Breadcrumb #620

DANIEL DIFRANCO

Margaret is backstage, arched away from the barre. Little by little the ribbons unfurl, and the autumn of youth collapses. The landscape, stuttering and rushing by as from a toy zoetrope, has forgotten its limberness. Headlights on the highway. Margaret has seen them all. She stretches. Reaches back farther. Swirling in a kaleidoscope without wings. She feels impatience—has known the impatience of hunger and all that it has robbed. 

The conductor commands in time—the bassoons are calling. Margaret enters. A pirouette. The piano and dancer now, an arabesque. A slow penché cracking. The swarm flutters. Applause for the ensemble. The season has passed.

“A slow penché cracking. The swarm flutters. ”

Margaret washes her shoes in the kitchen sink. Her feet hurt. Knees and back on their way out. The dream had been eclipsed. There’s no such thing as an old butterfly. There is either a butterfly, or there is not. She hangs her shoes to dry on a piece of string in front of the window. The city light obscures the moon and breaks in the room where she lies on the couch wrapped in a blanket drinking honeyed tea. The news calls for early snow.

Margaret falls asleep with the TV on. When she wakes up it is snowing. She stands and pulls the blanket around her body. She presses her face against the pane of glass and looks up at the blue black sky and straight into the confettied and never ending expanse of the universe. And oh, how it is beautiful—and oh, how she wishes she were dancing in the sand.

• • •

Breadcrumb #551

FRANCINE WITTE

I had this really bad idea. I decided to do it anyway. But first, I would broadcast it on social media. 

Soon, it took over my news feed. People were commenting and liking in a way they never had. “Do it,” they were saying. “You’re amazing,” they were saying. 

My husband walked in just then. I was posting or tweeting or something. “Why don’t you stick to real life,” he muttered. “We don’t talk anymore or go to the movies.” 

“Because movies are real life.” I said, my eyes never leaving the screen. Maybe snide remarks are also a bad idea. But not really one to go viral. 

I continued with my social media. My likes were up in the thousands. This was like scoring a reservation at one of those restaurants you see on the Food Network. 

“Maybe snide remarks are also a bad idea.”

“You see?” I said to my husband who had left the room by now. “I’m popular to someone.”

Later that night, lying next to my husband who was sleeping now in our California king, I was trying to ignore the other woman smell that was rising from behind his ear. 

I turned back to my comments. “You are so awesome.” They were saying. 

I looked back to see a purple hickey blooming on my husband’s neck. I thought to shake him awake to discuss it. I wondered if that was a good idea.

• • •

Breadcrumb #548

NATE WAGGONER

Death Valley exists because of a cycle created by low depths and high mountain walls that bake the place like a furnace or an oven. The heat just keeps coming, keeps cycling around. Dante’s View. Hell’s Gate. Devil’s Golf Course. The mood of the place does not invite subtlety. Dante’s View is of the depths of the place, of rivers that seem to sparkle and shine, but which do so because they are so full of salt. The salt keeps going down, down, and covering everything, too. Sometimes at night the ground will freeze. The water will start to break up and rocks will appear to move on their own. Despite these surreal qualities, there are people who have chosen to live here for generations. It’s only gotten more inhospitable over time. 10,000 years ago there was life, deer, water, different tribes. Now only the salt rules. It makes the water undrinkable, but the water does shelter certain snails. There is nothing you can’t get used to with enough time. The salt, like the heat, is part of a cycle that only makes it build up. If you’re here, you’re being cooked alive. Sensitive crystals. See the pupfish floundering in its salty home. One of the highest mutation rates. An entity like this must be joking.

• • •

Breadcrumb #544

NICHOLE KATSIKAS

Part I: The Final Year

You spend your days alone and nights with strangers. “Snooze” your alarm all morning because your to-do list is trivial: clean bathtub, wash sheets, break in new stilettos. Rouse yourself to get coffee from the organic bodega around the corner. Find yourself buying fair-trade shampoo, all-natural toothpaste and recycled paper towels because you are too lazy to go to Duane Reade and the expensive stuff is easier. Swipe your debit card without looking at the register's total. Remember the $1,200 you made the night before, bundled in precise stacks and buried at the bottom of your duffle bag. Stifle back tears when your personal trainer asks about work. You do not understand why her question invokes tears. Run an extra mile on the treadmill because you have no place to be and drink too much champagne last night. Ask yourself how long you’ve been this unhappy. Consider the question but do not listen for the answer. Instead, turn up the volume in your headphones and focus on your breathing. Get drunk on your night off from work. Give your friends lap dances at the bar because they think that it’s funny. Text your ex-boyfriend. Fuck your ex-boyfriend. Find the scarf you left at his apartment while you were dating. He has it neatly folded on his bookshelf, a sight that makes you feel romantic. Foolishly begin to cry and ask him why he left you. He considers the question but does not give you an answer. Anticipate his text the next day but receive only messages from your clients. “When are you working next, Athena? I want to see you” Take the L train to Union Square. Watch wistfully as other 20-somethings go on to get happy hour drinks with their friends. Instead, you transfer to the Q train and ride express to Times Square. Spend your happy hour in a dark den; your night a blur of sequins, champagne and awful dub-step remixes. Roar with fake laughter at jokes you don’t find funny from men old enough to be your grandfather. Listen for your stripper name to be called to the stage or pay a $50 fine. At the stroke of 4 am, race to the locker room. Kick off your clear plastic stilettos for white converse sneakers. Throw your modest sundress over your diamond-encrusted g-string. Watch Times Square disappear from the back seat of your cab home to Brooklyn. Measure the night’s success by the pretty purple bruises that kiss your knees in the morning. Ask yourself if quitting would make you happy. Consider the question but do not listen for the answer.

