Four Short Stories from Summer 2022

Me Moving

There’s something about other people’s houses when they aren’t there. I’m always ending up in them. I absolutely love it. I love pretending to be whoever actually lives there; looking at walls and mirrors and noticing what I think they would notice. I feel I understand them so much better after. I try to think, are other people alone in their associates’ houses as often as I am? Truly, no.

My landlord is increasing my rent by twenty-two hundred bucks so now he’s got me moving sooner than expected. Finding a place was hell but the moving itself I don’t mind. I love packing up my things and unpacking them into a different orientation. Emptying my old apartment feels like coming up on an acid trip; seeing the bare walls reminds me how many people will pass through here; I am not special to this building; I climb up towards the surface and see above my ego for the first time since I moved two years ago and I take a gigantic gulp of air then I bring my boxes to the moving truck and we drive to the new place and 

I unpack into the new place and my furniture and artworks and books and bedspread pull me back under the surface and I forget to be a person going from place to place and I remember to be me, moving in. 

There is so much to be said for moving. Did people really use to dance? Like really dance, not just move their heads and bodies up and down and throw themselves into each other. Where do I have to go to hear disco? When we go to the throwback clubs for 80’s night, we hit it just wrong so we’re practically alone on the floor. We drink cool beers and listen to cool music and dance coolly, and your hand is on my shoulder and your head is pressed against mine and it's like I can feel your haircut, if that makes sense. This is a lot of touching for us, so I’m just gonna look anywhere else and sway. This is me, moving on. Audio, Video, Disco.

It isn’t wise to spend time watching flies try to escape through open windows, unless you project the human condition onto them. The thinking man’s fly, butting its head against the glass only inches from its escape, is just like me moving, I say to myself, standing in my empty bedroom right before I leave. Later loser. I put all the keys to the front door, mail, and trash onto one tiny ring cause I hate my old landlord. Enjoy prying these apart, thick finger Sid.

When we go out for 70’s night to hear some disco, the joint is packed with old gruff men who call my ass grande and try to make my lesbian friends touch their dicks. They have diverse tastes. Fuck. No dancing for us. A cutie came up to me at the bar but I was getting free drinks from a biker named Garth. He turned to go. Do you not see me moving away from him? Just give me a second babe. Garthie, I don’t care if he just wants me to buy a lap dance, can you please get us two dirty shirleys?

I lay on the floor of my new apartment with my boxes for a while before I open them up; let me ride this wave right up to my eventual ego death. I wish I was riding a wave right now, on the beach that feels like it's always just over my left shoulder. I stare at the open blue sky through a window from my spot on the floor and imagine the very same sky over that beach. I see me moving with the waves, peeing a little, swimming away. I unpack everything in silence. Later I play a song on repeat I used to hate but grew to love while I break down my boxes. I’ve gotten so good at this.

There’s a lot to be said for recognizing that first impressions can be extremely biased and change so much, and that your intuition isn’t strong enough to account for an entire lifetime of knowing and being known. 

You feel that way about me? Moving.

Discarded school bulletin boards outside P.S. 100, June 28th, 2022

Free flowers at 37 1/2 St. Marks Place, April 1st 2022

Bodily Soliloquy

Why is everyone so afraid of bodies?

My body is not the little clay photographic objects that I make at work, where I stick the piece of clay between two clippings from a dirty magazine. Their smallness and cruddiness make me feel like a toenail laying on the side of a superhighway where a man just got out of his car in his big cowboy boots to step on me. And he steps on the only hand I have grabbing onto the curb, but because I’m so small, to me it's a gigantic cliff, and he steps on my hand and it bends like the clay and I’m sure I fall off but I open my eyes first.

Or sometimes, I close my eyes for just one second and it’s like I’m an ant. (I have a friend with narcolepsy and she told me that she can fall into REM sleep within five seconds of closing her eyes, so that must be what’s happening here because) I’m an ant on the roof, and there's a monstrous slinky robot cat demon ascending the stairs of the building and I intuitively know that it has no mercy or feeling but to kill and I am totally alone and helpless but to run.

And it hurts. What is the word for the feeling of awe immediately upon sustaining bizarre bodily harm?

Wow. It is sticking out of my finger. It went right through my skin.

I’m afraid of bodies.

I’m afraid of the shapes mine makes when I’m not looking, but more importantly I’m afraid of the shape of the negative space it makes relative to the shape of the environment we’re in. I’m afraid that you don’t deserve tattoos, and that your pedal board is backwards, and that these are things that I would assume you know so for me to have to teach you about them makes me feel like I made a miscalculation, and now I’m even more afraid. Afraid of where my body keeps physically ending up, cornering myself on the toilet trying to think of what The Body Keeps the Score would say right now. I’m afraid that the tesla going back to manhattan only has four seats and my body would bring the passenger count to five, so now I’m in charge of all these loose drunk people I barely know and why wouldn’t you unlock the apartment for Jill to get my pills that day I was in the hospital? What were you so busy doing? I was five minutes out from surgery just trying to get you on the phone. And then you ask if I’m mad at you. The shock from the procedure was so extreme, I couldn’t stop violently shivering for two days afterwards no matter how hot it was. So I was preoccupied.

