Breadcrumb #291

LISA MARIE BASILE

Trionfo della morte

After a long night, after a discord of self. After silence, and all that is carried inside of it, there is a kingdom in your name. That it does not exist when you arrive but is always there. It is not waiting for you, but it waits. It is not of you; you are of it. It is you. After a bath of ocean locks you in and old kings come to hold you to their chest, this place will be a living thing. It is not made for you, but made by you. It is made up of you. It is the blood of the long way home. It is the peacock & grotto. What wound it wants. What wound it fills. It is the white bird. It is the awayness of long nights, too long, too dead, too held, too sick. It is the hereness of some peace; the proximity to the grotesque, the longitudes of the divine. What silt, what silt. That you have straddled the cusp.

• • •

Breadcrumb #290

BOB RAYMONDA

She paces around the kitchen, listening to the grating ringback tone that her daughter has never bothered to get rid of. The sky outside her window vacillates between stark rays of sunshine and the thick, graying, marshmallow fluff of storm clouds. It’s six thirty PM, and Margaret is running late. A pot of bolognese rests on the stovetop, wasting her gas bill to keep warm so long after being finished.

    “Erin,” Margaret says, answering the phone sarcastically.

    She sighs, adding another dash of salt to the sauce she’d spent hours perfecting, “Must you call me that? Why not mother? Or better yet, mom?”

    “Because mothers show their children affection,” Margaret spits, “You’ve never shown me more than your checkbook.”

    Even with the sound of the car’s open windows screaming in the background, she can tell her daughter is chewing gum. There’s a stinging sensation on the back of her neck that she’s always associated with Margaret eating. A blinding rage. It takes everything in Erin’s power not to ask her to spit it out.

    “And a happy birthday to you too, my dear,” Erin says through gritted teeth. She burns her arm on the burbling pot, cursing under her breath, and asks, “When can I expect you this evening?”

    “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you,” Margaret starts.

    “No, you can’t do this to me. Not today.”

    “I’m not going to make it tonight, Cindy is taking me out for tapas,” Margaret says, turning the radio in the background up. Soft pop music plays, more bearable than the trash she listened to as a teenager, but certainly not helpful right now, as they talk on the phone.

    “We made these plans weeks ago,” Erin groans, “You were supposed to meet Glenn.”

    “I know, but I’ve never spent my birthday with her and I promised. I’ll meet him next time, I swear,” Margaret finishes. She chooses not to correct Margaret’s thousandth misgendering of her partner. This wasn’t the time for that.

    “Listen, Erin, I’ve got to go. I’m at the restaurant and I’m running late.”

    “But…”

    “And happy birthday to you too.”

    The line goes dead and Erin can’t contain herself. She grasps the pot of bolognese from the stove, bare handed, and dumps it onto the other dirty dishes in the sink. She lifts the cheap Home Goods vase Margaret gifted her last year, on their shared day, and smashes it into the ground. She collapses, sobbing softly among the shards.

    There’s a rustling in the other room as Glenn bursts through the door to the kitchen. When they arrive, Erin’s sitting on the linoleum with tears streaming down her face. She reaches up into the junk drawer, rustling around for her pack of emergency cigarettes and a lighter. Glenn nods silently, retrieves the broom and dustpan, and sweeps up the broken teal remains.

    “Cindy?” Glenn asks as Erin lights herself the last bogey in her crumpled pack. It's stale. She quit a year ago.

    “That bitch. What does she have that I didn’t provide?” Erin scowls, inhaling deeply, “Tell me that one thing.”

    Glenn sighs, joining Erin on the floor and rubbing her back with one hand and wiping tears from her reddened cheek with the other. Their skin is softer than one would expect from an iron worker, and their touch can, for a moment, calm her rage. A thunderclap soars outside as the sun peaks through, one final time, and transforms into torrents of rain.

    “Blood, honey,” Glenn coos, “That’s it. Just blood.”

“Their skin is softer than one would expect from an iron worker, and their touch can, for a moment, calm her rage.”

    Erin and Glenn have been together for the better part of a year, but Margaret has still yet to meet them. She lives not five miles from her mother, but every time there are concrete plans for a week, two, in advance, she calls at the absolute last minute to cancel. Or she doesn’t show up at all. Erin isn’t sure why she’s surprised by the betrayal, on today of all days, but she shouldn’t be. Her relationship with her daughter has never been an easy one.

