Breadcrumb #77
MEREDITH C. JONES
You're not supposed to go to the zoo
by yourself — like movies or dinner at a fancy restaurant —
the orangutans will look at you different
Because why would you come here alone
and stand among the school trips, family
outings, and first dates and have no one to talk to
about how similar we all are or explain
that National Geographic article
to in a way that is duly impressive
and says to the person, "I have read National Geographic.
I have not just scanned it for the low-hanging tits
and unmanicured cocks of indigenous peoples.
I am learned and you should want to fuck me."
This hulking, orange matriarch is indifferent to your
subscriptions. Her eyes are older and darker than people
you know and she asks, young crawling about her,
what the purpose of you is, without your tribe
in the monkey house on a Sunday afternoon.
Breadcrumb #76
ANDREW MARINACCIO
The buildings on Acapulco Boulevard would have yawned. Sun beamed on their rooftops in the uniform confidence she imparts on Southern California, land of pastel days where people play with their hours like new boutique electronics, only pretending to get their work done. Or that’s how Bernice saw it. Upon arriving she found it all immediately beautiful and, as most transplants muse, alive.
The boulevard was ideal in that it failed to live up to a conventional understanding of an ideal. Tangled in too much history too quickly, it felt poorly preserved yet disconcertingly alive for its wear. Sooty Art-Deco statements shaded rubbery faces from all over the world, tourists and teetering actors more willing than Bernice to spend their money. She felt grounded in the strip’s failure to betray a clear path through a categorical past. Its fight to be everything it ever was at once encouraged her to fill in the blanks.
Odes to the soft bodies of the Machine Age marked the oldest storefronts. A former law office with stout, single-pinstriped block lettering in its windows told Bernice how the loud and comfortable among her used to live. She thought she felt a yearn to settle down while staring at the soft neon cursive over a corner luncheonette. Smart fonts sandwiched between cresting rectangular column heads lent the facades dignity in retrospect. As she pushed against the crowd, her glimpses made her pretend to wonder if humanity had lost its way.
She saw Courtney & Glendale’s west coast division, a chrome banana arching high over the strip, housing the conglomerate’s trendier advertising department. Stark in its plastic angularity, the design was certain in message: Hey there. We’re from the future, and — as if we needed to state this — future-proof. Bernice remembered minor acquaintances who randomly, as far as she could tell, found work there. Anecdotes of stars aligning, synapses networking to command bureaucratic notice, providence silently providing against all odds to deliver the proper entry-level job. That wasn’t her, she assured herself, nervously shifting black bangs across emerald eyes in the law office window.
“I feel like Americans actually come from Illinois,” said a goth girl, her eyes questioningly fixed ahead and left hand held upwards, with fingers blooming like one of Michelangelo’s reaches for epiphany. She walked past Bernice, who then imagined being cool enough to be unapologetically, perhaps adorably, terrible. A life sealed from cloistered moments, projected as immediate and clever across a spectrum of circumstances. Life would be as she imagined the former lives in those empty windows, flat and quick as celluloid, something for others to reflect on as she functioned beyond a station of meaning.
“A life sealed from cloistered moments, projected as immediate and clever across a spectrum of circumstances.”
“But would the memories be as good?” she murmured. A short 34-year-old man heard her as he passed and immediately wanted to answer, “Yes,” even though he most likely believed the opposite and really just wanted to answer the type of question nobody bothered to ask him. The conversation remained halved. He stayed home most nights and had little trouble sleeping.
Bernice walked into the luncheonette to pass the time. She ordered two fried eggs over medium and a side of hash browns. Her waitress thought it was weird that she used the word “haystack” to describe the hash browns while ordering, as if Bernice herself was a twee menu from a nicer restaurant downtown or they wouldn’t julienne the potatoes. The nerve of some people. They had a woefully conceptualized “Breakfast for Lunch Special,” so she ordered a tomato soup to make it a deal.
When the waitress walked away, Bernice drowsily scanned the counter across from her booth, slightly comforted by the neon light dabbing creamy springtime tonics across its eggshell surface. She felt homesick for the first time in weeks. Now in a venue her subconscious deemed poetically acceptable, she let her grief sit next to her. Phrases involuntarily nicked her mind, darting out through her forehead and into her soup as soon as the waitress set it before her.
I’m impossible and alone because of myself. I can’t tell anyone how I feel and when I try I know I sound mentally ill, splish. I use the wrong words, even in my interior life, and all my secrets harbor failure at being a decent person, splash. The more I feel connected to this world, the more I understand myself as alien and dangerous. I will be scapegoated for this, and, by the way, fuck me for even assuming anyone would care enough to logistically coordinate any aspect of my demise. Plop.
Her soup covered the tabletop now, a swamp of pink formica and pomodoro puree. In the hard light it commingled towards the greatest shade of cherubic humiliation. She felt pulled by the minor envies of the last year and sacrificed anything she decided to know about life in attempt to mute it.
“I’m a stranger,” she said, sinking into her porcelain soup bowl. She disappeared in the gritty bottom of her appetizer, denying breaths and hearing ocean static. She made the oceans a sky in a sloshing pivot of imagination, though she remained swimming and breathless. Her lips turned blue, but she was still alive. With every stroke her hair clumped together like seaweed as her complexion drained to pewter. She saw a kite floating below her, recalling how she flew a few like it off the shores of Kennebunkport, Maine, as a child. But she had no nostalgic investment in its shape or circumstance. It was just something she did, and in this implosion of nostalgia was overjoyed to ignore it.
