To the Sailor's (Former) Wife

Go out and meet her (or it, if you so prefer--only you can decide her title, now that your sailor is gone). Go alone, and don't pay attention to those beautiful frivolities that adorn her. The rocks, the sand, and the sky don't matter. They were just means to an end--no need to waste your emotions on them.

Wade, don't swim. It'll be too much. She'll be cold like ice you've never experienced, but in time, you'll numb--first your feet, then the rest of you.

(Except for your ankles--your ankles will be last, strangely enough. Don't worry about this--she's a bitch.)

There will probably be wind. Be prepared. It'll feel like a slap, but you'll stand there with her ice at her feet and her breath on your face. You might cry. But know that the sailor's wife cries not because her sailor is leaving but because he has chosen someone else over her--again, again, and again. For you, my dear, the agains are finite.

Daddy

Chloe sits in the kitchen. Midterms are in four days, and the sadistic bastard who decided that chemistry and algebra 2 were going to be on the same day should be shot. The streetlights are out again, so it's pitch black. Thanks, Daylight Savings. She longs to sleep.

Oh my God's. Two of them. It's the second one staggers her heart, the tiny wail that Mom uses only when she cries. And Chloe knows, even before she walks into the room and sees the body. She's prepared ever since her grandfather's funeral some ridiculous amount of time ago. One day, Mommy and Daddy were going to die. She was probably going to have to see them dead. And Daddy was a smoker and didn't like to wear his seatbelt, so he was probably going to go first.

Dad's hands are cold. God. 911. Even though they were too late--his legs are stiff. She sits in the driveway waiting for the ambulance (she screams into her hands a little) before she thinks to go pull her mother off him. Carries her out.

The ambulance comes.

Shit. How is she going to tell her sister?

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Chloe's dressed neck-to-toe in black, clothes her cousin had bought her hurriedly the morning of the funeral because Chloe embarrassingly doesn't have anything in black that fits her. Nothing to wear to her father's funeral. Pathetic.

And here is the funeral procession--damn the South, thinking it's autumn when it's actually winter (leaves everywhere), and it's time to move. Figures in black. Leaves of red. Black against red. Life against death.

They made her sing at the funeral, then waited to see if she would cry. Everyone's watching for her to cry. So she won't.

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Chloe cries later, in January, when the blue jay joins the cardinal in the sprinkler in her backyard. No one sees. There are a lot of things she doesn't know, and she doesn't know if this is their secret or her secret, but it's a secret. She keeps it.

Grandpa

She was still half-dreaming amongst her crayon-themed decor when her mother came into her room. Grandpa didn't make it. And Chloe dreamt of the pool where Miss Laura taught her to swim during the summer. Grandpa had tried a no-breather and ended up standing up halfway through. He got bored, as she often did, and they went to watch birds, as he often did. He pointed out the cardinal and the blue jay. Much better than the brown morning doves they usually saw.

Of course she knew what dying meant. Chloe was five--not a baby like her sister. Grandpa was going to heaven. Grandpa was going to God. Chloe's mother dressed her in the red-and-white poofy dress with the flowers. Everyone was crying. Chloe twirled in her Mary Janes.

"Not today," her mother said.

Chloe didn't recognize Grandpa in the coffin. They shaved his beard. Chloe took note of the way Grandpa's hands were arranged and vowed never to sleep that way. She didn't want to die. She liked her hair.

Anthem for a Stroll (Mar's Song)

First, gather your winds about you--close enough to kiss your wrists (but leave room for them to tousle your hair). In summer, you'll want to float like your sister clouds; in winter, you'll want to slice like sleet. Claim your body, these legs that cover so much ground, these arms that gather so much love, and these hips that swing, high-tide, low-tide. Was the woman created from the oceans, or the oceans from the woman? Maybe they learned their paradox together, moving out, in, out, in, all the while, drawing deeper the men and the seashells. Flow, and flow.

Flow like flame, that core that never stops whispering this compels, this must. Feel it light your eyes and the tips of your fingers. The air crackles around you; you do not walk--you stride, and the earth comes to a standpoint in your midst.

