A Different Bed Every Time

by Jac Jemc

  Shanna kept saying, “So we bought some time. What’s the big deal?”

  “Stole. Stole that time,” I reminded her.

  We started cutting class and trolling other neighborhoods,. watching people’s routines. We noticed people loading their cars with suitcases. We counted family members leaving the house. We had a pattern down. Janna checked all the windows. Eve checked all the doors. Cathy looked for spare keys, and I sat out front ready to call out if I saw something suspicious. We never went in without an escape route, an alley or some woods behind the house that we could disappear in.

  We took TVs until we had enough of those. We took jewelry and movies we wanted to see and bottles of liquor and stuffed animals that stared at us saying, “Take me with you!” We could have taken a lot more with the intention of selling it, but we behaved modestly. Most of all, it was the thrill we were stealing.

  We rubbed dirt into the hems of our skirts and dusted our sandaled feet until they were an ashy gray. At home we exclaimed our wonder at what people would throw away or drop off at the dump. Our fathers smiled at the new TV, but our mothers knew that any self-respecting proprietor of the trash heap would have kept that TV for himself. “Eleanor, you can’t keep a stuffed bunny from the dump. You’ll get red fever or cholera.” She pronounced “cholera” with a “ch,” and when we heard that noise our minds felt vindicated. We’d shrug and hug the animal tight, then place it in the arms of our little sister, and she’d run off thrilled and our mother would give us a look like, “You’ve just murdered your sister. Hope you’re happy.” And we were. Not because we were killing our sisters but because we knew how our mother was failing.

  In the winter, we’d plan. The snow slowed us down. We had big downy coats to hide our bounty in, but we hadn’t figured out how to avoid leaving footprints around the houses. We barreled around each other’s rooms, sifting through the jewels we’d purloined, letting loose an expensive kind of laughter. Our mothers would knock on our doors, convinced we were getting high. When no smells shaped the right way they’d walk around the outside of the house looking for our windows to be open, for toilet paper tubes with dryer sheets to be aimed out into the winter air, but they were always shut tight. We saw our mothers in the side yards making tracks of their own and we waved enthusiastically, the wide expanses of our faces undamaged by fear of being caught. Our mothers inhaled sharply, their nostrils stamped together by the freezing wind, their khakis wet to the knee from not having bothered to put boots on instead of house sneakers. When our friends left, our mothers would ask to talk to us. “Are you involved in hate and destruction?” they’d ask. They’d comment on the asymmetry of the family as we grew and distanced ourselves. They began worrying and we all felt moments of sympathy for them, but we shook our heads just the same. “Is this what it is to watch your daughter grow?” they asked themselves as we walked away from the table. We shaped our fingers into guns as we rounded the corner and shot at our heads.

  We stole all the photos of ourselves from this time. We stole our mothers’ passwords and deleted the photos of us off their computers, and slipped pictures out of the frames lining the halls. “No,” they’d say with big worry in their voices. “This is the end. I’m putting up with your secrets, but I won’t let you take my memories.” Our mothers would hunt our rooms for them to no avail. We didn’t think about how someday we’d like to look at who we were. Our mothers hugged us tightly, trying to convince us to return to our old selves, the selves in those photos. “You’re soaked through,” they’d say, but it was our mothers who were coated with sweat like dishes too early out of the dishwasher, squeaky and startled. It is not uncommon for a person to first imagine someone else showing their symptoms in an attempt to objectify the pain and disease.

  Our mothers told us we smelled naked and ripe, and when they got close enough to hold an ear to our hearts they recreated the burbling with wet sounds, their clammy tongues flicking around their mouths.

  “Decay,” we whispered outside their other ears. All those manners and ethics were being pulled loose of us like too many bones, coyotes and vultures burying them deep to savor at a later time.

  First the lifeblood drains to the dependent parts of our consciences and that lividity rises up behind our expressions. The muscles of our decency refuse to uncouple. Our honor cools to a temperature of consensus.

  Froth and rupture. Our minds pillage themselves. New colors marble through the veins of our principles. Our hair slides out. Our skin slips. The maggots feed on us and squirm away to make their own code.

