Off the Rack

by Paperback Rack

afraid of, or maybe just a friend. I thought Tony was wrong about the truffles. But DD asked me straight out, and I said, “No, I’ve never been with anyone,” and then he smiled. When I didn’t smile back, when I didn’t even want to look at him, he sat back in his chair and rubbed underneath his chin with his thumb, watching me. He said, “Come on, Marie, don’t cry,” and he sounded like he cared, but I was so confused. He leaned forward then and reached across the table. He put his hand on mine. He said, “You’re the only pure thing in my world.” I pulled my hand away and asked him to just take me home.

  I wouldn’t talk to DD for a few weeks after that, but then I started missing him. I missed going to the cafe. And I started thinking, Why not sleep with him? I didn’t care too much about staying a virgin until I got married, even though I was supposed to. All of my girlfriends, every one of them, had already done it. My girlfriend Anjee was already pregnant, and I wasn’t interested in any of the boys at school. DD was a man, and I had never in my life met anybody who treated me like he did. Plus, we had something in common. We were both afraid. So I thought if I could help him, that would be a good thing to do.

  I knew DD wasn’t in love with me. He never said that he was. And I wasn't in love with him. I was just a kid. Still in high school. It was more like, if I slept with him, because I was a virgin, he’d be protected by magic or something. He must have been out of his mind.

  Lima was really nice to me, too, but it was different with him. First of all, he wasn’t good-looking like DD was. DD had black hair and dark blue eyes. That's my type. Plus, he worked out. He really took care of his body, and he spent good money on his clothes. He was sort of in love with himself, everybody said it, but that was okay with me. Lima was sloppy, and most of the time he didn’t smell very clean. He needed to lose weight, too. I think he drank a lot of beer. But still, he was nice. Sometimes he brought me presents when he made deliveries to the flower shop where I worked. Once he brought me a clear plastic tube filled with star-shaped glitter in some kind of liquid. I don't know what happened to it. I remember thinking they were so pretty, the floating stars.

  Lima’s name got mispronounced a lot. His mom named him after where she was born. People would read his name tag and call him lima, like the bean, and ask him if it was a joke. Lima hated it when that happened. He said people are just stupid, but he said that didn’t mean me. He called me Rose Marie, which is not my name. He said I was the most beautiful flower in the shop.

  The last time I saw DD was three days before he died. I went to visit him in the hospital. The nurse wasn’t going to let me see him, but then I told her who I was. “I’m his girlfriend,” I said, and she looked at me. I looked right back until finally she said all right. She told me I couldn’t stay long, though, because he was heavily medicated and he shouldn’t be stressed, and anyway he might not know me.

  I didn't know what to think when I walked into the room. He was strapped face down on a metal frame like a cot, instead of laying on a regular bed. I found out later they had to do that because Lima shot him in the back when he ran.

  The man in the other bed was asleep, so I tried to be quiet. I stood next to DD and whispered his name a few times, but he didn’t move or answer. I thought he was probably sleeping, too.

  I stared down at the back of DD’s head, at the swirls of his dark hair. I laid my hand on the cool metal frame and looked at all the tubes they had running into him. Bandages were wrapped around his middle really thick, and his bare legs and feet stuck out from under a blanket. He wasn’t wearing a shirt or anything. His shoulders were bare, too. There was just that folded blanket over him. I thought he must have been cold, but I went and asked the nurse about it, and she said he couldn’t feel anything, so it didn’t matter. That made me so sad.

  When I got back to the room I wanted to see DD’s face. I wanted him to look at me. I sat down on the floor and scooted under the metal frame, then laid flat on my back so I could look up at him. His eyes were closed. The lids were purple. His face was so pale that I swear, I thought he was dead. I whispered to him again and then again when he still didn’t answer, and finally he opened his eyes. I don’t think he knew me at first, but then I could see that he did and he said, “Hey.”

  “Hi,” I said, looking up at him. I couldn’t think of anything more.