"Oh, it's so cute!"

Kei's final art project made The Board--a Marilyn Monroe-type outline of a woman's face. We looked closer and saw Marilyn's skin and hair, all words: hairsprayhairsprayhairspraylipsticklipstickeyeshadowblushblush. To us, Kei was not an artist. She was the video game girl. She knew the Mario theme song and could play it by memory on piano.

If we all text her at the same time, she'll be so happy we admire her work.

I have my phone in my hands when I see the words written inside the eyes--blue, the irises.

Maybe Won't

They See

journals

They’re too liberal, allowing thoughts to bleed over the pages and through them, seeping through, staining tables underneath. The inkblots grow, color stains. The paper gives; transparent, a morning after rain.

We should hide our hearts behind more than paper. Maybe that’s just me.

Common/Newland

The sound of the lighter, a metallic scratch-and-snap, shocked me out of my panic, and I turned to find that she’d slid down the side of the record store and squatted above the rain-slick sidewalk. With one hand, she took a drag from her cigarette, leaning her head back to blow a smoke geyser into the air. Baby Faithful.

Around us, neon signs created white noise and drew us in subconsciously, city dwellers looking for illumination an hour before midnight. Cars cast our drive-by silhouettes onto the wall and sidewalk; the sound waxed and waned, an irregular rhythm. I joined her then, wading to the wall, immediately feeling the burn in my legs and pull on my high-heeled ankles as I squatted beside her. The rain before had been rough, a sideways rain. The wall behind me felt blunt and grainy, compacted soil beneath my fingers. I could read the street signs then—the intersection between Common and Newland. In front of us, the traffic light turned, bathing the air around us in red. Cars lined up, idling at the intersection. Beneath us, red traveled like electricity through the water, jagged edges distorted by bumps in the street and our own slight movements. I saw pieces of her face in the ruby-and-headlight haze, brown curls turned black by the light.

“So where’s this party, girl?” she asked, tired but still curious. The rain had brought the temperature down twenty degrees. Her soaked skirt skimmed the ground and clung to the curves of her hips and legs. Her wet tank top did what it could, hugging her back, breasts, and stomach into a fluid hourglass. I wondered if I looked like her, underneath day-old jeans and her sweater, which I’d had to change into after the rain turned me into a t-shirted, chattering mess. The shirt sat in the bottom of my bag now, soaking through the already-wet cloth linings, dripping by my side in a heavy mass. Why did wet things take so long to dry? Maybe the world secretly wanted to be immersed in water and people like me were drying up the parade.

“Who the hell knows?” I replied, reaching for a cigarette of my own. “City’s a fucking labyrinth.” I knew I’d made the wrong shoe choice. The acute but widespread protest in the balls of my feet had dissolved into a tender soreness. I slid them off, feeling the pain of relief in my now wet feet. I contemplated sitting—I was already wet. It couldn’t hurt.

“Well, let’s go,” she said, knocking my hand away from my bag. “Let’s find these people.” Behind me, traffic light’s green—I see it reflected in her narrow eyes. Selling ice to a polar bear.

A few moments later, as she’s dragging me down the street (we’d decided on this “adventure” exactly two hours ago, after seeing a flyer on a lamppost), splash-splash-splash, splash-splash-splash, I realize that I love how she’s running in Disney princess flip-flops a size too small. I love that she paints her nails according to her mood (she feels magenta today). I love her after-rain curves and damp-and-strawberry scent of her hair as we nearly collide around a street corner.

She stopped then, so suddenly still I felt I was moving. What law of Newton was that? The first one? I gasped for air, and there was my heart. Splash-splash-splash-splash-splash-splash.

“What’s a labyrinth?” she asked.