  We’d turned rotten is all. Autolysis and putrefaction. Our morals were breaking themselves down. Blistering. Aided by the outside world that hunted out any point of weakness to feed on. Bloating. All that integrity burglarized by blowflies and filched by gut flora. A vibrant person will rebuild herself. Only the dead break down.

  Recipe for Her Absence

  Ingredients:

  1 Half-Empty Bottle of Perfume

  1 Glass of Water

  Directions:

  When she gets up to leave, think of everything. Try to bribe her, blackmail her, hold objects for ransom. Objects like that almost-empty bottle of perfume she’s had in your medicine cabinet since it was full. When she looks at you like you’re crazy, grip your fearful fingers tighter around the bottle and shove it into your pocket defiantly. Turn around so you don’t have to watch her leave for the last time. When the screen door slams shut and then slams shut a little less and then wobbles, take the perfume from your pocket and figure out how to work the cap. Does it twist? Does it snap? Does it just lift right off? Yes. Spray the perfume into the air in front of your face and sneeze a little and be thankful for that small regularity. Every morning, every evening, when she left the house, she would perform this ritual, and if you were standing nearby you would sneeze, and right now that convulsion feels more comfortable than your skin. Cup your palm a little. Hold the bottle to your nose and breathe in deeply. Feel the tears rise and squeeze them back into yourself. Hold the bottle close to your cupped palm and spray it until a little puddle exists. Lean your face down to your palm and lap it up like a kitten. Grimace. Remember what it was like to lick the Windex off the window that time when you were a child. Lick your hand until the perfume is gone. Shake your hand dry. Flex your tongue out of your mouth. Savor the bitter alcohol and flowers. Think about how everything is different now, how from now on this perfume will be this taste and not her smell. Panic and think about the long list of irreversible things you’ve done. Go to the kitchen and fill a lukewarm glass of water. There is no time to wait for the cold to meander to the tap. Drink the glass down and then spit onto the stacks of dirty dishes you’ve been meaning to do. Already, allow the lazy hindsight to come into focus: how she could plow you down with her comments, how in every picture you could detect dangerous lies, how she’d stack the decks every time you played gin and deny it again and again. The pungent perfume on your tongue reminds you that no matter how sweet you remember her smelling, when you think of the taste of her now, your tongue will remind you of the perfume lingering at the back of your throat.

  Despite your best efforts, remember that ridiculous night in Grasse when you drank too much good French wine in the café, and how strong the summer breeze was on the short walk back to the hotel, and how she had that loose dress on that the wind nearly knocked off, and how her ankle turned gently on the cobblestones and how instead of leaning to help her up, you stretched yourself out on the ground beside her and twined yourself into her spilled limbs, and how you lay there breathing in the moist Provence air, clean and fragrant, and how she imagined aloud the wind undressing the flowers in the fields that surrounded the town, and how when you kissed her bare shoulder, you swore you could taste the jasmine on her skin.

  Now try and remember the taste of the perfume in your palm.

  Both Fruit and Flower

  Ciara-Bianca, Ciara-bright, Ciara-blossom turned to fruit.

  Every day Cia
ra-Bianca is cross-pollinated, self-surprised, she stays the same and comes undone.

  Ciara-Bianca, at twilight, can feel herself turn waterless, feel her bones bend into beams of ghost and question, can feel the transformation occur, a little backwards shipwreck.

  In the dark of night she is the ruins of ancient artwork. In the morning, she is a mystery, even in full light. As the afternoon turns to evening, though, she can feel herself become the ultimate skeleton fiction.

  It’s at twilight that the buzzing of the day embeds itself in her, changes her. It’s at twilight when her stamen feels the hunger, and her pistil feels full; the sticky tip of her stigma pulling the full day deep into her. That is when her body begins to make the apple seeds.

  Ciara-Bianca, on the stage, under the gas lamp of faithless vision and the panic of crushed myth. She drums closed arguments with faint questions. She cannot shake it out.

