Breadcrumb #153

STELLA PADNOS-SHEA

I hadn’t thought of it in years, it’s been years
since I’ve seen it.
I’d been first to see it, no,
second, after he who wrote it.
I am not using his name today,
he who erased himself
with such punctuation of blood.
Jenny just called me a glittery little minx.
See that John, you are nothing but corpse,
others leave me notes through the ether.
The letters just ride through air,
and all those nights I was waiting for some sign
that your atoms had regrouped elsewhere,
like vapor returning to water on my bare palm.
When you touched my hand it felt like a promise.
I think you left your loneliness writhing in my body.

• • •

Breadcrumb #152

LARRY GARLAND

My mother came to me in a dream about death last night. I’m not saying that’s the only way she can speak to me now. She’s still alive. Or she was yesterday morning. That’s when I spoke with her last. Soon, I’ll screw up my courage and ring-her-up, expecting to hear that usual cheerful “Hello, Sonny Boy!” I’ll ask her how she’s feeling. Did she sleep well? Is the arthritis better with this improving weather? I’ll ask about plans for the day, and tell her of mine. Did she remember to refill her medicines at Wal-Mart? Does she recall how Daddy loved sunny but cool spring mornings like the conditions we both are enjoying today? This fair weather is shared, even though there’s a thousand miles between us. One thousand miles of memories connecting her in her home in Tennessee to me in mine in New York. No matter. Love leaps any distance with a single bound, in a single beat of the adoring heart. 

    So in my dream, Momma said she’d had a dream. One that told her she was about to die. A dream, cradling a dream about death. A delicate layering of reality and emotion undulating, alternating—oscillating like the pendulum on a grandfather’s clock. Her clock. I can hear it. 

     She didn’t seem unhappy about the notice of impending doom. Still, I tried to shush her in the middle of the telling. In my dream, I felt if she finished it, then it would become real. Still her words tumbled out, knocking mine over even as I was beseeching her to hush. But her dream of passing to a different realm wasn’t real—or that’s what I told her in my dream about crossing over. Mine was the real dream. I dreamed that after she told me, it came true the next day.

“A delicate layering of reality and emotion undulating, alternating—oscillating like the pendulum on a grandfather’s clock.”

     Maybe she wouldn’t mind going. It’s fierce how she misses her husband. In their life together, they’d had a hard beginning, financially. But it worked out pretty well. There was some good luck, I guess, but mainly their improved lot came through hard work. Literally, from the sweat of their brows. They started with nothing but each other and made a home in a house they built and paid for themselves. Then they added on to that house—babies, my brother and me. By retirement time, they’d been able to set aside enough savings for food and clothing, for house and personal upkeep, and for limited travel. 

     The children turned out decent enough, if you don’t mind the incongruity of a near-hermit mountain man (my brother) and a somewhat more urbane and gregarious gay man (me). 

     At some point, my momma started saying, “Sometimes I just want to walk away. That man tries to control me too much.” It’s true, he did. But it was out of love. He was brought up to believe the man was the head of the house and was supposed to make all the decisions, while protecting his wife. But my momma was a woman of the times, and she saw the value of women being equal partners in life. Then, after Daddy passed, Momma became fond of saying, “How I miss my sweetheart. He was so good to me. We had a wonderful life together.” She has buried the bad memories with him, and I’m not one to go digging in cemeteries; so I never have had the heart to remind her of the shortcomings she used to see in him.

     The thing is, she’d never been alone before. She went straight from having a tyrant for a father to making a life with a good, but strong-willed husband. After Daddy’s passing, she discovered life alone isn’t so grand. She didn’t enjoy making decisions on her own. Oh, she still likes feeling she has control of her life. But she has come to rely on the advice of her two sons. So my brother and I have learned to couch things just right. We never say, “Momma, you need to do such-and-such.” No, we say, “Momma, have you thought about this possibility?” It has worked pretty well to plant the seed in the garden of her mind and walk away to let it germinate. 

    If Momma gets advice from one son, pretty soon she’ll be calling his brother. When she rings me after talking with my brother about some quandary, I’m likely to say, “It sounds reasonable to me, Momma. I’d go with his advice on this one.” Of course, when she calls me for that second opinion, my brother and I have already discussed it. We have come to mutual agreement. I’m just watering the soil now, to help the seed sprout. If this sounds devious, then so be it. We have Momma’s best interests at heart, just like Daddy did.

     This morning, even after my fitful night’s sleep, I awoke well before the alarm rang out.  I gazed into the closing night, watching without moving as dawn’s invading fingers reached past the curling edges of the pulled shades. Soon, dawn was brushing lights and shadows on my ceiling, its canvas. I studied what dawn’s finger-painting was foretelling. I stared at the revelatory images forming as long as I dared. Then I got up, raised the window shades on the world and went to work.

• • •

Breadcrumb #149

JEN WINSTON

You text me the link in the morning while I’m still half asleep so I only think I see it. Then I wake up and definitely see it, but now I’m running late and don’t have 15 seconds to load an article. Then my commute is cold so I forget about anything else, and then I’m at work, busy paying attention to a different screen.

