Breadcrumb #663

GENEVIEVE SACHS

Everything that has touched Mary’s tongue for the last month has been bland. Every food, every person, every word. She’s been awake since 6:00am—the first time perhaps in history that she’s been up bothering her dog before the dog can do the same to her. There’s a half-bitten Excedrin on her desk but she opts for two full. Something in her bed is broken and she believes Hank is responsible for both the broken bed and the broken Excedrin. Through the grates of her ground-floor window, she’s forced to look at a cumbersome half-finished tag on the sidewall of the opposing building. Apparently the culprit happens to be Hank’s studio mate. Directly next door under the graffiti is a giant, weed-filled—the foliage but to be honest probably the drug too—lot, or as she and the other tenants of Apartment #1 refer to it, The Pit. Vagrants come and go but the only seemingly permanent residents are the Pit Kitties. The Pit Kitties tend to scream into the wind, at the wind, and at each other every morning but today they’ve been unnervingly silent. Inside, Mary’s stomach recoils every few minutes at the scent of last night’s nearly drained wine glass (bottle) wafting through her bedroom. Yesterday’s abandoned deli coffee sits next to it, and the day before’s sits next to that. She has a rotation of three coasters always in use surrounding her bedside.

She is writing she is recounting she is re-counting because it is Sam’s birthday today and they split four weeks ago. They last spoke 22 days ago on the day his exhibition opened and he thanked her for the flowers she had sent him cross-country. I’m still thinking about you, too he sent back. This is why she decided that her preference is to fill her head with thoughts of coasters and cats in heat and the way her dog taps her shoulder, so that she doesn’t think of how she and Sam couldn’t even make it to the next birthday. Their life as we only occupied the space between birthdays—shortly after his 40th until the month before his 41st. She is 23 but before he gets to you, it wasn’t an Age Thing. The days following their grand finale at the East River, she was on a manic high, delaying the heartbreak and in denial of any other shoe ever dropping. She fared surprisingly well until on the cusp of the Third Week, she broke. She broke and she broke and she broke and she broke her promise to herself not to break. 

Mary and Sam’s love fell apart right as the Quarantine hit. The churning collapse of it got her to feel like both Abigail Williams and her yellow bird simultaneously. She used a napkin to write down ways to continue loving him but ate pepperoni pizza and the grease started to drip and her cuticle started to bleed and so did the ink on the napkin. Her flowers died, a different ex got married at City Hall, and a cat on a leash showed up at the dog park. 2020 planners were marked 50% off before March even started so she should have known the universe was about to enter the New Dimension and she should have known it wasn’t going to look very good. She slowly began scaling down her 11:11 wishes as she started to feel more hopeless—smaller and smaller desires until she was simply asking for her eyes to stay dry, to stay open. Meanwhile she was having difficulty opening her own notebook in fear that he’d manipulated her words as well as her thoughts. She was having difficulty opening her underwear drawer in fear that he’d monopolized even her own thongs. The only thing that meant anything to her was Words and she sank into the increasing repulsion budding from him having told her how to write. One night, she dreamt that she wore a red dress to say goodbye to him, and she donated her red dress the next day. 

“The days following their grand finale at the East River, she was on a manic high, delaying the heartbreak and in denial of any other shoe ever dropping.”

Another quarantined day she must now get through but she can’t even manage the thought of embarking on her deli coffee trip. She keeps filling her head filling her head filling her head with the man from the dog park in the orange pants and dredging up the courage to cook meat and grand plans of doing laundry so that the Coca-Cola t-shirt Christopher sent her doesn’t reek of him. But her thoughts just keep drifting back to needing to make her ex-lover proud. 

Christopher. Christopher came at the exact right time; from the moment her lips first closed around his finger—the first time they met—to the morning he laid down sleeping bags to cushion their bodies on the floor of his closed art gallery, he carried her out of a potentially very deep Pit. And for that, she was grateful. 

She knew he was in a non-monogamous marriage and had two kids—a 16-year-old and an accidental 4-year-old—but she didn’t expect to be warming her boots by the fire with all of them, let alone texting pictures of puppies to each parent separately. Bottom of her boots facing the fire, next to her new lover and his wife, careful not to get too close. Christopher said two weeks is when people normally get sick of him. She assured him that she was not “people,” but did wonder why he insisted on sharing every dirty thought in his head, both having to do with her and not. He masturbates in front of a camera for money. A 50-year-old Cam Boy. He described it as his “side business of selling his dick to gay guys and, remarkably, dudes who want me to fuck their girlfriends,” followed by, “the guys who say it’s for their girlfriends are just gay and don’t know it.” He apologized in case his morals had disappointed her but she just blanched inwardly at the humble-brag disguising his glorification of sex work of this sort. Sorry, sir, you have yet to shock me, she kept to herself. 

