Breadcrumb #33

DANIELLE VILLANO

I hear her whispering to dead people, sometimes.

     “Formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, methanol, ethanol, phenol, and water. That’s all it is. There’s nothing to worry about, when you think of it that way.”

     We are working late one night and I finally raise my voice enough to say: “You are very good at what you do.”

      She hears me but doesn’t respond for a moment, focusing on blending the complexion hi-lite onto Mrs. Simpson’s cheekbones. 

     “That’s a lot, coming from The Artist,” she says, using the nickname on my apron, the gag gift from last year’s company Christmas party. 

     We smile at each other over tubs of chemicals and stainless steel surgical supplies, and my head feels light, and we make the unspoken decision to go home together. 

     I’d never really noticed how close I lived to work until I walk home with her. It is quiet aside from the ice crunching under our feet as we take the 10-minute walk past chiropractor offices and Chinese food restaurants so warm that the steam from the open door makes clouds in the cold air. The sky is awash with dark colors, like liquid swirling down the drain. When we get to my complex I feel embarrassed by the broken front gate, but she kisses me up against it anyway. Her mouth is slippery, soft. Her pulse jumps in her throat. We stumble into my apartment, shaking snow off our boots. We are surrounded by deadness all day, and now all I can feel is this: the pressure of her hand on my lower back is a hot iron.

     “So this is where The Artist lives,” she says, and flicks on the light switch. And then she sort of yelps, because my mother is sitting, like some sorry old mannequin, at my kitchen table.

     “I couldn’t stay home,” my mother says, looking past The Girl and me, to a point above our heads. “I saw your father again.”

     My father died three years ago, and every few weeks my mother calls crying because she saw my inconsiderate father finish off the carton of milk and leave it empty, out on the counter. How she got across town to my building at this time of night I have no idea, as her knowledge of the bus system is very limited, and a quick scan of the room comes up empty for a sight of her purse. My mother is small and shriveled and I suddenly feel embarrassed for her eyes, which are sunk so comically low in their sockets. The Girl is looking at me and whispering, Should I go, should I go, and then my mother finally recognizes her presence and says, “Oh, you brought a girl home.” And then she breaks down and cries in a way that reminds me of a little bird left out to freeze.

“And then she breaks down and cries in a way that reminds me of a little bird left out to freeze.”

     “I’m Brianna,” The Girl says in the voice she reserves for dead people. She walks over to the table and sits down at the chair across from my mother. I want to say: No, don’t. We do not need to know each other like this.

     “I work with your son at The Home.”

     I can see my mother taking in the details of The Girl sitting across from her. Dyed dark hair, sloppily cut. Kohl-rimmed eyes. The silver ring in her lip that, some nights, when I lie awake in bed, I imagine grazing with my teeth.

     “Such a nice girl?  Working there?” My mother looks between the two of us. 

     “I can still make dinner,” The Girl — Brianna — says.

     I lead my mother over to the couch and Brianna rummages through the cabinets until she finds a can of ravioli. She locates the can opener and gets to work. The plop of cold pasta into the bottom of the pot makes the bile rise in my throat, and I am struck dumb by the fact that I can tear people open and suture them closed day after day and I cannot tolerate the most mundane of noises.

     My mother says, “It’s so dark.” 

     I tuck a blanket up underneath her quivering chin, and when she shuts her eyes the resemblance to Mrs. Simpson from earlier is so strong that I have to lean in close to make sure she is still breathing.

     It is after midnight when I settle into a chair and spoon lukewarm pasta into my mouth. Brianna licks sauce off of her lip ring. The moon is a shining steel basin outside the window.

     I want to say: I often catch myself wondering when my mother will find her way to the embalming table.

     Brianna speaks first. "At this time of night I feel most alive. Don't you?"