    “I don’t give a shit that the woman pushed my baby, kicking and screaming, out of her womb,” she moans, “I’m still the one who raised her. Where was Cindy when Margaret went to pre-school? Where was she when she broke her leg in fourth grade?”

    “God knows,” Glenn agrees. “Why don’t we get ourselves out of here, let me buy you some dinner?”

    Erin looks out at the window and tries to imagine herself going out in the downpour. She’d have to change into long pants and find some sort of marginally waterproof boots. She’d have to dig through the linen closet to find an umbrella big enough for the two of them. She’d have to get safely between the porch and the Mazda she has parked around the block without getting soaked. She can’t bare the thought, and shakes her head, letting the ash from her cigarette fall onto her dress, singing it.

    Glenn takes the cigarette from her mouth and stubs it out on the bottom of their boot. They pick her up in their muscled arms and carry her out of the kitchen, depositing her onto the fading leather couch. For awhile, they’re in the kitchen cleaning up the rest of her mess, but when they return, they’re smiling, “Pizza’s on the way.”

    Erin’s as happy as she can be, given the circumstances. Her partner is loving and caring and knows exactly what to do when she melts down. She wonders if this is why Margaret is so resistant to meet them. Margaret always looked down on her for attempting to go it alone. She was so relieved to find out that her bio-mom had the stereotypical doctor husband and two kids and tire swing and white picket fence life that Erin had resisted for so long.

    Glenn isn’t the father that Margaret had longed for, and they’d never try to be. Despite Erin’s loose definition of acceptable family structure, Margaret harbored in her an intolerance she’d never understood. And even if that weren’t the case, it’s far too late for them at this point, with her grown and outside of Erin’s grasp, but she had hoped her daughter would warm up to them. Would pose for a single, measly picture that she could post on Facebook to prove to her sister Diane that the three of them, in fact, had something resembling a familial relationship.

    Two large pies show up half an hour later, without incident. One’s smothered in ham and pineapple, while the other has peppers and anchovies. Erin’s favorites. They each take two slices and devour them while marathoning DVR’d reruns of Law & Order: SVU. They sit in silence, and Erin can’t help but zone in on the sound of Glenn’s beautiful jaw as it works its way through another chunk of warm pineapple. The way their nostrils flare up in pleasure with each lingering bite.

    She has an urge and follows it, grabbing their plates and abandoning them on the glass coffee table. She straddles Glenn and wraps her arms around their neck. “I don’t know what it is, baby,” Erin says staring into her lover’s eyes, “but something about the way you eat just turns me on.”

    She kisses Glenn hard. She forgets about her daughter. She forgets about the pizza. She gorges herself on other things, things that she denied herself for too long, in that life before. That life where it was just her and Margaret and no matter what she did, it would never be enough. She would never be like Cindy, and she’d have to accept that.

    She’d have to try.

• • •

Breadcrumb #289

LILY ARNELL

I’m a river that crashes into uncles, uncles that are balding and spotting and ripped at the knees. I'm a river that crashes into aunts who wade in pink and molded eggshells and moms who lick brown lipstick off the wrinkled corners of their mouths. I am a red sphere who bounces off white walls and white teeth. Mine are yellowed. Mine are cracking at the base. You look at me sideways when I say I haven't brushed them in two weeks. I am plaque-river. No, I am sad-sack-tributary. No, the heap of equal parts ‘thing’ and ‘nothing.’ No, I am jagged flop-rock wedged in your crooked heel and screening your callus for blood.

"I like shrimp," you say and wipe the powdered sugar from your upper lip. "I like really cold shrimp," you say and pull the bathroom door closed. I sit on the couch and wait and count the stains on the coffee table. Together we taint the landscape.

• • •

Breadcrumb #288

MARYANN AITA

“I think it’s colder here than Manhattan, like, because it’s closer to the ocean. Right? And the ocean makes it windier. I think.”

    It was early January 2012 and my friend Dominic was living in law school housing in Brooklyn Heights. He told me his weather theory as we wandered from the 6 train to his apartment.

    I grunted some kind of affirmation because my face was frozen by the wind. It was so cold I could only assume it had been summoned by some ice troll living under the Brooklyn Bridge.