She brushes it off, they brush it off. They do drugs by the fire, he bends her over his workbench, she feels her way to his pullout couch in the dark and takes the train home barely conscious the next morning. That was one week ago. That week followed the Worst Week, which means that presently she is almost two weeks removed from it. In the interim between the Worst Week and This Week, the Quarantine escalated. 

As the New Dimension seemed to get even more hopeless, she scaled her 11:11 wishes back up, way up. She wished for it to end, she wished to feel the sun on her bruised legs, she wished to wrap those legs around a body, she wished that the best thoughts weren’t the ones she has right before falling asleep so that she may remember more of them. She wished that crucifying her flowers upside down didn’t make them look more beautiful than the day they were placed in her Valentine’s Day arms, that crucifying them upside down didn’t ultimately keep them alive. 

Slowly, the girl realized that in order to continue getting by, everything must come down to a matter of seconds—Fight or Flight. Slowly, she realized that everything comes down to how she treats that passing of time; otherwise, if she checks out, even for what feels like a second, and doesn’t give the passage of time its due sentience, her sun spot will be gone and suddenly she’ll find herself sitting in a room slightly too dark for her to be able to function normally.

• • •

Breadcrumb #662

TRACE DEPASS

what is to be the chick of the bird the flock hates. whose requiem
have i been singing since birth, mine or his? what is huxtable proximity? what is light skin citizen privilege? the privilege of English & particularly working English? one aunt soon passes in quarantine, in isolation, alone, supposedly in recovery & another aunt calls me about my grandmother's potential corona inheritance, her bad athsma, her son & brother leaving for Florida again like niggas do to go be away from niggas, their standard deviation standard, except i have nothing to do with what they do, we all got our own shit:

i know your father hates me for some reason but if he ever needed me i would be there, the family would be there. I talked to him about karen's drunk ass trynna fight [Aunt] Pat, how she aint family no more, how we still celebrate your graduation, how when your uncle brought up money your father owed him your father couldn't be held accountable without further verbal assault on both their accounts, why are they like this? Why is this how men survive? He victimized, isolated himself, & played the victim. To whose surprise? Idk… [Aunt] Pat put on Facebook, looking pitiful, that she got COVID too. I think she'll be okay. i know

i'm at peace with looming death & being a brother in my mother's house writing the poem. i'll be dropping off wheatgrass, ginger, spirulina, tomorrow. my mother yesterday considered how her mother considered locking him up & my father is super positioned between jail & not jail because it take an observer, another word for writer, for him to be seen at all. schrodinger's matter property is what he is, he made me, sometimes he was there, sometimes he was not, another quantum reference to my narrative, & what about it? what was once a critique i made, i choose to be real, had damned us.

so many transitions, one cousin to a father, one play cousin
non-binary, one cousin to a woman, & my father wether or not he is in pain is still the same just as any number countable after infinity, after a universe, is still omega, still post-aleph null, my father not alpha nor omega yet decided to name himself after me & how about that? is it that i should have done a better job choosing him, my father, my derivative from which i derive, my core drive, my RAM & motor functions, my vascular shadow i keep alive by walking in light to the line of fire, my veteran father. so abled & enabling, us.

• • •

Breadcrumb #660

MEGAN GRIFFITH

Somewhere, over the rainbow,
in the flowerbeds 
in front of my childhood home,
there’s a place where I love my mom
the way she deserves.
Her gentle hands, roughened with dirt,
will pull the weeds
to protect her daisies and hydrangeas
and insatiable wild rose,
and in this place, I won’t weep over the dandelions
as I pile them into an old plastic bag, 
roots snapped and dazzling yellow faces drooping.
I won’t stand behind her, mouth closed,
mind shouting 
about the changing color of the deep earth
exposed by her insistent pull 
can’t you see it drying up?
don’t you see how sensitive it is
to the July sun?
In this place, instead,
I will notice the sunburn on the back of her neck.