• • •

Breadcrumb #32

ANNA PICAGLI

To start at the climax seems appropriate here. Our stomachs are swollen with breakfast and we are lost in a forest somewhere in Mamaroneck, the bleached crown of your hair safe against the crook of my shoulder blade. Silence took us, and the first sun of summer, and the skywriters in their frivolous grace. What a stillness there, in that fresh grass, pressed against the blade of all things, I as your bed frame and you as mine, just mine, for a stunning, stolen moment.

     There aren't words for the way you left. I woke up sweating for months, reaching for your long-gone hair, the warm and missing weight of your body against mine in sleep. A year has passed and still, nothing has eclipsed you. This neatness infuriates me, this stability: worthless without feeling. I have come untethered from the earth, I swear it. What a stunning production it all was, though. What a horrific accident.

     Do you remember the first night? You in your bound breasts, your painted beard, your propositions? You girlfriend and her good hips and the loud cluck of her tongue? The push and pull and mess of the three of us. And the rest of the lovers. Your roommates. Your brother. The whole world, watching the bomb of us tick. I have never felt such untrammeled motion. If the revolution was ever on its way it started in your living room the night Kevin inked matching freckles to the insides of our hips. Remember the hollow needles and how this was all your idea? That was the first time you ever reached for my hand. Your fingers were thin and coffee colored and I fell in love with you instantly. I can still feel your unbroken grip on my square palm.

“I can still feel your unbroken grip on my square palm.”

     I can still feel you leaving: the slow melancholy pull, the horror, the departure. Me left to sleep in the bed we laid in, a mausoleum of memory. Remember the eclipse and the pots clinking on the stove and me, up to my elbows in your dishwater, and you, with your hands on my hips?

     The whole of the stunning thing we were leaning toward?

     I still have the bent nail I pulled from your doorframe. Nothing else, though. Nothing else.

• • •

Breadcrumb #29

DAN POORMAN

Because I've casually used the term "eclipse," I have to elaborate. So I begin with tremendous frustration, "The syzygy is this: I am the sun and he is the moon and she is the earth — and we're all just fucking standing in the middle of Ferber, and it's 11 at night, and...my life is over, Priya."

     I may confide in Priya with abandon, but at the end of the day I always decide that I dislike her, that she's a quack even if she doesn't have her doctorate yet, that she's nowhere near even the lawn seats overlooking the Scoville spectrum — and so death to that particular sample of Rate My Professors users with poor taste who, whether or not the woman has actually seen and reveled in it, still have given her the benefit of that omnipotent chili pepper. 

     But I'm sure she hates me too.

     "So you consider this a religious experience," she says. She sits with perfect posture, and I know she is unbiased, that every cover letter she's ever written highlights her professionalism — but I can also smell her disapproval.

     I tell her something true: "I hate having to explain this." She apologizes, her eyes on the ground.

     I am talking to Priya about this moment, and she is the dart board to my fistful of darts, in that every now and then a part of the story will strike her in the right spot, inches closer to the bull's-eye, while the rest of the words I am saying miss completely, flying flaccidly into the wall or onto the floor. I pause to tell her this. 

     "Yes. But what more about Ferber?" she redirects me.

     What's more about Ferber: I live on the second floor of Ferber East. My roommate, George, flunked the fall, so it's spring when I'm left to this converted single. George's mattress is my closet, George's dresser is my bookshelf. George's father's winter jacket, left here mid-move, sometimes is my winter jacket. It hangs alone on a hook George often used.

      On the night in question, Jane is there. "She is perfect," I tell Priya, for context. Nobody is, but OK, she says with one look. Her adjunction is showing. 

     But Jane is petite, at 5'6", with hair that is wavy and apt to tangle for sensual purposes, fair skin but I'm not racist, round eyes you might call hazel in an eighth-grade poem. Jane has that name that makes me think of Tarzan. She wears, with modesty, a nude B-cup bra and a tie-dye shirt. But Jane's not a Deadhead. In fact, she's never smoked a thing in her life, and she's wearing sweatpants branded by the name of her high school and also: boys socks.

