Breadcrumb #34

AMY CREHORE

The heat here is worse than the heat I remember every summer before. Driving in my brother’s car as we stuck our hands out the window, swimming our fingers through the thick air, pretending badly that leaving the windows down was keeping us any cooler. My legs sticking to wherever they landed — the seat, a bench, each other — and pulling away with deep red marks, striped bands, announcing to the world exactly where I’d been before.

     The heat here is dry. I wake up in the mornings with my throat scratching for water, hardly able to take one fine morning breath. I kick off the sheets as I sleep, but it’s not like in New York — humid in July, welcome rain, river nights, cold forties from the corner deli. Here the sweat comes purely from you, teeming from every pore you never knew existed. Your skin produces it constantly, nonstop, and when it hits the air it seems to evaporate immediately, coaxing more sweat out. Come cool me down.

“Come cool me down.”

      The heat here makes me daydream about my first nights, dancing salsa at a club and then into the street, half carried home. Spinning me around and around and around, he in a white shirt, me in that silk dress with the polka dots. A cool gold glow to the city as its inhabitants ate drank danced slept fucked smoked cheated. We cheated. The heat made me think that maybe I didn’t, but we did.

      The heat here has me talking in my sleep. Has me dreaming impossibilities, you and he and she and me, all in the same room, all taking the same train, all doing the same normal thing and getting along. I wake up unaware of what’s true, what’s happened, what hasn’t.

     The heat here has my hand smearing ink in my notebook, leaving thumbprints on new book pages, crisp no more.

     The heat here makes cloudy smog, egg cream yellow evenings, consuming the sky while the sun takes it sweet time setting.

     The heat here makes the day last until 10.

     The heat here tires me out.

     I turn on the fan and lay myself down on my bed, starfish my limbs so that nothing is touching. I hum to its hum, dream of the January air hitting my face with a shock as I left the airport, a final greeting, smack, punctuating the fact that she was finally gone. Think of the icicles that consumed my city, hovering, threatening instant death. The cold windowed buildings, reflecting alternate dimensions. My vulnerable neck in February when I’d forget to bring a scarf. The lady singing soleás downstairs at the club, the men calling “dale.” The man across the street who stares out of his window every day without fail at 4 p.m., watching passersby, leaning on his elbows in his white wifebeater. Tourists in shorts in bars, invitándote to tequila shots. Seeing double. Sweating. 

     This heat is impossible.

     It consumes you, inch by inch, until it swallows you whole. 

• • •

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.

• • •