  We stayed like that for a while, without talking. The floor was freezing cold, but I didn’t want to move. I wanted to stay there with DD until somebody told me I had to leave. He was so doped up. He’d slowly open his eyes and slowly close them.

  As I laid there I started thinking about how weird it felt to be beneath him again. We were only together one time. I’m lucky I didn’t get pregnant because we didn’t use protection at all. DD said that would ruin it if we did and he asked me how close I was to getting my period so we could do it at a time when it was safe. We met at his apartment, one day after school. It was over in twenty minutes. It wasn't making love. It was like a transaction. DD said it would be better next time, but next time never came.

  Lying there on my back on the floor at the hospital, I wondered what Tony would do if he saw me like that. He put his fist right through the wall when I told him I’d been with DD. I had to admit it, though. He already knew anyway, and I was too scared to lie. I don’t know where he was that day I went to the hospital. I figured he wouldn’t come there, but I was worried because things had got so crazy. It was unbelievable to me that Tony wasn’t in jail. He gave Lima his gun, I know he did. He gave it to him after he told him about me and DD, but he lied to Lima and told him I was raped. He told Lima he wanted DD dead, but he couldn’t pull the trigger because he and DD had once been friends. That was a lie, too, I think. Tony was just too chicken to do it himself. So he lied to Lima and gave him the gun. Then he told the police that Lima stole it.

  I've tried for so long to forgive them, Tony and Lima both. I know that would be the right thing to do. But that’s not the only reason to forgive. I want to forgive them so I can stop feeling angry. I don’t want to wind up like the two of them, consumed by hate.

  Once, when DD opened his eyes, his lips parted a little, like he was trying to say something, but then they closed again. His lips were cracked, I remember. I heard DD swallow--that’s how quiet it was in that room. I stared up at him, hoping it was true what the nurse had said, that he couldn’t feel anything, because I couldn’t stand the thought of him being in pain. But then I thought that was stupid, because not feeling anything would be bad, not good. To live and not feel--what kind of a life would that be? Then I felt something hit my cheek, something wet, and I wiped it away. It was a tear. It fell from DD, and I swear, it broke my heart. That tear was like a bullet, it went straight to my heart.

  Drown

  Jesse Murphree Kemper

  My grandmother drowned herself. So when I close my eyes at night I see the cold black water she died in.

  I try to imagine what it must have been like to walk out into that water and start to swim, and then keep on swimming until she sank.

  At least this is what my mother told me. She said, your grandmother walked into the water and she swam in a straight line until she sank.

  I didn’t understand. I was five years old. At first I did not believe my mother, because my grandmother had always been afraid of the water. But then I thought maybe that was why she picked it, so it would be the last worst thing.

  My grandmother’s body washed up on the beach. My uncle, the husband of my mother’s sister, went and identified the body. He said it was her.

  My mother would not let me go and see my grandmother in the funeral home, laid out. She said my grandmother had been scraped up against the sand. She said my grandmother had been in the water for a long time, and she said I would not recognize her. She said there were things in the water with her and I did not realize until I was older that she meant things tha
t bite.

  I saw my grandmother floating, her body a shadow, everything around her completely silent.

  After my grandmother was dead, we went to the ocean and threw flowers into the water. My mother, her sister, and my two cousins were there. My hand was sore because I had put it into a cactus plant at the florist shop. My aunt was buying roses, carnations, baby’s breath. I watched her. Then I put my palm flat into a wooden bowl full of cactus plants and I closed my fist, driving the spines beneath the skin.

  At the ocean, my youngest cousin tried to throw her flowers into the water, but she was too short, and they landed on the sand. She picked her flowers back up, carefully, and put them back in her basket. She ran along the sand screaming, goodbye grandma goodbye, as if she really believed there was someone there to hear it.

  When I am in the water now, I am afraid of something eating me. If I am bleeding, if I am having my period, I don’t want to swim in the ocean. I imagine my blood mixing with the water and a giant shark rising beneath me, his mouth open, waiting to strike me where I am blind.

  When I told the other children, my friends, right after my grandmother died, that she killed