Breadcrumb #578

ALIFAH OMAR

To be heard… 

You think the dead are really listening? Have you ever stood over a grave, which ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of grass, and talked to it? I’ve visited … thought something miraculous or celestial would happen but there was nothing. I remember the white light of the sun behind some clouds. I remember the cemetery caretaker on the grounds looking as creepy as what you’d expect someone in a horror film to look like. I spoke some words to the grass. The grass didn’t respond back. So, I left. 

Just send flowers next time.

• • •

Breadcrumb #577

VENUS DAVIS

today
I saw you
from behind the counter at work. 
Three years ago, I would’ve gone through 
your tumblr and sent you a message begging 
for attention, for love, for a reason as to why you left.
I would’ve taken ibuprofen and threatened to 
murder my stomach lining until you so much as looked at me.

today 
I saw you 
and was reminded of who I used to be:
Some little kid who needed a
therapist more than a lover. 
A child who needed to drop out of college 
and check into their emotions. 
Someone who needed to put down the bottle of 
ibuprofen and pick up a bottle of Wellbutrin. 

today 
I saw you 
and I was happy that you didn’t see me. 
I was happy that you didn’t look my way. 
When you left me, I thought that I had lost my 
only chance at being complete. 
A half forever in search of their unrequited whole. 
Someone who called you a monster from  
behind a foggy mirror. 

today 
I saw you 
and I am so glad that three years ago, 
you left me.

• • •

Breadcrumb #576

MARYANN AITA

My mother is a lightning storm. She is there without warning; a flash, a rupture. She fits herself into other people’s worlds, like a chameleon with only a palette of pinks. She spews details she doesn’t own as an entry-point to empathy—her son’s cancer a conversation-starter, her daughter’s NYU degree her own accolade. 

    She spent most of her time in the house. When she stepped out, it was like the bottle of her exploded, leaving glass shards and liquid in a pool on the ground. My mother chats with store clerks, gathers fatty details about wait staff, and stands up for what she deems just. She wrote letters to the city council asking for four-way stop signs along our block. The city installed them. A few weeks later she set out to remove them—stopping every few feet was a public inconvenience. 

**

    As a kid, I liked storms. They were time I could spend inside, alone in the dark. I’d count the seconds between the flash and the clap—one, one thousand—to determine how many miles the storm was away. My mother always felt thousands of seconds away from me, but only an instant would pass between her flash and clap. I lived in the gap between them, fighting my way out of her electricity. 

**

    I learned to yell in the woods. My Girl Scout leader stood me at the bottom of a hill and made me shout to her. The first call was meek, but with each prod I growled louder and louder until I was screaming. Until I cried myself into existence.

    Once I’d discovered my guttural agency, I exploded: a first line of defense against my mother’s expanding storm of extroversion. Word after word my tongue raced, my hands jogged in tandem, squeezing more and more of myself into every sentence. Every class, my arms launched themselves into the air. Pick me. I know the answer.

“Word after word my tongue raced, my hands jogged in tandem, squeezing more and more of myself into every sentence.”

Silence was like an oven: I couldn’t sit in it for more than a second. I acted in plays. I ran for Student Council Vice President. I sang in choir. I joined the speech team. I spat language and scribbled in gestures. 

    The small meek me was ash in the forest. I’d made myself outgoing.

**

    “You can make friends in a Starbucks,” my mother said, comparing me to her other daughter. “Valerie isn’t good at that.”

    My sister wants to be small. She tried for many years to make herself disappear. In her adolescence, she developed an eating disorder. By the time she was 24, she weighed 60 pounds. But like a light post uplifted in the wind, she hit the ground again somewhere. She landed—healthier—in Arizona, with a husband and baby, a thirty-minute drive from our mother. 

    I can make friends in a Starbucks. I learned from her: say something witty; complain about the wait; revel in your mutual confusion. It’s automatic now: pick me. 

**

    In line to get a book signed by a favorite author, I started chatting with the woman behind me. Out of habit, words spewed.

    Conversation is volcanic in me. I gave fire to man and like Prometheus I felt the violent pecking at my body that followed.

