Your plastic god is unwieldy. A pigeon, flint-sleek on red, sprouting feet. He clicks when you wind him, predictable in his dwindling steps. I pluck him up, lift him between my praying palms, and crush down on his mechanical and factory-made viscera. The sound of him breaking is the beginning of our end.
*
“Have you seen Harry?”
I’m turning the pages of a magazine that’s been in my hands for two hours. I haven’t read a word.
“No babe, I haven’t seen Harry.”
He shifts in that little way that means I don’t believe you.
“It’s just that—he’s always right here. Next to the rest of my dad’s stuff.”
I look at him over the glossy top of the magazine.
“I haven’t seen him, Ross. Promise.”
I roll off the couch, make a big show of getting up. There’s a rip in my tights that audibly grows bigger when I stand. I toss the magazine down, feel myself start to pick up the thread of a fight from the night before.
“Fine, why don’t I just help you look, then. Probably just another misplaced thing that’s all my fault.”
He’s blinking at me.
“You know this is different, Heather.”
A pain in my esophagus tells me it’s not.
*
I hadn’t meant to start swallowing things again. A nasty little habit I had sworn up and down was dead and buried. Deliberate Ingestion of Foreign Bodies. DIFB, to be neat and tidy. Neat and tidy like the line of trinkets I was presented with following an endoscopic removal. Neat and tidy like the hospital rooms in the psychiatric facility.
But then there was a button on the floor. Ross had set it out for me to mend for him. Just a little thing, a pearly button with four holes in the middle. It had torn off his shirt in the doorway, he said. I had held it for hours, rolling it between my fingers. I knew how it would feel on my tongue. Then it was on my tongue. Then I was in the bathroom, looking at it sitting on the pink silk pillow of my tongue, wet and shining, like a jewel on a cushion. And then just like that, I watched myself swallow it. I averted my eyes from my reflection. Ross donated the shirt.
*
I work at a nursery. Nursery like garden, not daycare. I wander the aisles of potted plants, drag bags of fertilizer to the cars of elderly women, and wrap my red vest tightly around myself as if it will help me hold onto the job. A friend of my dad’s owns it. He’d called in the favor as a last resort.
My dad picked me up every day. Dropped me off outside the nursery. Some days I went in. Some days I went to the woods behind, and the expansive acres of overgrowth behind, and pretended I wasn’t here at all.
Today I am on my back, having decided it was a day for going to work. The misters are on, sprinkling water that had been warmed by the sun were it languished stagnantly in the hose. It falls over me, an artificial rain mixing with the fine layer of soil on my face. I keep my eyes open in the spray and watch the way my vision fogs up, a windshield in a buffeting storm. Wiper blades scraping over my eyes. My car jolts. A sheet of water.
Rain bird.
I sit up.
*
The man whose cart I am ringing up is smacking on cinnamon gum. I can feel his eyes on me, and I know what he is seeing. I’d caught my reflection in the employee bathroom mirror—dirt-streaked, hair stringy, vest soaked and stained on the back where I had been lying on the ground. My dad’s friend, Mr. Cohen, didn’t care all too much what I looked like, so long as I gave him a hand job every now and again, standing tucked in the maze of cypress and manzanita. His stomach got in the way sometimes, a beer belly that he held up with both hands. Better that way, with his hands away from me, and mine the ones in control.
“Do you need help out to your car, sir?” I feel the vacancy behind my tone ringing hollowly.
“No, thank you,” he sniffs, hoisting up his blueberry plants and pushing out through the double glass doors. The bell rings out his exit, and Mr. Cohen appears like a dog, nodding his head out toward the back. I follow, wondering what the dog of a dog is called.
*
I’m on top of Ross, riding him and watching my hair leech droplets onto his chest, his cheeks. I had walked home along the side of the highway and gotten back two hours late because of it. Ross had already been in bed, so I stepped into an icy shower and let the water heat up until my skin was numbly boiled.
Ross’ mouth pulls tight. I halt my hips, put my hands against the sides of his face. They’re damp, the water from my hair mixing with hot tears.
“What’s the matter?” I murmur softly to him, but I know what’s the matter. His dad had been killed in a car accident last year. It had left a glassy, far-off way about him.
I start to roll off him, but he digs his fingers into my hips and keeps me above him, rocking into me slow and deep.