I get my Instagram account hacked while at the gym, a contentious place that changes my body in ways I’m not sure are for the better. I learn more about it, and notice new things that are unchangeably wrong. I reach for pliers, driving my bicep into the corner of a wooden cabinet the day after telling a friend I don’t bruise easily. I lower my mask on the subway to bite a piece of dead skin off of my nail bed and hope the nail doesn’t get infected like that one time in 2015. I fiddle with the ropes of my borrowed bolo tie at the venue. I am here; this rope is around my neck. I paint the patches of psoriasis that spring up on my back in the winter like oases for bacteria. I pass my fingers across them, using the bumps as landmarks, touching each as an excuse to caress the skin between them.

I’m happy to be in my body, I don’t want to rip my skin off. A professor of mine once warned us Do Not Do Your Thesis Show About The Body. I know she was right. There isn’t much I could say about it.

The Crazy One

I had a cool neighbor once for a very short amount of time. She was very cool. She wore leather vests and drove a cute little car from which she delivered newspapers at three A.M. We crossed paths as her day ended and mine began.

I loved the view from the one small window in her bedroom, seen at first through my phone screen but eventually from seated on her bed. I loved the rectangle of light it projected onto her golden hour selfies, broken up by the shadows of her potted plants, like a lopsided shape in an Ellsworth Kelly painting. She would have hated his work if I ever showed her. But he would have loved the logic system of her acrylic nails, identical shapes graduating in size, interrupted only once or twice by a broken digit like gaps in a smile. Even more grown up than having acrylic nails, I thought, is someone hardworking enough to break them, and too busy to fix them.

She was four years older and came to do all the older sibling stuff for me that I had missed out on by being the oldest child myself, like getting me high, telling me what liquor stores don’t card, and letting me touch the tender, greebled skin of her bright red shin tattoo that read “angel”, explaining to me that she had to go back for one more session. Wow, I thought, what is more grown up than going to multiple sessions to work on the same tattoo?

I showed her where I went to spray paint, and she rolled us spliffs with those blueberry-flavored rolling papers and we would watch the freight train go by and fantasize about running and jumping and grabbing the ladder on the last car and holding on all the way to Hartford. There, we would live in the overgrown parking lot of Bradley International Airport off of unbranded candy bars and drops of water spilling down from the highway overpass until a rich insurance exec saw us there and fell in love with us, sweeping us off to a life of luxury.

Me and her, we burnt fast and hot, because within three weeks of us becoming friends, she had to go. I thought if I left for a while and came back, it would be different, she said to me in the cozy ass little attic bedroom with the window and the view. She had strawberry seeds stuck in her teeth from the spoils of our early afternoon. So she left again, though not before I started a painting of her. I never finished it, never could bring myself to do her face. Even in my mind’s eye, I couldn’t get a face like hers on canvas.

My best friend’s ex said to her in their breakup fight that the two of us left no air in the room for anyone else to breathe. I take that as a compliment, and although I never hung out with my neighbor in a group setting, I think the two of us would have done a lovely job of sucking all the air right out.

The day my neighbor moved out I planned on helping her bring her boxes to her little car after her last morning paper route, but by the time I got up she was gone. This is just like Bridge to Terabithia, I thought to myself. I didn’t have one single object to remember her by but the unfinished painting, which sat blank faced against my wall for three years before I finally painted over it. 

When I was 17 the kid who sold me my first eighth got shot in the face, and at the time I thought wow, that is so grown up. Now my baby brother is 17 and he seems afraid of drinking. I guess my becoming a problem child left an impression on him.

Great, now I’m the crazy one.

Going Out Monologue

-and suddenly we’re there, I see we hit the line at its longest, but at least the bar is somehow also at its emptiest. I suggest we take a shot, I’m really here to get chatty. I do my best business at the club. But first let’s leave, this music sucks. Chelsea Manning is playing Elsewhere again so we may as well go. Yes, that means another cover. But it’s okay, you can get us both.

The new place is better, almost good. We’ll settle. Another shot. And a tequila sunrise. The camera angle changes and things start to get really funky. Finally we hit the dance floor. I step to rhythmic plinks and imagine all the open heart surgeries I could be performing with this wasted time. I take drugs and say This is fun! 

Don’t get me wrong, I love a sensory experience. I am a sensory experience. And you know what he’s right. He took and we went and she saw and they fight. I drink my drink and become something else and look back from the fringes outside of myself. If I’m lucky I have some attention to feign off, if not I guess another shot. A rush, a glance, a touch, a dance. This material feels great, do you wanna feel? Do see play bad go done heal?

You take my hand, my nose feels runny, you pull me too hard, bump girl look me funny. See Me Sorry

Hand Floor Fist Think Hold Drop Rake Sink Came Gone Thru Thought Did Feel Steal Sought Preach Piss Peace Right Meek Seek Stink Sight Shine Proof Clash Truth Fist Fuse Plush Tooth See Clear False Truce Did Forced Done Fuel Lose Raze Fall Fool Graze Fake Dance Stain Trap Feel Lust Blame