“Foolishly begin to cry and ask him why he left you.”

Part II: The After Months

Now you wear your chipped nail polish like a badge of honor. The manicurist at the salon forgets your name and that's okay. You post an ad on craigslist to sell your old gowns. Hundreds of dollars in sequins and spandex reduced to a few crisp twenties. Save the money for grocery shopping. Break up with your personal trainer because you can't afford her and that’s okay. Occasionally go on a second date but usually not. Feed your loneliness pints of Ben and Jerry's Half Baked frozen yogurt in predetermined blackouts. Scrub the chocolate stains from your white comforter the next morning. Ask yourself if you are still drunk. Consider the question but do not listen for the answer. Nostalgia sets in around 3 pm on a Wednesday afternoon at the photo studio where you now work. Consider moonlighting at your old club in Queens, the one that let you work freely without a schedule. Take a coffee break instead. Feel the sun burn your thighs. Now you take the L train to East Village for happy hour drinks with other 20-something year old women. Give your friends lap dances at the bar because they still think that it’s funny. Text your ex-boyfriend. Fuck your ex-boyfriend. Feel relief when you wake the next morning and find that he has gone, leaving only pretty purple bruises as evidence. Ask yourself if perhaps stripping was not the reason he broke up with you, after all. Consider the question but do not listen for the answer.

• • •

Breadcrumb #524

CAT MULROONEY

Death. The body in its most natural state. The end of wanting. The quieting of the heart and its infinite cravings. Give me. Touch me. Love me back. See me. The body elegance of all that is gone. Exposed. Bones holding moonlight. Bones holding marrow like thin hives. Honeybees take sustenance here. Now, let me be hollow. Essential. Self. Death as downstream. In death, my body owes nothing. 

In love, it asks everything.

When a kiss opens up in the mouth. A kiss you’ve waited for and wanted your whole life. Mouth widens yes. Take it all in. The body would welcome death like a kiss.

But then there’s this. 

Then there’s her. 

Insecure about her square jaw. Her thick knuckles. Her body solid as a stone. Something I could lean on. Something that could bear my weight. Singing her body into mine.

Rhythmic. Percussive. Magic. 

I get off with just her breath on my neck. I get off on just the taste of her kiss. Tangled in her bedsheets. Her pelvis pressed to mine. Bone on bone. I lick the pale white peach fuzz on her jaw and taste metal. I hold her close afterwards because it always makes her cry.

The release.

The goodness.

The way girls like us don’t know what to do with that much tenderness.

Kindness makes us crazy. 

Love fucks us up.

I could touch a boy and never feel a thing. Embarrassed by their desperate bodies. 

It is different with her.

She measures the weight of my breast in her hand and calls it beautiful. She licks a river down my spine and makes me feel the currents. Water racing to the only logical destination. Yes. She presses into me and it is nothing but honeyspill to her wrist. Her touch of yes. Of sweetness. Of now. 

“Water racing to the only logical destination.”

Also, our words. The throb and hum of vocal cords. Before. Talk like breath. Talk like air. Empty and possible. Memories of no pain. Memories of not feeling like broken glass. I breathe her words in.

But calamity always comes to the sickhearted. 

Sicklehearted. 

Love erodes my heart from a fist to a thin fingernail moon. Obliteration. Shadow black. Nearly new. I am a horrific creature. I forget my name and hers. I forget thin fingernail moons left on my skin. Hands contracting around my shoulders. Tattooed scab reminders. Someone touched me long enough to leave a mark once.

Our vigil at the river. Waiting for shooting stars. We swallow ecstasy like candy. Bourbon chasers. Beer cherry red. Blood red. Her mouth red.

I am so naked I take my skin off again. Shed it like a birch tree and lay it down in the black sand dirt of the riverbank. Just a body dancing. Splashing. Water cold and cleansing everything. John the Baptist. Reborn. Holier than Jesus.

Women in the water. Riverstones in my mouth. I suck them clean. Birth them back from between my lips smooth and round as vowels. Silent as prayers and the still pools we swim in.

Blood songs. Blood swimmers. Her bonewhite skin painted with mud. Swirls around her belly. Serpentine coils around her throat. Long mudraked arrows on her thighs. I read her holy sigils. Mysteries. Litanies. Her thighs part in indigo water.

The meteor shower never comes.

Or that’s what we tell ourselves, too busy charting the planetary pull of the other. When she sinks, her hair fans out around her. 

Water so dark I can’t see her.

School of fish. 

Someday I will forget this.

Maybe I already forget this.

She grows gills beneath her sharp jaw. She stays under so long she’s no longer human. I want to call her back to the rocks with me. Come back to me. But, instead, I swallow one smooth stone so I will remember. Her scales flash silver in black water.

I swallow the moment down. 

Swallow her down.

Come back.

We aren’t trying to die. But aren’t avoiding it either. 

There is nothing else anyone can do that will hurt me. 

Nothing left to destroy. 

She is part girl, part fish.

I am part girl, part dead thing.

Two girls high at the river.  

The stone lodges in my belly. Unmovable. Like my heart. 

She doesn’t come back. At least not to me. She suddenly knows about breathing underwater.

• • •