Damage

Debbie had wiry brown hair that could spring out of control at a moment’s notice.  She annually spent what Jonah reckoned to be hundreds of dollars in her attempt to find the perfect hair care product that would make it smooth and soft.  “Your hair is your hair,” he would tell her.  “You should just learn to accept it.”

“But I don’t like it.”

“So you don’t have nice hair.  You can’t have everything.”

Debbie stared at him.  She then turned and left the room. 

Jonah meant to tell her that he, personally, loved her hair.  But from how she was slamming around the kitchen he decided it was probably best just to leave her alone.

Masquerade

I wanted to suffer quietly and beautifully
but suffering is noisy and deformed
it spits on the sidewalk in front of innocent
bystanders and it makes no apologies
it wipes its nose on its sleeve and it whines
for sympathy it licks the hands of the compassionate
it howls over a broken fingernail
everything reminds it that it exists everything
mocks its existence everything convinces it that it
is ugly it is a freak at a freak show it is
the rotting leftover shoved to the back of
the refrigerator and it makes everything smell as
its final biting and weeping vengeance that
it exists at all.

Endings

Despair rose up in me like a flash flood, so quickly that it had almost drowned my heart when I heard a snuffling.  The dog who smelled like cake shuffled out from behind an overgrown bush.  “Are you real?” I asked her.  “Or are you going to disappear, too?”

She cocked her head and bared crooked teeth at me, as if to say, does it matter?

I dropped down onto the ground next to her; the setting sun was hot on my neck.  “It's too warm for you,” I told her.  “You should go back into the woods, where’s it cooler.”

But she wouldn’t move. 

Tiredly I leaned back against the damp, cold ground.  I closed my eyes and I heard some more snuffling, until I felt her fuzzy head against the palm of my hand.  We will be safe tonight, I thought to myself.  Tomorrow was anybody’s guess.   Absolute safety would never be mine to have.  It simply didn’t exist. 

Cold

I remember the glasses now
the dark plastic green with ridges in 
the base the small slim
crystal that held the dandelion
I brought home for you.
I remember the spectacles I broke
as they lay on your bed
it was an accident it was an accident
they cost the earth you said
I never had a chance
god how you hated me
it was only an accident
I remember.

Unprepared

No one mentioned Debbie’s name at work.  “What happened?” Jonah would ask himself in the mirror each night, just after he brushed his teeth.  One moment she'd been standing next to the cart, complaining about tropical oils.  And the next, he was holding the perfect strawberry in winter, talking to no one.  Only Bill, who Jonah sometimes came across in the cafeteria during his coffee break, said to Jonah, “I’m sorry about Debbie, man.”  Jonah pretended not to hear him.  He just asked if Bill knew who had won the basketball game.

Corners

I met her at the cafe where I liked to read the paper in the morning.  At the time she struck me as nothing special—just another smiley college student waiting tables over the summer.  Only after she gave me the wrong coffee three days in a row did I really pay any notice to her.

During her rambling apology—“I’m so sorry, I just can’t remember if the white doily means vanilla or regular, I keep thinking white has to be vanilla and then I think, no, it’s the opposite, and then I get myself all mixed up”—I didn’t know whether to laugh or tell her to go away.  In the end I did neither.   Eventually I would come to wish I had done the latter.

Jumping

Erica calls me a couple of days after Thanksgiving.  We talk for a while about work and debts and boyfriends.  I thought I knew everything but now I realize I know almost as close to nothing as you can get without having fallen here on accident from another planet.