    At the table with the author, I melted into the small shy girl in the woods. He asked me a question—one I had an answer to—but I was nervous to respond. I needed a moment. I know the answer. The woman behind me was suddenly a magnetic friend, closer and closer, so near to me, a part of me, pecking at me.

    She answered for me.

    We had a banter, one I didn’t want, but initiated anyway, programmed from years of observing my mother.

**

    In Arizona, my mom’s friends call her “the mayor.” Everyone knows who she is. Everyone has a strong opinion about her. She teaches water aerobics, tempesting pool waves while she hovers above the water. She and my father throw parties and play trivia and go to karaoke. 

    I am terrified of Karaoke.

    I am afraid of my voice. I threw it out into the wilderness once and it wasn’t mine when it came back.

    I am not the extrovert, my mother thinks. I am not like her. She can’t see what isn’t like her.

    There is only an instant between the flash and the clap. I live between them. It’s not enough room to separate us. 

***

    I like it there, in the dark. I like it in the interior. I like the alone.

    But, like my mother, my culture does not value the introspective. We want the CEOs and salesmen. Workspace walls have fallen. We televise the awards for actors and directors—for the human interactors—but we stamp sound designers’ names in silent text.

    I want to be small.

    But if you walk into the wind, you must lean forward. I learned from my mother how to be assertive, how to monsoon a conversation. I know how to put on a face. She taught me to test lipstick on my skin and leave a gentle blot on a tissue. It always left an imprint, a little part of my body left behind, a piece of myself gone. I learned to cloak myself in the world of the extroverted.

    Pick me. Pick me.  I am the life of every party I don’t want to attend. 

    I prefer to live in the gap between thunder and clap, but I learned to inhabit the flash of lightning.

    I was such an astute performer; I believed I liked it there, on my mother’s stage. I liked the smiles and the shaking hands; I thought my electricity originated there.

    But I draw my power from solitude while staying inside during a storm. That is where I trace my thoughts, in the calm where the rain beats down on the rock outside and I am whole. Where fire belongs to the sky and thunder is my heartbeat.

• • •

Breadcrumb #575

AREN LANDAU

It starts with a snag
A dropped stitch when I wasn’t paying attention
When I was
Too distraught to be careful and I didn’t care
If the tapestry was perfect
You were there, and you held me
Through whiskey breath and tears
Mourning the mess we made of excess yarn, lurid pink and strewn about the kitchen
In coagulated snarls 

But you prod the bruises before they even 
Have a chance to settle,
To congeal into a putrid yellow that belies where broken capillaries
Knit back together
A pattern I could follow with my eyes closed even though
The rows are always crooked
The warp of curves, the weft of womb, and the blood that rises to the surface 
To greet a pair of bone-white needles

You never saw him
Teeth bared in my face, eyes hungry
The shard of ceramic on my floor the sharpest
Thing in my room besides
The gasp I take
When I finally pry his hands off of me
You heard the bed shake through the floorboards but couldn’t hear my heart
Tremble in its cradle
Once you would have rocked me until
Each sob was just a hiccup, a memory my lungs recall 
When they can no longer grasp onto my sorrow

You say you’re sorry but all I hear is
How can you be so clumsy still?
And it’s true-- my stitches are never straight
The skeins of me always unravel
I fall down the stairs, twisted and tangled
And you are tired of tugging the thread
Trying to pull my wounds closed when I am far too fond of frayed edges
You say you’re sorry but all I can think is
It’s my fault
For never healing in the arms of someone gentle
For fumbling against cold porcelain
And wishing too hard for soft fingers

How easily I forget 
That those who touched my heart before were never tender
Knitting needles catching, snaring, careless in their mending
How easy it was to forgive the nails
That cut me into crescents
The seam ripper clutched in her fist, glinting in the moonlight
Like a textile weaver’s smile
But I never forgave myself for coming home in tatters
And when I look at you my heart still aches with the memory
Of sympathetic vibrations, of a summer when
I still trusted a seamstress 
To know exactly where to hem, exactly when to purl
With steady hands to darn the loose ends closed

• • •

Breadcrumb #574

JENNIFER HON KHALAF

When Ness saw the first moth flutter out from the pantry, it was unimportant. In fact, it could have been sweet, pretty; a muted butterfly of sorts. She swatted its wings away from her face. Rob was due to come over in a few minutes and she needed to get the pasta into water so that dinner would be ready for him.

