“I tie a ribbon in a foolish way”
“The delicious fragility of this travesty”
“Where we still laugh and wish”
***********************************************************

I can’t stand the delicious fragility of this travesty one second longer.
His face was twisted and red.
I’m sorry, I said. Were you talking to me or rehearsing a line?
I looked at my mud-splattered feet instead of his eyes.
I thought of summer ending and other endings and
I rocked forward on my toes, trying to lift myself
From the spot where we still laugh and wish.
Or anyway, the place where he does still.
I’m done with it there.
I tie a ribbon in a foolish way, remember.
He’d pointed it out once
And never let me forget it.
Gravity kept me on the ground but it’s a
Vertical force so instead
I spun on my heel and walked in
A new direction
To a place where I’ll tie ribbons
However the hell I want.

*********************************************************************

“Wait!” I screamed after her, “Your hat!”

The little red-eyed tree frog yawned, blinked his third eyelids twice and stretched his sucker pads wide. He shuddered. He sighed. He looked down from his perch in the tree. He looked up from his perch in the tree. Another night in the jungle and he was hungry. And bored. And lonely! Oh, was he ever lonely. Just as he was contemplating his circumstances—another night in an endless string of them, his perpetual state of hunger, his ennui, and his loneliness—a delicate cricket leapt from the Rainforest floor below. She landed directly in front of him and they stood, the frog and the cricket, frozen in each other’s gaze. She knew she should be patient, wait for le frog to yawn and then make a quick dash for the next branch. But she, too, was lonely. She yearned for companionship. Maybe this one’s different, she thought. So she ignored her better instinct and gave into her more overwhelming urge to chirp. Chirp! Chirp! Chirpchirpchirp! Said the cricket to the frog’s pleading eyes. At this, the red-eyed tree frog let slip the great length of his narrow tongue, snatched her up and swallowed her whole. He was still hungry, still bored and still lonely. But at least he didn’t have to listen to that cricket yak all night. The wild kingdom expelled a collective sigh: Plus ça change, plus ça meme chose.

The last thing I saw was rain. Or drops of it, anyway. I mostly remember one sparkling bead shivering on the green tip of the yellow-veined magnolia leaf. Since then, it’s only been rings and splashes of the fireworks behind my eyelids and even still when I open them wide. I see no specific shapes or faces I recognize or the wink from daddy or the familiar loping gait of momma when she approaches with the salve. I’m starting to know her by smell, instead. Sometimes, if I concentrate extra hard, I swear I can make out a ghost in lace but I’ve mostly stopped trying. Instead, I dive toward this new blackness to see what’s in there, feeling like I have no tether to the periwinkle stars that engulf me. I’m floating and I’m terrified. But I’m thrilled and excited all the same.

It had only been three days since I left James and everything that we were and everything that we’d built. I had woken at the mellow sound of the Wood Drake on the water, before the sun had even contemplated lighting my side of the continent, and made myself a fresh pot of coffee. I walked through the thick cold air, naked and barefooted, to the front door carefully balancing the hot mug in one hand while grabbing a wool blanket in my other. It was draped across the wood chair by the door, right where I’d left it last spring, feeling no better than when I’d arrived. It smelled of dust but I didn’t care. I was older than the dust that day. I wrapped that musty blanket around my body and enjoyed how it scratched my shoulders. It reminded me that I was alive. I inhaled at the sight of the lake spread out in front of me, settled into my quiet seat on the front porch, and held the ceramic mug close to my lips, feeling the steam warm my nostrils. Daisy had made that mug for me on Mother’s Day years ago, a relic from that other life. I thought maybe I should feel depressed, sort of felt obligated toward it. But while I watched the morning fog curl around my unpainted toes perched on the railing, I felt the freedom I had wanted for so long.

Dear Diary,
I’m still trying to take off some of this weight, slogging along on the treadmill every other day. It’s miserable. My knees hurt. My hips ache. It’s boooooring. And only seven pounds off in the last month! But I do it. Yet clearly my efforts are for naught. This morning, as I lowered myself in to the limousine, my belly actually touched the bottom of the steering wheel. Touched it. As in MADE CONTACT. It frustrated the hell outta me and as I sat there, feeling the steering wheel press into my blubber, all I could do was think about Ding Dongs. I wanted a Ding Dong so bad that I coulda sworn I had a fire raging in the hearth of my stomach. I knew a pack of Ding Dongs was the only thing that would make me feel better after all these weeks of no sugar. So I said screw this! and drove like a guided missile straight to 7-11, even though I knew I would be late for my pick up and even though it was a challenge making the turns (what with my stomach impeding the steering capacity) and even though I knew it was the wrong thing to do.