  The petals of the blossom fall as she plumps, her skin growing thinner, building layer on layer, until that epithelial first coat has knotted itself into a core.

  Ciara-Bianca rising round the neck of the dying spring, shining from within like startled death, her vivid veins rushing like nothing when compared to the famous, clean poetry of the fresh curse of fruit.

  At the bottom of her are all the furry parts that made her, the part we try to ignore, to pretend it doesn’t mar the smooth red slick of the separation of inside and out.

  Ciara-Bianca, filled with people weary of the great half dark, in her hands rests a cold story.

  A little overripe, looked over, winked at and passed on, the chiaroscuro of Ciara-Bianca jumps with centipedes. She can only feel love like a loose shadow.

  “When I’ve rotted,” Ciara-Bianca tells herself, “when I’m past possibility, I plan on asking what all of this is about. I’ll do it, in the service of shrill facts and likely twins. I’ll give credence to the sunless ideas, beautifully explained under the weight of many men and women. I’ll win my case with that old repellant weapon: betrayal.”

  Ciara-Bianca, like church or scorpions, bent and strange, cut with a little bit of snake oil. Ciara-Bianca says, “It’ll all be over in the end.”

  Even a roof is under something. Even the coldest day has a cooler shadow, grateful and long. Even the deepest hole can be dug deeper.

  In her bed, in the pitch black, Ciara-Bianca can hear everything. The memory of her is thrown away just as it is called into being.

  In the dark of the night Ciara-Bianca’s face becomes the moon becomes a chemical fire becomes a belly of dead moisture becomes herself and her.

  Which is true? Ciara-Bianca could flower and bear fruit at once, could watch herself without touching a mirror, could read her story without laying eyes on the page.

  Configuration

  “Holy God,” we say. Lory has crinkled all of the wire hangers into a meaningless Venn diagram on the wall. Lory tries to wink and tit in some sort of meaningful way, but she is covered in flowers and downy hair, and it all feels like too much to be honest. Lory, standing on top of the covers, like some conquest, Lory hears out of one ear and pouts against her shallow chin. “Lory,” we say. “Go ahead, explain it.” But Lory knows the rules. Lory presses the meaning deep inside her and reaches with a blunt thumb between her teeth to dig something out. “Come in,” she says. “Take a look.” And that’s all we do. We whisper, and Lory beams proudly and stirs within herself. We coo a bit and think that we’ll forget this by tomorrow, but a handful of tomorrows come and this image still pops up like floaters in our vision.

  The next time we see Lory, Tuck is disappearing behind her, doing that thing where you stand behind someone and stick you arms under their armpits so it looks like the person in front has four arms. We wait for them to get still before we laugh, and their elbows are waving and tangling again, and then we have to fly our hands to our faces, because the image of those wire hangers returns. Lory, with her piggish eyes, looks down, and sees all four of her arms, and tells us twice about her confusion headaches. Tuck sends out a stray hum behind her, to remind her he’s there, and her arms get heavy and trap his hands right where they are. The two of them stand for hours there, free and yet tied. We leave and go to the mall, where there are salesgirls and gold and the slow pace of age. There are hollow prayers in the air that look just like window shopping. We hop around in our slender skins and ogle the sagging, elderly patrons on the benches. We stick out like sore thumbs, or the old people do. Whichever it is, someone doesn’t fit in.

  The Effects of Rotation

  In this messy room, three rumpled girls toss themselves down on misshapen couches, melting with their ignorance of enterprise. Their eyes loll around lazily, never stopping. Their arms drape down to the bubbling shag carpet. Soft tufts of breath emerge from their pillowy cheeks as their minds move nowhere. In this loose, open ocean of a room, three slugs will never even know what it is to scrape their full bellies along concrete or punch pulpy holes into the tissue of fruit. Torsion is taking hold of their insides, twisting them to make explanations for the doctors, who haven’t a clue.