After dinner, they settled into the couch with some chocolates to watch a movie. Tonight it was her choice, something characterized by Netflix as a "dark romantic drama with a strong female lead". Apparently, this is who she is and what she likes. Being a dark romantic drama, the light flickered only intermittently from the television. At one point, her chocolate bonbon was illuminated - small spots dotting its surface. 

"Why are there holes in my chocolate?" Rob didn’t turn his head from the fight unfolding onscreen, so she pushed the bonbon in front of his eyes which squinted and focused. 

"Hm… that doesn't look right."

They paused the show and walked into the kitchen, turning on the light so that Rob could investigate,. He set the chocolate on the cutting board, slicing it in half. Something fluttered. Dimly, she could see a small white creature, wriggling in pain from being slashed in half. More holes drilled the inside, forming tunnels in and out.

"Looks like larva of some kind."

She couldn't speak and found that her hands were raised, covering her mouth. 

"Well, what do you want to do?" Rob turned to look at her when she said nothing, her eyes  widening when they met his. "How many did you eat?"

She could only raise her left hand, five fingers up. She could have been waving,demanding a high five, telling Rob to stop the interrogation, or admitting that she had eaten five pieces. Either way, she walked off to the bedroom to burrow into the sheets and curl up, feeling a churning nausea, trying to forget the translucent wriggling of the broken worm.

"Whoo!” exclaimed Rob. “At least we don't have to finish that boring movie!"

Ness dreamt of larvae boring holes. They tunneled through the walls, dropping onto the floor, traveling through pantries, only to keep on with the incessant tunneling straight through the floors. IWhere she was standing they kept on burrowing, at times up into her feet through her soles. She moved to the sofa, butthey had already squeezed their way through the stuffing, then into her back, buttocks, thighs. It didn't hurt; instead they studiously quarried away, miners unearthing treasures, eating their fill, moving onwards.

Rob's hand stopped stroking her side. "That dream is nasty, Ness. We've got to do something about it."

She tried, but it was difficult to explain how they burrowed inside, through her skin into her essence; it wasn't gross, she insisted.

"Well… no, that's gross," replied Rob. 

The next few days were devoted to determining the identity, source, and methods of destroying the infestation. Whenever Rob came over, he would use Ness’ laptop to Google the different pests that congregated in their area of the world. Shoving the laptop in her face with a giant blown up image of a multi-segmented beetle, he exclaimed, "They're drugstore beetles! Oh wait, I've discovered a new function on Google images. They're pantry moths. Whatever they are, they're a good source of protein!" She had eaten at least five good sources of protein. 

Or it could've been more. The way they burrowed, tunneled, they moved inside of her body. She kept dreaming she could feel them inching along, traveling through her limbs, moving towards the ventricles of her heart, little tingles when they turned around, ran into one another and switched directions. Intersecting, growing, multiplying, transforming as they moved. They moved ever so slowly, but every night these dreams made her sweat, toss, and turn. They were figuring out where to go. But it was too much for Rob, who stopped spending the night. "You wiggle too much now, and you're taking all the sheets."

Rob started bugging her about cleaning up the kitchen, but she only grew silent and pensive. He had written down a list of what she had to do to deal with this problem. First, all the food would have to be thrown out, frozen, isolated, and/or inspected for contamination. Then, every surface would have to be wiped down with hot water and soap, followed by another disinfection with a dilutionof vinegar. Finally, she would have to clean and quarantine any food that was brought in from the outside world. That was where they really came from - outside. 

“She kept dreaming she could feel them inching along, traveling through her limbs, moving towards the ventricles of her heart, little tingles when they turned around, ran into one another and switched directions.”