She accepted the fact that she’d have to get up soon. Scarlet feathers grew from her chin and hips as she swam deeper into the lame void. She lost sight of the kite and couldn’t find anything or see what she became. That was more than enough.
Breadcrumb #74
DANIELLE VILLANO
In the hospital we are only allowed to see you after we’ve disrobed and we’ve scrubbed ourselves with disinfectant. The disinfectant smells like lemons, which is an interesting touch considering the last crop of lemons fell — rotting — off their trees five years ago. A year or two before now and that realization would’ve stung like citrus in a fresh cut, but now there’s only a slow burn behind my eyes that lessens when I blink.
So on go the plastic undergarments. They are sexless, nude colored, and they squeak modestly as we change with our backs to each other. Then the zippered plastic suits. The gloves that, in another time, would be associated with washing dishes. Now they are what we use to reach out and touch those of us who weren’t so lucky.
You weren’t so lucky, darling.
In through the airlock chamber, we are propelled forward by an orderly who hums under his breath. The sound is echoing and strange through the mask he wears over his mouth. We are propelled forward by routine and a sense of duty. Fridays have been — without fail — visiting days for the last five years. Your daughter is 15 years old now, you know. We got in a fight on the car ride here, because she wanted to go to the movies with her friends. I think she might love a boy. Does she ever tell you anything about that, when she whispers at you through the glass partition? I always stand a little bit off, so she can feel like she can share secrets with you, if she wants to. But truth is? I’d be devastated if she did.
I find it easier to talk to you here, in my head, rather than when I’m sitting next to you. But here we are; we’re rounding the corner and coming up to the glass. I shut my eyes as I walk because I know how many steps I’ll have to take before my gloved hands meet the glass (35), and I know exactly what I’ll see when I get there (you, underneath the blankets, which are pulled up to your chin).
And then I have to look, because I know you expect it. You’re looking at us now. You blink your naked eyelids. We are now used to seeing you without your eyelashes.
Those of us infected by the blight woke up the next day to stiff faces, and dry eyes, and eyelashes that felt brittle like spiders’ legs. I remember you asked if I had any eye drops. “I want to loosen things up,” you’d said. I told you I’d put them on the shopping list. The list stayed stuck to the fridge for months; I never bought the eye drops.
Back to the eyelashes: There was a universal quivering, a spasm that touched those who had been unknowingly infected, and all at once the lashes of those people broke off onto the floor. It was a normal afternoon, before that happened. People were eating in the food court at the mall and riding bicycles on the sidewalks. Suddenly there were spiders’ legs sticking up out of the chicken chow mein. Pedestrians were spattered with eyelashes from the bikers who pedaled by. They were sweeping little black bristles off the streets for a whole day afterwards.
I brought you to the emergency room to get checked out, but the line was already out the door. I had to leave to pick up our daughter from school; the school had called for an early dismissal. Confusion buzzed through the air. When I was walking our daughter to the car I saw a woman cover her mouth, saw her fingers shake and drop something, clinking like ice cubes, to the pavement. When she howled, her open mouth was a gaping black hole, and I knew the things clink-clinking on the pavement were her teeth.
I also knew — the thought made my stomach churn — that by the time we got back to the hospital your teeth would be gone from your mouth. I was hoping you’d have the sense to sweep them up, so as not to scare your daughter. But they were still in a pile in front of you, and you had covered your face with your hands.
I can’t describe what it feels like when you find your husband seated in the same waiting room chair and he opens his mouth to ask “Why?” All I can say is you suddenly know what he will look like if he lives to be very, very old, and the idea is not a comfort.
What I can say now is this: You do not look very, very old. In fact, you look incredibly young. You are constantly molting, shedding your skin. Your daughter says around school they call those who were infected “snakes.” Your face is pink and plump, no longer weathered by the elements. Your eyes are clear. The nurses have to administer eye drops often since your lashes are no longer around to protect your eyes. Your fingernails grow quickly and fall off; they are painful pink pads for a day or two, and then the nails grow back even stronger.
“Your face is pink and plump, no longer weathered by the elements. Your eyes are clear.”
Recently on a talk show a comedian said that she wished she’d been infected by the blight.
“Sure, it’s been hell on the economy, and our agriculture, and our ability to reproduce as a human race, but have you seen what it’s done to their skin?”
I reach my gloved hand through the slot in the glass near your bedside, and you grasp at it with eager fingers. It is a pink pad day, and you wince a little bit, showing your gums. You smile at me with your eyes. It’s easier that way.
I talk at you for a little bit about the softer stories on the local news, and about the movies that are coming out in theaters. Despite all the damage our society has taken, our desire for action movies has only intensified. We want larger-than-life heroes. We want sweat. We want machismo. I try not to think about how I used to compare the cleft in your chin to that movie star’s. Your skin is so soft now; the cleft is nearly gone, anyway.
I try not to think about how we used to cocoon ourselves in our bed on weekend mornings, clutching coffee mugs and each other, shuffling around the Sunday paper. I try not to think about how your lashes used to brush my cheek in an Eskimo kiss that made me giggle like a schoolgirl. I try not to think about the way my hands cupped your face before I’d kiss you on the mouth, or how I’d smile into your teeth. I wonder if we were placed in a dark room — would I know who you were by the feel of your face? Would my fingertips recognize your skin?
I move aside, worn out, to let your daughter speak to you. She is all dramatic sighs and jerky movements, making me relieved that some things — like teenagers — don’t change, even in the face of a worldwide disaster.