  The Things Which Blind Us

  I hated when they made me wear the bear suit in public and hated it more for how comfortable it was when I was alone. A conundrum. The heat had been turned off in my apartment for almost a week. Wearing the bear suit in public wasn’t making enough money for me to pay the bill, but it kept me pretty warm. If I quit to find another job, I would have to return the bear suit, and then how would I sleep? I avoided making a decision, which meant deciding to keep the bear suit and living without heat.

  At that point, I’d been confused for days, like trying to see through dense foliage. I hoped it was just the mescaline wearing off. When that effect faded, suddenly, random birds began falling from the sky every few minutes, and when I looked for them near the ground, they were nowhere. When my coworker offered me another of the small pills at the drive-in several weeks later, I declined. It was warming up. I was thinking of ditching the bear suit. Not only did I not need it in my apartment, but it was getting miserable to be inside of the suit on the hot sidewalks all day passing out sale flyers.

  I lived on the fourth floor of a big semi-converted warehouse and my best friend lived on the fourth floor of the building across the alley. I spent that summer trying to rig passageways between our windows. First, I thought big and worked on designs for a rope bridge. By the end of the summer it was just a tin can telephone, and even that proved to be tricky.

  My friend and I crowed open the door of the landlord’s storage space downstairs, convinced he’d been stealing from me. We navigated the dark basement, through unknown detritus, and then, as we got deeper in, our eyes adjusted. With the blindness arrived a sensation in which everything I touched felt like something I had owned. Then lights seemed to click on in my brain and everything I touched was bright and clear. And then everything took shape, or real light appeared again, and it was fantastic. A whole scene unfolded as if another world existed in that basement: there were tattooed ladies and strongmen slumping in laps around carousels and Ferris wheels, carnival barkers presenting me with fantastic options, everything wound and rotating. I looked at my friend, to share our amazement at what was hidden in this basement, but she was unfazed, unaware of the circus spinning behind her. She was still looking with her hands for anything that had once been mine. Suddenly, I felt very alone, sure I was seeing everything which blinded the rest of the world. In the darkness, from the light of the carnival, I looked at my friend, and she held up a set of magnets she’d given me, not even freed of their packaging yet, which had gone missing weeks ago. They were ugly, some bubble sticker of a teen TV-movie character pasted onto an oversized paperclip, some kind of joke I didn’t get. I hadn’t been upset to lose them specifically, but they were not the landlord’s to take. My mind started wandering to how often he went into my apartment, wondered if he had been hiding behind the shower curtain while I danced in the bear suit to keep warm. “I think I found
the birthday gift I gave you,” my friend said. Her hands were running all over the package, figuring it out. She still couldn’t see. We pocketed the proof and lifted our knees high over the stacks of old newspapers, dirty piles of rags, stained fish tanks. I looked back for the fair before we left, but it was just that blank slate of darkness we’d seen when we’d first cracked the door.

  Later that night we terrorized the open galleries down the street. Art had metastasized on walls which had been blank days before. Photographs of people wearing scrappy helmets that looked like weapons. Sculptures that triggered my gag reflex, a disgusting network of roots and plugs extending from the undersides of everything. Paintings of rockets announcing themselves against absurd skies, everything reminding me of a time when the world seemed covered in gluey strings of resistance and life had me convinced I needed a reason to do anything I got it in my brain to do.

  On the way home, my friend looked up into the sky and told me about how the planets would dissolve from one side to the other until we could stare straight into their hollow centers. I shoved her and we didn’t bother saying goodnight before we climbed to our respective towers.

  Back in the apartment, alone, unable to sleep, I spent the night making myself sick, spinning in a loose office chair. I spent time running my hands over my body looking for that lovable cancer monster. I convinced myself I was full of putrid and secretive cells. I thought about what I knew was true, even if it couldn’t be proven or if I’d never read it in books: that more comets flew than suns rose; that everyone slept on the job, so no one needed to apologize; that someone must have lined those apples up outside the fourth-floor bedroom window I couldn’t budge, no matter how impossible it seemed. I had chameleoned d into this life, or maybe it was the other way around. I stopped trying to distinguish anything from itself. I tried not to look at the moon directly. I stared at the bear suit piled in the corner and took off all my clothes.