He stuck the list up on the fridge door and for weeks, whenever he came by, he’d remind her to get started on the great cleanse. He still came by after work to watch TV while she wandered to and from the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards, pretending to tidy. Whenever his cutting gaze caught her, she felt exposed. When he came into the kitchen, he pointed out all the telltale signs of invasion: small, dry brown shells which lay scattered; a grain of rice that started wagging on its own; clinging particles signifying cobwebs; a flash of dry, papery wings sweeping past as he opened the cupboards. "I'm trying to help you. This is a really serious problem."

Ness began to feel an almost continuous sensation of revulsion. Almost anything could be a symptom. It looked like a grub; it appeared by a beetle; there, a moth, here, a speck of dust, a mote. This was supposed to be her domain. She felt guilty for failing to keep a clean kitchen. His list, written in black Sharpie, all caps, stuck in the middle of the fridge, was so long and demanding. When she peered into her kitchen, there was nothing, but then if she tried to see things the way that he did, the signs were everywhere: lurking, hiding.

She had stopped cooking because there was the risk of discovery with everything she opened up in the pantry. A bag of risotto could be wriggling larva. She could stare into the depths of the bag for minutes, concluding that there was nothing but inanimate granules. Yet they’d start curling up, shrieking and smoking, when she poured it out onto the heat of a stovetop. If she didn't make risotto that night, they could have continued living safe and unknown, coddled amongst the grains in the dark warmth of the cupboard. They could have been free for the duration of their lives, doing whatever that entailed; being a grub, turning into a beetle, maybe building a cocoon of one's own and finally bursting out as a moth.

In the moments at home alone after Rob had left for the night, she crawled into bed and found that she could start burrowing into the covers, maybe drill down into the memory foam and discover another world. 

"Fine - if you don't want to eat or make anything in the house, then let's go out to eat. Go get dressed." But wasn't the source of the problem from outside? That's how they first came in. Going outdoors felt too exposed. Why go? Why be peeled away from her soft sweats and jersey into stiff heels and scratchy jackets, out into the cold, shrieking wind, waiting in line outside of a bistro surrounded by smokers, forcing conversation in order to drown out other conversations that weren't meant to be overheard? If they had dinner at a restaurant, there was no TV. Instead, they'd have to sit across from one another, gazing at the full blast of each other's faces. Ness couldn't remember the last time she and Rob had talked about anything meaningful - or at least, meaningful to her. If the waiter was slow, they might be finished talking about what happened earlier in the day, the weather, the people around them, the decor of the restaurant, all before ordering. Then what would be left? 

What is loving really like? To be able to crawl within a person's innermost veins and tunnels, looking around and knowing that this is what they were made of? An almost undetectable presence, only there every once in a while, made known by a tingling in her chest whenever she needed reassurance. It was unimaginable for Rob to be so small, a part of her in that way, imperceptibly burrowing into the Ness-ness of herself. Instead, it was always a ripping off of sweet silence, to force himself into her innermost sanctum. He was always shoving things in front of her face, pushing his hands onto her body, giving her advice, gazing upon her, listening to his voices, his thoughts on top of her reverie. Maybe all Ness wanted to do was to burrow and brood. Why did she have to do things? Least of all, why did she have to throw everything away and start rubbing her counters with vinegar? She wondered what it would be like to have a giant chocolate egg as a home, so great she couldn't see past its borders. It would sustain and protect her. It was food and home. The gingerbread house in the fairy tales without a witch or a brother - but hers and hers alone. Ness would eat and eat until she was sleepy, then lie down surrounded by dark, soft, sweet walls, nibbled down to embrace her shape. Then maybe after a little rest, she'd start making a cocoon, one in which you’d start knitting a cloak around yourself, building and building, until finally it encapsulates you fully and you are surrounded by nobody else, nothing at all, free to dream about the metamorphosis.

It was a relief to hear the clang of the spare key and the slam of the door. Turning the deadbolt lock slid in the last stitch, and she could finally rest, secure in knowing there were no more possibilities of intrusion, interruption. She could curl up on her bed amongst the blankets - nay, even venture out to the living room and stretch herself out on the rug on the floor, and still be enclosed! Ness was waiting.

• • •