     "Priya, Jane made popcorn in my microwave."

     We met in philosophy class. From Hegel to Nietzsche. Sometimes she puts glasses on. She's from Buffalo.

“We met in philosophy class. From Hegel to Nietzsche. Sometimes she puts glasses on. She’s from Buffalo.”

     The film is Batman Returns, and the last time she saw it she was 14, and she loved it, or so she tells me — and she likes that I have it on VHS, and that I tape black towels over the windows to muffle the light and as much of the noise from the quad that I can. We have movie nights that we're calling platonic, and yes, we are best friends, and she tells me first semester was lonely, and her roommate is a simple bitch, and she points to my beanbag and chuckles, "Cool beanbag," and she puts a Tropicana in my fridge, and I tell her Danny DeVito gives a truly remarkable performance, and does she remember when he bites that guy's nose?

     I think I'd like Priya better if she asked me more questions like "Would you call it cuddling?" I am ready to answer that. I'd say, "I would."

     The rotten astronomy takes place in an evilly brief plot of time I'd compare to a caterpillar's prick: slight yet undoubtedly scarring. I'd excused myself to the bathroom, four doors down my hall. Told Jane, "Pause it on the title card" because that just makes sense to me.  

     "I remember she giggled," I'm saying to Priya. "She giggled and said, 'All right, I'll be waiting,' as if maybe we'd bang, as if maybe I'd come back and she'd be in some negligee." Priya asks if this is about sex. I swear to her it's not. She urges me onward. She's watching the clock.

     If I am the sun, I am risen from the restroom, having blotted nervously at my hair with faucet water, having only pissed a little — an amount you might legally call a tinkle. "I am the portrait of innocence" is something I actually tell Priya. She never writes this down. 

     The moon is the Terror of Ferber East, the guy I've dubbed "Agent Yacht" to a few of Jane's giggles past, the star of the security blotter in his naked splendor (his salmon shorts are crumpled in the doorway of his room). His ass is pasty, and on his back are scars from a lacrosse stick or two. Careful pimples on his shoulders. Sweat that'll taste like Rolling Rock if you try it. He is fit and stinks of reefer, and he is wielding his ruins of the day: a detached railing, likely from third-floor Ferber West, splintered and repurposed.

      And then there is my earth, on the other side of the moon, and she's captivated, frozen. Her grip loosens on her Tropicana. There are a few stray kernels of popcorn at her feet. The moon breathes heavily. I have reason to believe she is trying to synchronize her own respiration pattern with his. 

     "Because it wrecked my life, it seemed like it lasted forever," I tell Priya. A few things I could add but don't: Space is infinite; terribleness is infinite; I thought of putting a knife in Agent Yacht's spleen.

     "So then what happened?" Priya asks, and she's picking up her books. 

     "It ended fast in real time," I admit. What happened was: I made some kind of gurgle, and Yacht turned quickly to the sound, his member flopping with him — and he got real red, and he screamed into the void of second-floor Ferber East, "ALPHA — TAO — OMEGA!" before retreating to his smoky dorm.

     And then Jane told me there'd been a loud crash, and she'd crept from my room to explore it, and "You know, I'm really tired, can we do this some other time?"

     "Priya, she hurried together her things and left me alone with my TV" — as it projected Burton's title card, sad and still, save for a few traces of static that passed like hiccups, or EKG spikes. 

     Now Priya — this fake teacher, this ice queen — asks me passionlessly for an epilogue: "Where is Jane now?"

     I recount just last week, on a walk to Burrito Junction, cutting down College Ave., and I see her outside a big house tattooed with spray paint letters, and she sees me, and I stop like I sometimes feel the earth does truly, and she's in some tight dress, and she's got some defunct Tropicana just sloshing around in a Nalgene, and I ask her, "What's up?" and she says, "Nothing, you?" and I say, "Where you going?" and Priya— 

     "She said, in the middle of a crowd, 'Out,' and walked directly inside."

• • •