Japanese Lovers: An Urban Legend

Their story is an absurdly urban tale of boy meets girl, girl hates boy because he works the DPS counter and she forgot her second form of photo ID and has to drive all the way to the other side of the city in rush hour to get it and all the way back through the detour that goes through the interstate that curves up high and she hates heights, really hates them and is shaking when she walks back through the doors because it’s raining and she looks like the hairball at the bottom of the shower with her matted hair on that one spot on the side of her head. She glares at him, trying to contain his laughter in her presence and she’s freezing and curls her fingers at her sides, trying to keep from strangling him. Instead, she tilts her head to the side and rests her cheek on her hand. You want to hear a story? He wants to give her the default answer, the cordial remark he makes to everyone who attempts to break the fourth wall beyond a how are you, but here’s this edge to her voice that’s slightly tempting and almost completely pissed off, so he says yes, and he listens and laughs and jokingly tells her that he’ll buy her dinner to make up for it, and she half-jokingly says yes, and (as they’ll tell the story later) it begins.

They share her working lunch on a Saturday in the hospital cafeteria—she needs the extra hours. She gets paged twice and their burgers are cold by the time she gets back, but they establish that John Mayer is overrated and Republicans suck, so they consider it a success. Four dates after that, they decide that they can agree to disagree on the subject of Boondock Saints (she loves it, he can’t stand it) and change their Facebook relationship statuses.

Except it’s hard. Because he works days and she works nights and weekends—their license plates are from different states, for Christ’s sake. They invest in more caffeine so they can keep awake when they see each other—breakfast and dinner, breakfast and dinner. After a while, she starts sleeping over—not because they’re having sex (they’re always too tired) but because it’s just practical. Granted, it’s the only practical aspect of their relationship because they’re spending more money at a point in their lives when they really shouldn’t, but they know that you have to fight sometimes to find someone who also changes the station when it plays “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room.”

When it ends (because it does have to end—fighting is sometimes necessary but love doesn’t conquer everything, like distance and a need for sleep), the realization comes like a big wind, and they’re blown, washed up on the uneven landscape of his bed, naked as newborns, and he tells her the story of the Japanese lovers Kengyuu and Orihime, who neglected their duties and were punished by God, only allowed to meet once a year in the summer, when their constellations brushed against each other in the heavens.

They usually end the story there. Too many more details are awkward, because they’re still Facebook friends, and most of their friends are friends with the other’s friends. Lots of friends, and they have a nonverbal agreement to keep something private. It’s their due, their acknowledgment that something happened in an age where relationships are like dandelion seeds, floating around and getting stuck to your new sweater. The story, as they tell it, does it justice, in their opinion. At the end, people always sit back and look thoughtful. “That’s really something,” they’ll say, pause, then go back to whatever they’re doing, change the subject. The idea of such a pure connection is somehow too overwhelming.

The Grifter(s)

Melanie's one regret in life was losing her name in a game of chance.

Shehe and her sister had placed their birth certificates between them and played Paper, Scissors, Rock by their fireplace. Best three out of five turned into best one out of thirteen. Shared DNA rarely dictated shared personalities, but this was a business merger, and Melanie watched as Lucy Blake Ryther burned, calligraphy first.

Together, they reveled. Together, Melanie could be in two places at once. Together, they overlooked the fact that life bore a shocking resemblance to a con. They could not control the circumstances.

His name was Ian. Melanie won him on the twenty-third time, paper over rock.

Now, she stiffens as he kisses her goodnight. Her reflection has waved at her through the window. He doesn't notice and leaves the room. Melanie waves back, knowing that what happens after will not matter.

Either way, his wife will soon join him in bed.

Fuck Valentine's Day

When she gets tired of alternating days eating nothing with days eating nothing but potato skins, she emerges from her bed-cave and decides to take a shower. The towel’s still on the floor where she left it. It’s been cold, so the puddle of water next to it hasn’t dried. Clinically, she cleans up both and sits on top of the washer while she washes, dries, and folded everything he has touched. Her energy’s gone by then, so she leaves them in a stack on one of the living room chairs. Now, she doesn’t have a bed to go back to, so she picks a different towel and takes the shower.

Oh, she was a dramatic one. She’d collapsed on the floor when he told her he was leaving. It was a mistake—she knew this as soon as she hit the ground. The floor was cold, her hair was inadequately shampooed, and her towel, her last shred of dignity, had fallen so that her ass (and only her ass) was exposed to the cold air. She cried loudly, and he walked out. She was a pile of bubbles and water. And an ass.

