“Drowning”
Mort was cooking his own breakfast, as usual, when Rita stormed into the kitchen cradling something wet in her palm. He thought maybe the couple’s therapy was working and she’d gone out of her way to be kind, and as such, had forged wild mushrooms for his omelet.
“Grab me a basket for this thing, Mort, please.” Rita’s cheeks were flushed. He wished he didn’t notice these things. It’d have made their thirty-one years together so much less work if he’d been less observant.
“The Second Hand”
It’s dark in his bedroom and the boy is having a hard time steadying himself on his mother’s shoulder while she peels off his pajamas. Same way she takes her time skinning a mango as to not waste a bite of flesh, she slows her undressing of him to the cadence of the Blue Angel Hornet airplane clock on his nightstand, matching the tick-tocks in half-time. Her fingernails, not long, just barely past the rump of her fingers, graze his back and arms, his belly and knees reminding him of bath time, bubble sculpture, the sun’s last skid across his mother’s brown oily nose. [Order to Read More]
My heart rate in utero
was around 130 beats per minute. Slow for a girl. A girl’s heart rate in the womb typically beats faster than a boy’s—usually closer to 150. This isn’t meant to foreshadow gender reassignment or a turn with women or spite for men. Just the opposite. I’ve since fallen in love with every man I’ve met and in the process of doing so, mapped futures that never panned out. Maybe my heart had decided at conception to beat like a boy’s, to conserve for the crushing demands later on. Maybe it was clairvoyant.
Brett and I are breathing from our mouths. An animal pant. It’s the only way to get the news out fast, because it’s deep in us—the news—as if maybe when we weren’t looking, the doctor implanted it on top of our hearts and lungs.
Paul is cooking two organic eggs, which are considerably more kind than the non-organic variety. Something about hens—and any animal with a decent sized brain stem—needing space to practice self-sufficiency and homemaking. The eggs sizzle and spit. Paul watches, analyzing, perhaps, the human condition in relation to the eggs’—should he turn them into a scramble or let them be over easy? This instead of Mass. Genuflection at the sight of sugar turning to candy, prayer books flipped to Quick Breads—we prefer communion in the company of double boilers and yeast starters. Just when I think he’s going to let the yolks carry on whole, he pierces them both. Yellow mottles white and white mutes yellow. Paul sighs.
1.
The doctor says, it’s everywhere. From kidneys to heart and back to bone, cannibal cells divide and deploy. What does it look like? I’m thinking the industrious carve of tiny termite alleys. Or a delicate pattern of holes and fissures that, in the right light, are pretty — maybe a doily heart, a snowflake liver. Maybe it’s as straightforward as dry rot: chipping, flaking rottenness. Such a pretty girl, people say.
2.
At the grocery store I buy antioxidants. Blueberries, strawberries, green and orange things. I hold a cancer-fighting rainbow in my basket and ask the clerk to help me find soy milk. Rearranging the store wasn’t such a great idea, I tell him. I liked it the way it used to be. Everything made sense before, not now.
3.
Sunday she complained about stomach pains. It was after our run, we were having lunch, with margaritas and our kids. Cheese salvation on the patio, under fog and a fringed umbrella. Stress, the divorce, have a Tums, I said. She mostly talked about custody. I nodded, offered to help with the kids. How about Wednesday? She asked. I have a doctor’s appointment.
4.
The Friday nurse asks, Here for Allana? Go on in. I’ve brought her a book and a block of bittersweet chocolate, with almonds. I imagine she’s laced up like a corset from belly button to sternum. Blue pen still marks the entry points. Three hours pass and I’ve read her half of the book and eaten the chocolate. Now my stomach and hers ache. It’s everywhere and she doesn’t even know. I never keep secrets from her.
5.
What does it look like?
6.
First impression of Allana: face too perfect for good conversation; long, blonde hair, blonde even at the roots and pillow lips. Legs lovely and lean like the L’s in her name. On Sundays she smells like real maple syrup because we meet for long runs after she’s grilled pancakes for the kids. She always writes in cursive. The hospital gown doesn’t cover up her calves, muscular still, even though we haven’t run in two weeks.
At certain angles you think you already look pregnant, but mostly you look disgusted. You’re tired, swollen like a tick, and barely six weeks along. A complicated tangle of cells about the size of a spring pea has knocked you off your rocker. In no time, spring pea will grow to new potato, then peach, and soon thereafter, The Great Pumpkin. Sparking that bullshit glow isn’t going to be easy. Which is why, despite your legitimate fear of looking like a cowbell, you’ve amassed an arsenal of gauzy, flowy things. The tentative plan is to go “earth mother” on your chubby self and play like it’s all some spectacular metamorphosis. Anyway, the point is, you’ll soon have no points — you’ll have a circumference.
I told him that I was looking forward to missing him. I hadn’t missed him in a while and I missed not missing him. “Remember how you used to travel for a week at a time,” I said, “to places so far away, we’d go three, four nights without contact and when we did talk, the lines, they never went silent. And how one night, across coils of cord, how that reunion was like that burger we ate after a week on the grapefruit diet? Remember?
Lisa thought Steve, sitting in his Leatherette recliner like that, could have passed for an extra in a John Mellencamp video— his old Martin guitar, a faded John Deere t-shirt, pieces of weekend mulch burrowed in his arm hair. He was practicing the Pentatonic scale in A, warming up for tomorrow.
The guitar was about a decade old, hardly used in the last three years, except the few Sundays he resurrected it to show Eli, his two-year-old son, what a man looked like with music on his mind: one leg propped up on the guitar case, eyes shut, then open to watch fingers blaze red at the tips.
A note is taped to our front door. It says something about a community-standards violation and cites section 2B from the HOA policies handbook: All residents are responsible for the upkeep and general maintenance of their front yards. The signature is live — fresh ink and all — because in our parts, an untamed lawn is grounds for a full-scale suburbia stand-off.
People in the ‘burbs like things pretty. Truth is, we do too. We like our property lines delineated with boxwood, our five-foot fences crawling with jasmine, the four corners of our plot staked with gigantic tropicals. We prefer that our grass doesn’t bend too far in the breeze, that our lives are edged at ninety and pruned in January. So we hire Jesús.