    Acknowledge, you text me two hours later, the lack of punctuation intended to show your impatience. A few minutes pass, and when I still don’t respond, you send one single space. It's a blank text, sitting on my iPhone like a gray balloon, all full of helium with nowhere to go. This is a bump, the least punctuation possible, the most impatient text of all. I tuck my phone in my back pocket to sneak it into the bathroom, duck into a stall, and click.

    “Fallen Construction Plywood Kills West Village Woman,” says the headline. I sigh, realizing the sound was probably audible to Janet, my boss, who is washing her hands. Yesterday you sent, “Two Taxis Collide In Front Of Williamsburg Bridge.” The day before, “Bronx Bodega Owner Slain In Gang Shootout Misfire.” The stories’ protagonists all are — or were — 28-34. It’s the same age as us, but also the same as the people I’m supposed to be selling body wash to right now. I send a blue balloon back to you, Acknowledging, and leave the bathroom without washing my hands.

     Janet shows me a cherry-colored shower gel and asks me to write taglines for it. The gel has little beads in it, so the taglines must convey the importance of exfoliating. Back at my desk, Janet gives me a cherry-colored shower gel and asks me to write taglines for it, making sure to convey the importance of exfoliating. We have to motivate people, she says. They will thank us later. I consider that I haven’t exfoliated since I ran out of apricot scrub two months ago. I haven’t gathered the strength to make a drugstore run because a drugstore run is a thankless, exhausting errand. This is why Janet and I can’t change consumer behavior — because all target markets have one thing in common: They are lazy.

     Hi, you text me that night. A text without a link is much easier to deal with. I know you know this, so I know this text means you simply want me to Acknowledge, to tell you you’re not alone here.

     Hi, I respond.

     One week later, I’m in the West Village. I think of the woman, then, obviously, of you.
In west vil rn, I text, and you reply almost immediately with another link. I click it while I’m walking, causing me to almost step into traffic, but I see the cars just in time and jump back. I sidle against a snowy mailbox, quickly forgetting how scary the moment almost was, and read “Elevator Accident In Midtown Kills Two.” You’ve given me a new neighborhood to fear, a different man-made object to avoid.

     Thank you, I text back. That helps.

     Between us, we are inexperienced with death. We have lost no parents, no siblings, not even a grandparent during our lifetimes. We dumb to it, which means we are lucky. And we know this.

     I guess I do have one story, but it’s never felt right to tell it to you. An acquaintance from my high school, someone I kissed once at a party. He was found in his college dorm, electrocuted after stumbling into a high voltage chamber. He was drunk. You need to know this story, I think, because you and I are often drunk, so it’s relatable, the way the other stories are because of 28-34. But unlike the others, I knew this person. I kissed him. And I don’t want us to use someone I kissed to imagine ourselves. Every time you act out a play, it becomes more theater than reality. It’s not fair to your characters to kill them again.

     This is the point of sending headlines to each other: I get to imagine what if it were you, you get to imagine what if it were me. But we both only imagine these situations from our own perspectives, from the vantage point of the person who stays alive. This is why I like you — because even in hypothetical situations, we stay realistic. We know that, in the back of our heads, we would be pissed that the funeral meant we couldn’t work out that day. Sending the headlines to each other is a way of giving the other person permission to think like this. This, I’m sure, is the real reason we send them.

“This is the point of sending headlines to each other: I get to imagine what if it were you, you get to imagine what if it were me.”

     When I imagine you in the headlines, I imagine me as a wreck. I know I would keep texting you, and wonder if my iMessages would mark as delivered. The texts wouldn’t contain headlines, of course, because the purpose of those — the imagining of you in them — would be gone. Instead, they would just say Hi. Much easier to Acknowledge, though you never would.

    I imagine my office wouldn’t even give me bereavement days, since we’re not dating, or married, or related by blood. Most people don’t even know we’re friends because we text more than we talk, and screenshots of those texts would be shitty evidence — out of context our links and blank balloons would seem almost illegible, like a code concealing something of little to know interest. Maybe this is because of the acquaintance I kissed, but whenever I imagine death, I imagine it without blood. Cold and empty, almost purple. Anything but red.

     Janet likes one of my lines: “Scrub now. Shine later.” Millions of people will read these four words on billboards and our product’s bottle, and I realize this is only kind of story that anyone wants to hear. My boss says this product is a big deal — if just one of those people age 28-34 starts exfoliating, we have them for life. Think of all the dead skin that will fall, making ceramic shower floors look like marble.

    On the way home from work, I walk past a Duane Reade. I have fifteen minutes, just enough time to pick up more apricot scrub, cotton swabs, and other things I sort of need. But then snow begins to fall and my fingers go numb, and I imagine freezing here on the street corner. I wonder who it would hurt more if I turned into ice and never saw you again. I decide I don’t want to go inside, so I stand there until I only have five minutes. Then, my whole body stinging, I walk home.

• • •