In the mirror, your face stares back at you, under-slept and hungry. Far as you know, the boss died happily paragliding between your fine, fine breasts, and when the paramedics got there, he was absolutely dead. By then your clothes were on.
Godzilla is the pet name he gives her not long after they start sleeping together. She’s restless, especially at night. And she doesn’t yet know her way around his apartment in the dark. Topples the footstool, the laundry hamper. Creaks the wooden floors.
“I can’t stand Literary Fiction, it’s all Alzheimer’s and wanking.” She’s draining her second bottle, Red, the White long gone; and I realise, I want to put this woman inside a tree and set fire to her.
One day my boss was talking to me and I just disappeared. Like that. It was amazing. Then I came back. This wasn’t so amazing. I was pretty pissed. I said, come on guys, meaning my body.
Jessie wakes to the smell of manure being spread. Every day. Or maybe only growing season, but it feels like every day. When her father and brothers come in from the fields and Ma has one of her sick headaches, it’s Jessie who washes their clothes, pounding dirt and dung out of stiff, worn denim, watching her hands grow cracked and red, and thinking about death.
This morning when I walked Jimmy to school, I ruffled his hair and told him he’d end up with a bald head like me. All the men in our family go the same way. He’s got a lovely cheeky face, my boy, and I said even if someday he didn’t have hair, the girls would love him. But they’d hurt him too. Girls always do. The bakery is stifling – I’m cutting three strands of dough to make up the milk loaves and wondering what it would be like to have a daughter with long hair to plait.
Everything is folded up and airy when I’m in love the first time. You walked into my shop with that lonely immigrant look on your face following the elusive chocolaty scents of brewing coffee soon to be served in my Arabian Nights demitasse. You stare ominously at the folding chairs and tables, at the wisps of Arabic among the paraphernalia of blonde heads and dark beards.
I rub in the hand cream, slide it over giraffey age spots, sniff the petal scent. Marcus watches this ritual with unbridled irritation.
The breakfast sun melts over him like butter. I run my hands across his dips and hollows. No one else comes close like this – feels him soften in the slanting dawn, sees his stern facade pink and gild.
Before I married, I was a plume of gas. His hands grasped through me. Slowly, slowly, I set into that which can be held. Or be hurt. My cracked lips taste of summer on the turn. I press on raised veins on the backs of my hands, trace a map of mortality along my skin. Never to return to a noble gas, perhaps I can cling to another to become a compound.
Everyone’s Hon to May. Even strangers. Especially strangers whom you want to feel at home like their regular diner. The regulars are all Hons, only the teens are not Hons, they are Hey Guys or You Guys or Hey Gals or You Gals.
With a whoosh and thud, he lands on the courtyard wall, and I leap up, startled, my book flying off my lap. His wings are twin arcs of pure light, and he smells of wet leaves and burnt umber.
It matters who says it first is first and I love you for it sometimes I love you and sometimes you’re first but there are days oh my those days when I
He stumbles through sentences, forgetting whether verbs come last or second or first. He confuses the order of pronouns, putting ‘I’ before ‘you,’ and ‘me’ before ‘her.’ He is failing a simple test, running interference between the Germanic and the Romantic, thinking of the ends and beginnings of his story.
Laundry flutters against the slack breeze. Bumblebees bombard gooseberry bushes. We maneuver the broken fence. Lay naked in their kiddie pool, bodies pretzel-like, jagged.