When Ross starts to snore, I roll out from under his arm. He had scooped our books off the shelves in the living room and transformed them into a shrine to his father. I let him. Trinkets in thick rows populate them from front to back. His dad had been a collector—coins in cardboard protectors, booklets of stamps, keychains, bric-a-brac and knick-knacks and marbles. Ross had started wearing his clothes and his cologne. I let him grieve his own way, but it had begun to feel like I was losing the person I had married, and not for the first time.
I walk to the shelves across our dusty floor—both of us had stopped cleaning after the accident—and reach for a folder of newspaper clippings. I pull out an old cartoon strip, the ink a rough texture against the slickness of the newsprint. I rub it between my thumb and forefinger, savor the shredding tear of it coming apart. With measured bites I swallow it down entirely.
*
The frozen section of the grocery store had always disconcerted me. The constant humming, the artificial coldness of the light and puffed breaths from the doors as they opened and closed. I am staring at the convenience food Ross had told me not to buy. He wanted homecooked meals again. He wanted his father’s famous branzino.
A hand lands on my shoulder—my own father, guiding me away from the boxes of processed convenience food and towards the deli area. I go the counter and ask after European sea bass. The teen working back there looks at me and starts laughing.
“Yeah lady, sure.”
*
It was Ross’ aunt’s idea to start going to church. I don’t kick or scream these days, so I find myself standing against a wooden pew in a denim shirt and blue silk button down, looking better than I have in months. Neat and tidy. Hands keep reaching for Ross and finding him—parishioners leaning in with condolences, a squeeze on the shoulder. His father had been an usher here. The stained glass is casting a green stripe across the minister’s face like an oversaturated slug, trying to get in.
When the communion bread is passed down in its slotted silver dish, I take one of the spongey squares in my hand, lift empty fingers to my mouth. Beneath my heel I grind the bread into the low pile carpet.
After the sermon, everyone is standing in the gym. Ross is next to his aunt. They are ringed by a concentric continuation of the earlier sentiments. I smooth my palms down the slip of my shirt. I glance around. With crossed arms I back slowly towards the doors. When no one turned to look for me, I step into the hall and wander away.
It smells stale and dusty. The voices of the Sunday school teachers ring out dully.
“Excuse me,” comes a resonant voice. I turn. Behind me, the pastor stands in an open doorway. He walks towards me and lifts my hand from my side, taking it in both of his. They are hot and dusted with powdered sugar. Privately enjoying some of the donuts and coffee from the gym, probably.
“A bit overwhelming in there, I would imagine,” he says, nodding down in the direction I had wandered from.
“Everything’s a bit overwhelming these days,” I say without knowing why.
He opens his mouth with a slight intake of breath, finger raised, before turning back into the doorway. The plaque on the door marks it as his office.
When he emerges, he is holding a small golden pin.
“This belonged to Ross’ father. There just…wasn’t ever a good time.”
He presses it into my palm. The edges are sharp. I close my hand over it.
“You’ll give it to him for me? Tell him I am sorry I waited so long.”
“Of course,” I reply, letting my fist drop down to my side. Neat and tidy.
I walk farther down the hall, turning to where a sun-flooded alcove looks out to the parking lot. I fondle the pin in my hands, let the light desecrate its blinding edges. Am blinded by it myself. I put it in my mouth and swallow. It gets stuck partway. I imagine a caricature bulge on the vulnerable swatch of my throat, oscillating as I try to force the object down. I reach my fingers down as far as they will go and retch. I can feel the surface of the pin, slippery and scraping tissue. I push hard, gagging on the intrusion of my fist in my mouth, and feel the pin settle on its way to my stomach. Breathless, I tilt my saliva-slick fingers in the light, and wipe them down the side of my pretty blue shirt.
*
We are sitting in a diner, one of the ones where they give discounts to patrons who bring in a church bulletin. My runny eggs bleed themselves thickly on the flecked plate in front of me. I stir at them half-heartedly, mixing them with the flayed gratings of undercooked hash brown. I take a sip of my coffee. When I set the mug down, a bit of blood has mixed with the crescent of my lipstick. I swipe it away with my thumb, then lay my hand to rest on Ross’ thigh. He smiles at me.
Ross and I are fighting when a knock at the door interrupts our sharp words. He has lost a little matchbox car from his father’s shrine shelf. It had probably rolled off, I argued, crawling around on my hands and knees. I had probably thrown it away out of spite, or pawned it, he had snapped back.
I look at Ross. Ross looks at me. I blow the hair out of my face, pushing dramatically off the carpet.
“Fine, why don’t I get it,” I spit.
When I open the door, a familiar officer is lingering in the doorway.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Roberts. I wanted to stop by and touch base on your report.”