She walks aimlessly, leaving her phone at home. She is disappearing, and you can’t do that with a phone. It’s dark. She enters a bar. There are ribbons in the way, and she pushes them out of sight, treading on the debris on the floor that blended together into a quite annoying shade of pink.

The bar is empty, save for the bartender and two women who comfort a fourth who is crying. She’s about to leave, but she really, really wants a drink. Or three. This is a three-drink situation.

Five drinks later, she’s helping Crying Woman into a chair. Bartender pours her another drink on the house and joins all of them with a bag of chocolates. The circle of women, mostly strangers, all wronged, all alone, all united by the quite pertinent possibility of only ever living with cats ever again.

Love, Later

Breakfast

Theirs wasn’t a love story.

For that to be true, they would have had to love each other in that ridiculous ultimate way that ended with either a happily ever after or both of them blowing their heads off.

She laughed when he told her this, so hard that she slid in and out of view from his rearview mirror. “You’ve been reading too much again,” she said, not opening her eyes from where she was stretched out in his backseat. “No one’s story ends like that. Happiness is relative.”

“So love is relative too?” he asked. “I don’t buy it.”

“I don’t buy that killing each other off is the only way to find true happiness,” she replied easily. Her eyes remained closed, seatbelt draped haphazardly over her hips so that she was technically safe.

“And are you happy?”

She tilted her head at him from where she was lying down in his backseat, eyes shiny slits of green as she squinted in the spots of sun that made it past the tree blurs on either side. This was getting way too deep for a car ride to breakfast. “Yes.”

“Relatively.”

“They’re the same thing.”

He’d wanted to push her, to ask, “Relatively to what?” She would have gone along with it. She had a lot to say on the subject of faith and signs from heaven. She meditated in the mornings, rearranged her furniture to salute the sun, had Chinese characters tattooed on the inside of her wrist. He would have circled the block a couple times when they got to the restaurant to keep her talking. She wouldn’t have noticed.

Instead, he pulled into the parking space, hearing her shift behind him, pulling her shoes back on, murmuring softly to herself. She hated premature silence.

He got to her door before she could. “Honestly, it’s the twenty-first century,” she said (she accepted his arm anyway). “Wait.” She reached up and yanked two grey hairs from the front of his head.

“Now four more are going to grow in their place,” he joked, taking a quick glance at the top of her head. But she was almost six years younger than him, and her hair was dyed. He’d probably never see the first of her grey hair; she’d probably never let him.

“You honestly believe that crap?” she asked, grinning up at him.

She stepped away from the car too quickly, and he pulled her back, away from the oncoming car. It honked at her as the driver raised his arm. They didn’t have to see him to know what he was doing.

The shock registered for a split second before she stepped back out into the street. “Well, fuck you!” she screamed, eyes radiating with that exhilarated look she got whenever she disobeyed a rule. Suddenly revived, she grabbed his elbow and they practically skipped to breakfast.

They flipped through the health food section of the menu first by habit before they looked up and registered that they were the only two sitting at the table. She raised her hand for the waiter and ordered a plate of chocolate chip pancakes and two glasses of chocolate milk.

“We’re old, we’re falling apart,” she told him. “Might as well do it on a sugar high.” He was almost fifty. It was embarrassing that sugar still gave him a buzz. But she smiled—a real smile, and there were lines on her face that he didn’t remember. He reached out to touch one around her mouth, and she laughed, reaching for her napkin. “I haven’t eaten anything yet, and I’m already a mess.”

He finished tracing the line somewhere near her chin and said nothing.

Full of sugar and laughter later, as they drove to the theater in his car, he decided that at that moment he was happy, relative or non-relative.

Blue Morning

She awakes to find morning peacefully infiltrating the room. Around her, the blue light of pre-dawn touches the walls, the ceiling, her skin. Somewhere on the other side of the house, the sun peeks over the horizon, sidling into view, but in this room, it is still night.