    Dominic had invited me to hang out with his law school friends while they played Goldeneye on N64 until we all worked up the courage to go outside and walk to the bar three blocks away.

    He and his roommate kept referencing Captain America, which was their nickname for their friend Marron. I thought Marron was already some kind of nickname, but learned this was his actual, given name.

    “Why do you call him Captain America?” I asked.

    “He kind of looks like the guy who played Captain America."

    “Chris Evans? Why not call him Chris?”

    “Captain America’s funnier,” the roommate added.

    “So he’s not, like, a really big fan of superheroes? Or a republican or something?”  

    Dominic and his roommate laughed. “He might be a republican."

    Apparently, Marron was as arrogant as he was wealthy. With a name that screamed “my family owns several yachts,” I could only imagine what kind of money he was descended from. Marron, I was told, was also kind of a know-it-all.

    A few minutes later, “Captain America” arrived at the apartment and I learned two things immediately:

    1) He was wearing boat shoes in January.

    2) He looked like a human Ken doll.

    He was also pompous and seemed to start complaining about something before he got through the doorway.

    After Dominic’s law school buddies had collected, pre-gamed, and murdered each other in Goldeneye a few times, we bundled up for our journey to the bar.

    Along the way, Captain America went on about argyle sweaters; he then explained that he was wearing a Fair Isle sweater—I own hundreds of articles of clothing. I can tell you the difference between tartan and plaid (it’s the colors), discern houndstooth from herringbone, and I am the first to praise argyle everything, but—I had never heard of Fair Isle.

    This guy, however, was an expert.

    I believe someone commented on the atrocity he was wearing, which prompted his explanation of the pattern. Somehow, this turned into me arguing that it was definitely not an argyle sweater (a fact he did not dispute) and how argyle sweaters are much better than Fair Isle sweaters, which remind me of clothes that people wear in catalogs when they are standing next to horses.

    Captain America never disagreed with me. Prompted only by my friend’s opinion of him, his ugly sweater, and the fact that he was wearing boat shoes, I made it my mission to argue with him. So I continued discussing the shortcomings of his non-argyle sweater in an effort to out-annoy him. Our argu-greement took up a substantial part of my evening, but I was fueled by fiery bourbon keeping me warm from the chill outside.

    Later, Dominic told me that his friends actually thought I was funny. They appreciated my haranguing Marron because none of them ever would. Assuming I would never see him again, it made no difference to me what impression I left. Sure, he looked a little like a Disney prince, but what was I going to do with a cartoon?

    I never expected to see Marron again. I wasn’t expecting some rom com plot where we find out that we were destined to be together. I was out with a friend who happened to be out with some of his new friends and I was the tag along.

    But Marron walked back into my life one morning.

    Two years later, Dominic helped me get a job as a paralegal at a law firm. I had been a nanny—the kind of job with a built-in expiration date—and transitioning into the world of office work had been challenging. I worked at the front desk as a phone answerer/legal assistant/pseudo first-year attorney/office manager. Dominic was back in school by then and no longer working at the office.

“I had been a nanny—the kind of job with a built-in expiration date—and transitioning into the world of office work had been challenging.”

    On a Tuesday in January of 2014, a blonde man in a suit walked in to interview for an internship.

    “Hi I’m Marron,” he said. “I have an interview with Tim.”

    I wondered if there could be two people on this planet with that name.

    “Hi,” I said, “You can have a seat. I’ll let Tim know you’re here.”

    The walk from the front desk to the back office—Tim’s office—was about eight seconds, but those eight seconds were some of the most vexed seconds of my life.

    That can’t be the same guy. Why isn’t Dominic here? He would know. That CAN’T be him. Do I say something? Does he even remember me? Why would he remember me? I remember him. But I'm creepy like that.

    I got to Tim’s office and tried to stretch time—I had to solve the mystery before I got back to the front desk.

    “Hey Tim,” I said.

    “Oh is the interview here?”

    Damn it. Why was he aware of his appointments?

    “Uh. Yeah. Marron is here.”

    “OK. Let him know I’ll be out in a minute. You can have him sit in the conference room.”

    I made the eight second walk last about eleven and put Marron in the conference room.

    “Do you want any water?” I asked.

    “No, thanks.”

    He was wearing dress shoes and a suit that looked more expensive than anything either of my bosses wore.