I had filed a report last year. A stolen vehicle. The officer, Sergeant Leavy, had been stopping by a couple of times a month to fuck me senseless. Ripping tights, setting the wooden bedframe to creaking again, pulling at my hair, showing me how his handcuffs worked. As cops do.
I use my heel to kick the door the rest of the way open behind me. Sergeant Leavy sees Ross and clears his throat, cut his eyes at me. I smirk at him.
“Come on in, officer. Can I get you something to drink?”
The look he gives me is both promise and threat.
Sitting on my striped sofa, Sergeant Leavy nurses a sweating glass of lemonade in both hands.
“So have there been any…developments?” Ross asks, leaning forward anxiously.
We had reported our car stolen a year ago. I had perhaps neglected to fill Ross in on the snippets of information that came along with my and the officer’s pillow talk.
“Well, we still don’t know who was driving the car at the time of your father’s accident, but now that the vehicle is in our custody, we’ve started the forensic labs. I came by to collect samples, actually, from both of you. To rule you out of the results.”
He takes a sip of his lemonade. Winces. I knew I put too much powdered mix in it.
Ross’ eyes are storming under his furrowed brow.
“You—you found the car?”
Sergeant Leavy’s eyes rake over me.
“Yes, sir. We’ve had your car for some time.”
“Well why don’t we have it? I’ve been practically fishing coins out of the couch to afford our rental.”
Ross is a teacher at the local high school.
“It’s totaled, Mr. Roberts. And I do apologize, but it’s evidence. You won’t be able to have it for some time.”
“Totaled?” Ross yells, rising off the couch. It is the most life I have seen out of him since the accident. Then he blinks, slow and big like a cartoon. I see it register in real time before he opens his mouth. “Wait…what do you mean, ‘evidence’?”
Sergeant Leavy locks eyes with me, disbelieving. Then I am looking at Ross’ hand as he waves it animatedly between us.
“Why do you keep looking at her? Heather? Did you fucking know about this?”
I gulp dryly. Look up at him in a way I can only hope is placating.
“Sweetheart, I didn’t want to stir things up. When you were just starting to look like you had light back in your eyes, too”—a blatant lie, one he sees through immediately—“And they don’t know anything yet, not really, so I didn’t think it was worth worrying you…”
Ross turns his back on me completely.
“What’s she talking about?”
Sergeant Leavy has the good sense to be cowed by his tone.
“Your stolen vehicle was involved in a hit and run. The night your father was killed.”
Ross has never hit me before, but tonight I wish that he would. He and I had lock into a staring contest. Sergeant Leavy sees himself out. Ross’ chest is ebbing and flowing, threatening to pull me into its riptide. Then he leaves without closing the front door behind him. I know where he is going.
*
I edge forward on my elbows, dragging my front through the dirt beneath our house. I am alone and I am in the crawl space. I flop to my back, but a sharp jolt pierces my stomach. I roll into the fetal position. I can feel edges in my organs, lodged paraphernalia that didn’t quite make it through. It ulcerates there, bitten by bile and making my vision flare. The pain is white-hot, a gloam drawing me into its staticky dimness until my fluttering eyes close and stay that way.
My hiding spot isn’t much of a hiding spot. I wake when I feel a hand on my ankle. I don’t startle.
“Angel?”
I hear shuffling sounds as Ross, who does not fit beneath the house nearly as neatly as me, wedges his way in. The air is black as tar now. He has been away for hours.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, pressing his lips to my stomach. I whimper at the pressure.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, mistaking my sounds and, encouraged, trails his kisses downward. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”
In our bed that night, both covered in grime and too tired to do anything about it, he strokes my hair.
“I shouldn’t blame you. But I do,” he confesses in his gravel-spit voice. “I know it’s wrong.”
I turn my head away from him as I began to taste blood in my mouth. I suck it down as it mixes with saliva. I feel it rising to spite me in my throat.
“All you did was leave the keys in the car one time, and I treat you like you killed my father.”
*
I’m jerking off my boss when his cellphone begins to ring. I stop, but he motions for me to keep going. So I do, pumping my hand while his voice strains to whoever it is on the other end of the line. I look around, bored and a bit cloudy. A snake is sliding through the spillage of a split bag of potting soil. I watched its scales flicker wetly. It passes by a walnut shell, a tempting challenge of pitted organic matter, hardened and cupped. My attention cuts away as I hear my boss, unable to suppress his groans any longer, cum on the ground in front of him. He lets go of his stomach. It smacks my hand, and he waves me off so he can finish his phone call, rubbing his cum into the ground with the toe of his shoe. I go back later and kneel in the dirt where the snake had been. It smells faintly musky, and there is a gently winding stripe through the earth. A dry riverbed, and in it, the walnut shell. On my hands and knees I shove it into my mouth, back arching like a cat, as I force it into my body.
