with a monologue about outgrowing her regional territory, that she’s “L.A.-ready.”
Or, nothing. The departure of echoes from a scrubbed-out space.
She slides into the water.
She pulls her tee shirt over her head and lets it glide away, frees one leg then the other from the muck-slick bottom. She allows herself to merge with the current and extends her arms to stabilize the pace, not reaching for something to hold.
The Terrible Softness
How has it come to this, he would think, zoning on the pixels that flickered, MRI-slow, from the screen on his blanket-covered stomach. Regardless of how hard I try, I can’t seem to keep my shit together.
Fundamentally, he knew you couldn’t keep any kind of shit together. Everything was carbon and particles smaller than carbon and those particles were always corroding, breaking, collapsing against each other with the terrible softness of tongues. A rapid, infinite sequence of shifts that didn’t stop and were at once fragile and impenetrably brutal. If he felt a pang of irrational strength, he would try to fight the changes: he would dismantle his power cord, close the screen, his thoughts, his head, and for as long as he could, forget the events, faces, and hips that had come to define his particular disintegration.
He would stay in one place and keep staying still. He would hold his breath and try not to desire it.
Simply absorb fluids.
Keep your shit together.
He could still feel the dense and desperate oscillations, though muffled, continuing unabated, buzzing in directions he wasn’t even aware of, reminders of his task’s impossibility.
He would open his laptop and jerk off and sometimes sleep soundly.
One night during a routine meandering, he watched a clip of a husband/wife team of amateur bow-hunting enthusiasts with a moderately large subscriber base. He knew the video was recent because of the date it was posted and because the foliage in the background was as barren as the few trees in his neighborhood at an almost equivalent latitude.
He assumed from the comments section that the wife had shot the large antlered mammal the pair was crouching over, then groping – “NICE buck hunnie!!! love that you guys got the whole family in on that its amazing! cant wait to get some meat in the fridge :).” A pink-shafted arrow protruded from the base of the animal’s neck. Its hide was covered in mud and fallen leaves from the ground where it had whined and twisted.
Where once it had eaten and fucked and shat and now died.
The video ended and he placed his laptop on the floor next to his bed.
He didn’t think about how the husband and wife had concluded by taking a selfie and making out while straddling the carcass. How Dana, if she hadn’t moved out last week, would probably have cried and wanted to hold the animal in her too-brittle arms. How the animal hadn’t done anything that animals shouldn’t do.
He fixated on the decaying plant matter licking the animal and the ground, returning everything around it to a place beyond change.
Now that the leaves are almost gone, he thought, maybe I’ll be able to keep my shit together.
One day soon, when all the leaves are gone.