    I lingered for a moment, not sure if I was trying to recall his face or if I was trying to send him some kind of signal: Hey, remember that time I yelled at you about some sweater you were wearing?

    Tim came out to interview Marron and I got back to work, which meant trying to see if we had his resume saved somewhere or a note on the office calendar. I got his last name from the calendar appointment and emailed Dominic to confirm my suspicion.

    I was right. It was the same guy. Although, really, as soon as he introduced himself, I knew: Fair Isle sweater.

    That law firm had a staff of less than ten people. Four law students interviewed for an internship that spring. And Captain America was one of them.

    In the week of waiting for my employers to make a decision on interns, I began to wonder what I would do if he got hired. Would I admit that we’d met? Maybe he already knew. Maybe he wouldn’t accept the position. But what if we had started working together? What if this was some punishment I had to endure for mocking a near total stranger?

    Of course, some tiny part of me loved the absurdity of it all. It felt like it had to mean something.

    But he didn’t get hired.

    He didn’t ever return.

    I wanted this coincidence to matter, but that was all it was: a coincidence. He was not, in fact, my prince. All the elements of a Hollywood love story were in place and then real life happened.

    Nothing happened.

    Sometimes, there is no greater meaning. Sometimes, we wonder for eight seconds and move on.

• • •

Breadcrumb #287

FRANCIS SANZARO

Unlike yours, my heart is tied down—stitched, actually—to my upper shoulder courtesy of a flap of skin they, the surgeons, stole from my inner thigh. I’m being serious here. In the manner of a mouse with its feet stuck in a pad of glue, the stitching keeps my heart from wiggling out of place. I have what is called ectopia cordis, an exotic but romanesque way of describing one who is born with their heart on the outside of their body.

    Go ahead, look ectopia up. It is an existentially threatening Google search. It is even mentioned in the cuneiform records of Babylon. Apparently, most in ancient history born like me were considered gods of temporality, since you could literally see their heart pumping on the outside of their body—an eternal timepiece cloaked in the veneer of mortal flesh.

    With ectopis cordis, most quickly die. Me, I lived. Also, I was born a twin, but my twin sister never made it. Ironically, she was born without a heart. We always wondered what became of her heart. I mean, really, where can a heart go? How can a heart not grow?

    Having your beating heart rest on the outside of your body, well, brings with it significant     challenges. One of those is Simone, who stood before me a few days ago trying to break up with me.

    As was always the case, she just couldn’t break the news. I knew it, she knew it, and being the emotional strategist that I am, I stood in my reluctance as a wet bird stands in a mud puddle, reaping the consequences of their joy all the while unable to fly until the mud dries and washes off. Mind you, about mud, she already called me spineless and pathetic...lovingly I think. But the details are not important here. She had cheated on me twice—the times I knew of—but my mother always said when you find something you love, don't let it go unless it bites too hard. The problem was I never felt her bite. I didn't deserve any better, and so, she dragged me around.

    This is all in retrospect, you see. The dainty and graceful Simone eventually did break up with me, but as to how she worked her sweet magic, you’ll have to wait.

    A fact about me, perhaps, or a note on exposed vulnerability—just because you are born with your heart on the outside of your body doesn’t mean you have a good heart. Aside from the obvious, allow me to make a few observations about women, sex and ectopia cordis.

Lying, deception, and the great game of opaqueness of soul cease to be a possibility. If I try to lie—say, “professor, I did do my homework, but left it at home,” the little red creature—my heart—vibrates and scurries about like a mouse when the lights turn on. When I’m horny, it stiffens and fills with blood, flopping around like it owns the place. A wolf tethered to a sheep is no tether.

    When I’m distracted during a conversation, it hums, well, kind of imagine how a mouse would sing if it got voice lessons from Bob Dylan. Young Dylan. If I am angry, its red body turns black…you get the point here—there are as many behaviors to my heart as there are what people have called “moods” or “emotions.” No manner of yoke or harness have proved effective in giving the little bloody pumper directives. It merely responds, and I have to clean up after it, as if I'm trying to decipher a poetic toddler who just learned how to talk backwards.

    Sometimes I feel guilty disobeying it in the face of its pleading and brutal honesty, as in, it has a distinctive consciousness of its own, which, while clearly associated with the irrational labyrinth that is my psyche, exhibits traits that feel foreign, nay I say feminine.