• • •

Breadcrumb #659

RENEE LAKE

The library stands empty. Everyone has gone for the night. A silent building against the twilight. The windows are gaping holes to pitch-black rooms lined with bookshelves. What would the books say if they could talk? Would they tattle to weary librarians about the otherworldly nighttime activities?

The night time patrons come in, through bookshelves, out of walls, up from the floors. Dozens of spectral beings. Some transparent, but obviously people; others wisps of white smoke with voices. A few in color and even fewer solid and lifelike. Many are black and white like old photos or movies. 

They settle around the room, far enough back so they can’t be seen through the large glass doors and windows. They don’t want to frighten the entire neighborhood, and if people saw them, their nights together would end.

“I think the old librarian suspects something,” a teenage boy says, laughing, pulling a book down from the shelf. It seems to float in the air next to him.

“Should we be more careful?” A young man in a suit and tie peruses the nonfiction section a few feet away.

“Not sure how we could do that, we clean up after ourselves.” The boy grins at a particularly naughty joke in his book.

“It seems to float in the air next to him.”

They don’t haunt this library. They use it as a meeting place. 

A sad woman holds a baby, enjoying the break from wandering the lonely highway, night after night.

Wisps dance together, excited to be anywhere but the swamp.

Two little girls read picture books out loud, wishing people would bring books into the old hospital wing instead of bouncing balls.

“Maybe we should see if there is another library, we could rotate, that way there’s less to be suspicious of?” A voluptuous blonde ghost breezes into the room. Her hair floats behind her like a mermaid underwater. She is beautiful and pale, with eyes burning like coal. Everyone adores her, especially their host.

An older ghost scowls at this. He is why they gather here. This used to be his library. So many years ago, he forgot how many. Back before the library had fluorescent lights, computers, and audiobooks. 

“I don’t like to leave my library unattended,” he says in a thick southern drawl.

“We know dearest, we know. It was just a suggestion,” the blonde tells him, laughter in her black eyes.

Silence once again fills the room, as more ghosts show up.

One-man drifts near the ceiling, eyes closed, trying to decide how best to scare tourists at his prison.

A shadowy woman known as the Red Lady of Everston Estate keeps to herself. She sits in a corner, fear leaking from her, affecting the very air.

“Who wants to read out loud tonight?” a tween girl asks. Her head crooks at an odd angle. She’s dressed in Puritan fashion.

“I will,” the blonde woman says, gliding into the middle of the room. She holds a hardback novel. It is bright red and leather-bound.

She begins to read. It is a light-hearted tale about friends on a journey. The story is full of jokes, euphemisms, innuendos, and life. 

The rest of them congregate around her. They eagerly listen to her voice twist and turn over the words and spin the chapters of the novel.

The library is quiet, aside from her voice. She reads, untiring until the light begins to peer over the horizon.

The sun is rising.

She sighs and closes the book to grumbles and groans.

“I wish we could stay here forever,” the little girls say; their hollow voices echo in the room.

“You know we can’t,” the teenage boy tells them. He’s lit a cigarette. It isn’t real, merely a manifestation of vice.

Their host looks out the window, “you all know the drill, out you get.” He loves the book club, but as dawn approaches, he is anxious. He wants to be back in the basement with the dust, damaged books, old microfiche, and cobwebs; he hates making the librarians nervous. 

One by one, the spirits leave, they need to get back before the sun rises too high.  If caught by daylight, their eternity will fizzle in the heat. No one wants that, and no one knows why. These rules have been in place too long to question. But they all remember Dead Hazel, who roamed the cemetery. How she told them she wanted to see the sun once more and then never came to the book club again. 

Twice a week, they meet. From sundown to just before sunrise. 

They can’t be gone from their haunts every night, or they start to forget who there were, who there are. They will moan in their houses, scare the unaware or retreat into the darkness of their minds until the next meeting. It’s something to look forward to. Nothing in this afterlife is how they thought it would be.

This brief respite brings joy and companionship. The old southern man watches as they disappear, the woman with the burning eyes is last to go. She always is. Waving, she blows him a kiss before stepping through the back wall.

He sighs and rights a chair the children knocked over. He will put everything back in its place before the librarians return, they already feel his presence enough, no need to cause them panic.

As he sinks down into the basement, he’s excited for the next meeting of their ghostly book club and another phantom kiss from a woman who still calls him dearest.

• • •