Penultimate
Death overtakes genital warts, but only by a splash. After that it’s rapists, scorpions, and loss of virtue. Talking about my father’s death, not because I’m hurt but because the more I talk the more likely it is someone will notice I don’t really miss him, I just miss someone else looking out for me.
Not heights so much as vertigo, then crowds with no bathroom, hard drugs, dismemberment, injury to my eyeballs, losing someone else’s child. Daniel coming back into town because every time he does one more person realizes I’m just a version of him, smarter but fatter, and with less charm, and anyway what’s funny from him is abrasive from a woman. A twisted ankle in the woods. A government operation in the woods. One of the world’s active serial killers in the woods. Bears.
Not homeless people but becoming homeless. Abortion, not that I’ll have to have one but that I won’t, and then I’ll never be able to write about them. Being a bad lover. Atomic bombs and no heaven. A flood and no plan. A cannibal colony and no allies.
Men who need mothers before women who need mothers because in my experience women need their mothers less and in fact don’t like to acknowledge them. Anyone who was fucked by a family member and never stopped destroying themselves in response. Anyone who wanted to fuck a family member and destroyed themselves at once. Riding in cars when I don’t know the driver. The ingredients in processed food. Being yelled at in a deli or a bus or anywhere a line can form and I can hold it up.
The death penalty but only once it’s broken down. Electrocution before firing squad but only because firing squad would look better in a movie. And of course all the archetypes before that, I’m heretical because I know no one can burn me for it anymore.
Failure, though my sister argues from the next room that by some standards I already am. I have no money. I am not afraid of having no money.
A situation in which I have the opportunity to prove myself selfless. Mispronouncing words in public forums. The feeling that sets in with the first frost that I will never be warm again. The feeling that sets in with the first fuck that I will never get off again. The feeling that sets in getting off that I’ll never be in love again. The feeling that I’ll never be alone again.
The tranquility I feel when the story is told of how I locked Daniel in a room on the outside of the house. Unfurnished and unlit, I was three and managed by chance to work the latch. He was entombed there for an hour until our mother saw my giggle and panicked. How I pictured that little room the first time I read the story where the man keeps the girl in his basement, to watch her, but ends up having to hurt her.
I imagine they’d be different if I was someone else: If I was a man, it would go like this. One, don’t let anything happen to my cock. Two, my best friend and my girl. Three, death unless I was doing something cool while it happened.
Two nights ago I dreamed that everyone I’ve ever gone to bed with was in a room and they were putting me on trial. I was acquitted but it didn’t matter because they all wanted me to hang anyway.
At least she’s a good lay, Elise said, standing up.
Terrific, Thomas said.
Let’s not get carried away, Sean said, like a citizen displeased with the tide of a town hall meeting. She’s enthusiastic in bed. She’s eager. But she’s not great.
You haven’t been with her when she’s got the home-team advantage, Elise said.
That’s another thing, Sean said. Nobody every nailed her dead to rights so she never decided. That’s another thing she’s done, to all of us.
You’re only here, I thought, you’re only here because I liked your red-necked chivalry. And your stupid grammar and if anybody doesn’t belong on this panel it’s you.
If I was with someone like Sean it’d go like this: First that he would hit me. Second that he would hit me and no one would break his legs for it. Third I’d stick around long enough to see him pay for all the things he does. I wouldn’t stay with Sean. I didn’t stay with Sean and he still hasn’t paid and there was no panel, not really, but if there was, he’d pull out a pistol and implement any justice wasn’t sanctified when the hammer came down. Gin has helped a lot of men do the things they thought needed to be done, when no one was on their side. Gin is a good excuse.
I didn’t have time to think about it when I was with Elise because she was so afraid herself. That I never came. That she didn’t come enough. Of fucking on the kitchen floor of her mother of what she’d missed in the years that being a woman who loved women had kept her from church. Of eating meat because she believed in transubstantiation and she wanted the only flesh she ate to be God’s. When I left her I made a lot of cannibal jokes and it didn’t bring us back at each other.
Never going to Spain. Ambient music. Semi-solid foods which means cream cheese and pudding and hummus. Vomit, but not my own. Women, but not my own. Line dances I don’t know the steps to. Samuel Beckett. Microwaves. Every president. If I could dream it again I’d make it a circus instead of a trial, and in the end I’d jump off the trapeze and see who wove themselves into a safety net below. Ten bets that Sean would help save me. Ten that Elise would go back to Indiana. And the rest riding on me, the rest saying I wouldn’t even let go.
One of the earliest men I met in the city said that to me. He came from Carnie stock and called pizza, “a slice,” and ice cream, “a cone,” and all of the women he’d been in love with before me had been fat, really fat. The kind of fat that absorbs young men, till they’re a little, floating tumor with a potency when they look at you but never when they bed you down. Nothing counts for nothing. His first love wore ice skates that choked the fat around her ankles. Women like that had a lifetime of releasing the line, he said, because they’d never been beautiful and they’d never be much.
But no one waits at the bottom, he said, don’t make any mistake about that. No one wants to know her up her skirt.
No one even looks to see if she’d live, I said, back in my mind at the trapeze artist. You all just assume she would, even without you. And me, you think, if I come to some really steep place, I must have gotten there by accident.
It’s not that, he said. I just get the feeling that if you found yourself up there, you’d bail out over an ocean.
First is death, but only as a technicality. Starvation doesn’t even make the list. And the rest are half-jinx, half-prayer like wishing a woman would fall off the tight rope rather than keep toeing the line.
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