    It would have been so much better if my sister had survived. We could talk about things, laugh together. I wouldn't be so lonely. Mother always said we were soul mates who never had the chance to meet, but will meet at the end. What happened to her heart? How could someone be born without a heart? Are you kidding me?

    The little experiment that life is playing on me has revealed a truth so far only investigated in the dusty annals of speculation—a thing called honesty.

    As it turns out, the ability to feign emotion is as integral to our social life as money is to our economic life. While everyone can pretend to feel bad, pretend to care, and go through the motions of what empathy looks like, I’m marooned on an island of asshole, since if I don’t care people know it immediately, and apparently, I care seldom. I can try to make excuses for it, but who, really, to believe? The rest of my body doesn’t even have to react anymore, and strangely, over the years it seems to have a ghostly mission to direct me in my affairs, a phenomenon I know exists since it is not always consistent, as something purely instinctual should be, nor is it always against me, given that it often reacts in such a way that I don't like in the short term but, in time, I come to realize is the best course of action. Girls that I’m physically attracted to but repulsed in every other way get the wrong impression—actually, you’re hot, but I don’t want to sleep with you—and conversely, girls wearing baggy clothes that I want to see naked get the impression that I don’t think they are sexy.

    On the other side of things, you’ve all heard of having a broken heart. People are terrified to hurt me, since, well, my heart begins to break immediately—on my chest, on the spot, immediately. Blood down my shoulder, valves writhing as a headless snake. It’s all literary in a sense, but a fucking mess in all practicality. Rags, a mop, disinfectant, the whole shebang is needed.

    Now, you would think that this would be a boon to any guy. Chicks dig sensitive guys, right?, a guy who has shucked the incandescent slime of masculine indifference and who is now open to the world’s sensations, as much as say, a flower is to the warm tentacles of the sun. I am proof this isn’t the case. But right now you’re thinking all this is a bad thing. You are sadly mistaken.

“Blood down my shoulder, valves writhing as a headless snake.”

    Let us return to Simone, that petite blond beauty who was just standing in front of me days previous botching her break-up speech. Simone stopped me under a street corner. Her lips quivered under a flickering street light, and I saw, on that rare occasion, what makes her so delicate, why I fell into the love hole with her in the first place—an inability to hurt that registered in the color of her skin. When she panicked out of fear of causing harm she would turn pale, as pure as an angel dipped in a bucket of white paint.

    Simone and I were kin in this regard. We were both readable on the outside, unlike the rest of you conniving bastards, you who can hide.

    She was trying to break it off for some reason, but that’s not important. What is important is the position of power I always had over Simone—once she saw my heart quiver, gasp and turn black on my shoulder she would be forced, out of an emotional imperative that has its origin in her father’s death when she was twelve, to back pedal. Simone couldn’t hurt a soul, at least intentionally. But she was no dummy. She was well aware of this fact. She knew that as long as her eyes saw my heart break, she didn’t stand a chance of going through with it. Sleeping with other men was no problem, but to return home to face up to the fact in person would crush her, and I empathized with her in that regard. She knew that to successfully break up with me she would have to employ trickery. Trickery she did.

    Like a dog on a scent I could immediately tell that something was amiss when, rather than lower her head and break up with me in shame, as she had done on so many previous occasions, she stood forth, smiling that sexy smile, leaning forward, surreptitiously—nay, clandestinely—drooping her heavy breasts into the cold night air so that even mother Teresa couldn’t avoid a peek. And when I saw them, my heart pumped full of blood, squeaking giddily as she delivered those fateful words—“You’re an asshole.” Then my heart exploded, split, frost heaved, cleaved…blood everywhere, bits of heart flesh scattered on the sidewalk like crumbs of insincere love doled out by drunken carelessness. But wait, she didn't say those words. She said, "You hurt because you are scared, and you are scared because you feel guilty about something, but I don't have a clue as to what that is....I don't deserve you."

    By the time I figured it out, she was already around the corner. With my heart in pieces, I was still living, still breathing. A man without a heart—it was a scientific miracle.

    But it wasn't a miracle. The heart on my shoulder was never mine it turns out, but the heart of a ghost, a twin, a twin sister who never made it here.

    I'll see her in the end, I've been told.

• • •