I ended up sipping champagne and eating Ding Dongs in the back of the limo and thought, so this is how the other half lives. It’s nicer in the back seat, diary.
Trust me.

I exhaled and a cloud of white smoke blew from my mouth into her face. A few curls wound backwards and I inhaled them through my nostrils, tasting the cigar at the back of my throat. Exhaling again, I turned my head to the side and spit once toward my boot. I looked up at her again, tipped my hat back with work-weathered fingers still wound tight around my Swisher Sweet, lowered my arm back down by my side. I squinted my eyes as I glared because I wanted her to know that I was very serious this time. Very serious. I took a step closer so I could taste her breathing. I smelled her drug-store perfume and the faint wisp of sweat borne of a day bent over a hot grill. Her heavy eyelids drooped, she couldn’t help it, and I could tell she wanted this as much as I did. She put her delicate hand on the brass belt buckle my daddy gave me, just sorta rested it there. She didn’t pull me to her but she didn’t push me away neither and her heart was beating faster, I could tell. I could tell, I could practically feel it there on my belt buckle, her heart. That hand. I stepped so close that my thigh pressed up against her apron. She didn’t move, just pressed right back up against me.

Just two hours earlier, she’d been on the side of the busy highway talking to her husband on her iPhone. “My car just stopped running on the on ramp. I’m gonna be late for my meeting and I spilled coffee on my white shirt. Fuck! This day is monumentally fucked and it’s not even 8:00 yet!” Now, as she crawled frantically on her stomach through the grassy field, hair and sun and tears in her eyes, she stifled her noisy gasps for air, trying to conceal herself in the brush. She heard an airplane pass by far overhead and tasted the metallic canyon in her mouth. The damp morning earth seeped through her coffee-stained and now mud-covered shirt, and she felt the ground give just a little beneath her elbows and knees. She wished desperately that she’d waited for the damn tow truck instead of taking the stranger’s ride. But he’d seemed so nice. He was from Wisconsin, for shit sake! Who ever heard of a psychopath from Wisconsin? Then Jeffery Dahmer came to mind.

She began to breathe faster.
She crawled faster.
She whimpered.
She clawed at the ground, scolded herself for being so stupid and prayed to a God she didn’t believe in.

She pressed the gas pedal, speeding faster than she should have up the winding driveway, nearly rear-ending her rival’s blue and white 1960-something Mustang. It was a hardtop. She knew it would be parked there. What a lame car, she thought. She yanked the emergency brake hard like she’d seen her mother do once. She shut off the engine, stepped from the car, slammed the door behind her.

She didn’t bother to knock. She walked in like always. And there he stood with the beauty in the shadows, acting like it was any normal Friday. Except, this wasn’t a normal Friday was it, asshole? No, it wasn’t. This was the Friday that you got caught. Pep rally, my ass.

She stormed past them both, the lying popular son of a drug dealer and his cheerleader girlfriend. But wait, she thought. Wasn’t she the girlfriend? Quietly furious, she made her way down to his bedroom two stairs at a time. She passed his bed where they’d fucked so many times and where—by the looks of it—he’d just fucked the cheerleader. Happy Friday, she thought.

On the credenza was the picture of him and the cheerleader. From prom. She opened the drawer directly beneath it. There was the framed picture of her. She grabbed the photo. She raced upstairs, three stairs at a time, to find him hugging her. She tossed the photo between them. You deserve each other, she said.

He sells used cars now.
She and the cheerleader are friends.

She sets her right hand on the door, palm flat against the warm wood. She gives it a push. She finds the door to be much heavier than she’d anticipated. She leans one tanned shoulder against it and puts all of her weight against that shoulder, sweating under the still-hot afternoon sun. The door opens, slowly, quietly to reveal a broad room. The saltillo tiled floors are cool beneath her bare feet. There is no wall on the opposite side. Nothing but ocean down there. Twenty or forty feet in front of her—she’s no good with distances—there is one shallow step down to another level of the room. Another forty feet, another step, a pool with no edge. Just the light blue of the water meeting the dark blue of the ocean meeting the pink blue of the sky, twenty or forty or thousands of feet away.