*
“I cheated.”
I had been stirring pasta at the stove, watching the boiling water grow starch-heavy and thick as I leaned my head against the cool wood of the cabinet. I rotate my head towards where Ross sits at the dining room table, looking at his hands.
“With who?” I ask distractedly. The sear in my stomach is peppering up into my esophagus. I had coated one of his father’s jackstones in olive oil two nights ago. Ross hadn’t noticed yet, but I felt where it was stuck.
“Monica.”
Monica is the petite blonde who works in the admin office at the same high school Ross teaches ninth grade at.
“Mmm,” I sigh absently. I don’t lift my head from the cabinet. Don’t stop stirring the pasta. After a while I hear chair legs squeak as Ross gets up.
“Don’t you care?” he breathes against the back of my neck, running a hand down the front of my dress. And I am crying. Ross licks at the tears, even though they aren’t for him. He sinks to his knees behind me and hikes up my dress. I keep stirring the pasta, which had long since turned to a gluey mush, as he pretends he’s doing me a favor.
*
I am surprised it took Ross so long to tell me about the cheating. I had glimpsed him and Monica at a holiday party at the high school after Ross’ first semester teaching there. That was years ago. We were newly married. We had moved to this town to be closer to Ross’ family. In fact, his father had insisted on it.
My family lived in the town over, but my dad moved closer to be with us after the accident, in an attempt to corporealize the ghosts we had become.
The real reason we had moved was because Ross had been let go from his last posting. He told me the layoffs were budget related, but I got an email from one of his ex-coworkers some years later. Ross had been having an affair with one of his students. His father paid an enormous amount on his behalf to keep the girl from pressing charges.
I had received the email one year ago. And Ross’ father, in all his pious devotion to his son, had been notified by the family lawyer, ahead of Ross, that I was filing for divorce.
I will never forget his face, swimming in the blinding beam of my headlights. He had absolved his son of any sense of wrongdoing, any consequence. In fact, Ross felt quite sorry for himself. His father had looked frail in the wash of light, disoriented in the darkness surrounding him.
He was jogging along the dirt road up to the lake boat launch. Filled with grief and disgust over my husband and his family, I was unmoored. They knew. All of them. So did much of the congregation—Ross’ aunt had started a prayer group. I had been heading to a quiet place to weep and smoke and curse the sky for my failed marriage. Then I saw Ross’ father. Instead of going to the boat launch, I simply shifted the steering wheel a few degrees to the left.
*
I remember a deer hitting my family’s car one day when my mother was driving us home from school. This had not been much different. I did not check to see if he was dead—it didn’t matter.
I drove the car with its concave front end somewhere it would not be noticed for a while. I walked into town and took the bus to the closest stop from home. It was still a twenty-minute walk, but there was no one around to miss me. Ross would be back the next day from a conference he was attending in Monica’s close company.
In the wan light of morning, I took a cab to the police station. I reported the theft to a man named Sergeant Leavy. I didn’t start fucking him for a few more weeks, when it suited.
I had my first DIFB relapse that night. I had pried the heirloom ruby, perfect and shining, from my husband’s family ring. My wedding ring. I left its spiny shell in the grass near the car, cast aside and emptied of all value to me. If Ross thought this strange, he never mentioned it. Perhaps the density of his grief was a veil. Perhaps he had stopped noticing his marriage to me a long time ago. The ruby had been like a pristine pomegranate seed, sleek and taught with self-contained juice.
*
I am under our house, in the crawl space. I wonder if the ruby is still with me now, or if it has long since passed. My digestive tract, that long pink road of intestine and tissue, is a potholed road. I catch where I am not meant to, leak like a faulty machine. In me I hold my own shrine to Ross’ father.
I exiled him out, but now I hold him in. Press his nose to this fall from grace, this damnation within my body. Through my eyes he must bear witness to what has become of Ross and me. All that we eat and do not taste. All the mechanics of our bodies moving without pleasure or desire. All the love that has been lost between us, strung festering and hollow while we remain bound together, trapped now in the wasteland of a sunken Eden.
~~~Alyssa Blankenship is a working artist. Her literary work has been published in Burningword Literary Journal, Camas Magazine, and Bardics Anonymous.