She swings herself silently over the side of the bed. It’s one shot, motionlessly moving her feet from bed to floor, a perfect science of hand bracing and weight placement. She accomplishes this action easily, a practice she’s perfected over ten years. Still, she glances back at the figure beside her, checking for the quiet expression she both knows and needs to see. He sleeps on, still a light sleeper after all these years.

It takes one to know one.

She needs a purpose for getting out of bed, a better one than “I just needed to get out,” and decides on water. She shifts her weight to get to the bathroom, feet protesting the sudden weight, every sore joint in her body begging her to make it stop. She pushes through the pain, as she’s always done, smiling to herself. It’s amusing how years of running and fighting and travel have simply ensured her safe travel to and from her own bathroom.

Her glass feels cool and familiar in her hand, and she reaches for the tap, glancing at herself in the mirror. She’s been losing weight over the last fifteen years, and her skin looks stretched, taut over a face that has aged. She’s weathered, but (and this always shocks her) there she is. The same nose, the same curve of chin and lips, the same eyes that could never decide on reflecting blue or green light. There’s something new in her face, though, an expression in her eyes. She looks closer. Compromise? No, acceptance.

She turns the tap, filling her glass with water, glancing through the mirror to where he still sleeps behind her, remarkably still in the room of blue. It’s been a while since he’s slept through the night. Even now, years after they’ve had to load and unload their lives from a car in a matter of minutes, he sleeps restlessly. He’s a hero without a cause, and when he sleeps, his body twitches beside her, muscles clenching and unclenching, still ready for action.

She takes a sip of the water, surprised at the contrast between the comforting fluid and her dry mouth. She finishes the first glass easily and fills another.

Come to think of it, though, she can’t remember his last fitful night. Did he still have the dreams? Did he sleep all the way through the night now? She’ll ask him. She’s always hoped for his peace, but she knows him, knows him better than anyone. She’d rather live with him up in the air, together in this purgatorial calm, rather than alone on the ground.

Suddenly, she has to be near him.

Her foot slips on the last step to bed, and she catches herself on the bedside. He awakes somewhere in the middle of her scramble to get herself back under the covers, and by the time she looks at him, he’s conscious, blinking, trying to focus on her face.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. His voice is cloudy, confused.

“I was thirsty.” This was true. She had been thirsty—simply didn’t know it until she had mouthfuls of it sliding down her throat.

“Is that it?” There’s too much for him to process. He’d rather ask questions than read this wrong. He’s still not sure whatever this is.

She lies down beside him, staring up at the ceiling. “I love you.”

He kisses her tentatively. And damn, it was true, what they said about not saying it enough. He’s still confused, and so is she. But he’s here, and so is she, and they’re too tired to speak, so she rolls onto her side and smiles, and he knows it’s alright. Each tries to watch the other fall back asleep, but they won’t remember who succeeds, because they’re both asleep soon, slipping off to somewhere soft and warm.

Outside, orange light seeps into the blue, filling the sky outside and the room around them.

Creature

A certainly strange creature, commonly talked about, hardly seen. Look for it in bookstores or work or in your basement, playing World of Warcraft with your best friend. It's a small creature, small enough to be held in a palm. However, it's best owned by two. Some find it best suited to three or four, but, if possible, try not to own it alone. It's a large responsibility and you may find yourself overwhelmed with your tiny creature. It appears meek and joyful. Do not be fooled. At times, it becomes sad and moody. A beautiful being, like bamboo. Like all things, it is either saved or not. Kept or not. Held or not. Forever or not. There is no in-between, no half-creature, though you may lead yourself to think that it still lives with you in your bed or the sunny window in your kitchen. Do not be fooled. If it has left, it may come back. Or it may not. You must not wait for it. It will not come to you inside and alone. The creature loves people, and while you are out looking for your creature, you may find someone looking for theirs. Out of nowhere, it may come back. Both of you will have to share it, but the creature doesn't mind. That may be the most maddening part. If Something should happen and your co-owner leave, the creature may stay with you or with both of you. You will wake up and find it curled at the edge of your bed, staring at you with large and steady eyes. It will follow you until time arrives and quietly leads it away out your chimney and into the atmosphere.