Residue
By Jean Marie
We’re standing in Lindsey’s kitchen, leaning on countertops, making conversation at this party, was it someone’s birthday or an anniversary, a full moon or a “Mercury is out of retrograde” or just a Friday, you don’t recall, Lindsey is always having a party, and this you is usually never going to the party but this time this you did, when Nella, the photographer, turns and demands, When did you become this, gesturing to your up and down looking self, bestial, wings lining your eyelids –and molting, more now under her gaze, your piercings and plumage, the mole on your face that says, I dare you, and by that you mean please, please, lick you, comb you with cannabis, grasp you by the scruff of your neck and leave a mark, let you know you’re alive this, but you just look at her, cock your head at this beautiful human, thick and Samoan, and innocently ask, This, and then Nella waves a hand in a circular flourish like a feather duster over you, saying, I mean, THIS, and you gather, through the gap in your teeth, that she means when did you become this someone who isn’t a wife or a mother even though technically you’re both, who doesn’t use those words, finds them laughable, even, offensive, even, because they refuse you, someone, some thing, some this – a pronoun, adjective and adverb all in one kind of this – that wants to be all she is supposed to be sometimes but mostly everything she is not, well this is what happens when you get a positive pregnancy test but no baby, or there’s a baby but it’s never alive on your chest, just bobs bulbously like an amoeba in your uterine bucket, or not, because the very first amoeba is still alive, and nothing lives in your bucket, nothing, except the horned god known as Pan, flicking his hooves as he shoots desire out of every black hole of loss punched into your body like a coffee shop buy-ten-get-one-free card, and when this non-baby baby thing is what happens so many times, and the last time, when you birthed a preserved angel, you pushed her out in what they called a still birth, and maybe that’s why it still hurts, and “trauma” is the overplayed word for it now, the it girl term for your unraveling, and hey, no one took care of you, they don’t even have the words for how, a loss that cannot be counted so in you it’s infinite, and so you don’t exist, so you’re this, and sure they put a band-aid on all the skeins skating out of you, but come on, what could stitch a tsunami inside your own body, they took you to the hospital to surgically remove the blighted yolks in procedures they criminalize now, they want to throw your incandescent sorrow behind bars – god if only, if only you could do that– but no, the hollows yawn free in you, a target sheet, cause yeah you live in a part of the world where people shoot shit, or they spend a lot on shit like “charcoal maca lemonade,” but this is you, not a person but a perforation, riddled with holes, riddled with why’s, and this is why you fail or inspire the babies without breath, this is what happens when all the love the world tries to plug into your wormholes, all the Tinder profiles, those frissons of sexts and dick pics, it just runs right out this colander of your thisness, the cloudy watery love slips out, rinsing the people around you al dente and you empty, and if the question is when did you become this, this hoofed hound, this elusive pronoun stomping time zones because Pan knows they never respected your ozone, this you that rabbit runs elsewhere, well, maybe it was written when you met him, and it was just birth control pills that made him attractive and maybe his Adam’s apple, and maybe it’s just been too much of him watching you fall, unable to help, and maybe it’s just that no one wants to catch the unluckiness you got, your personal pandemic, that’s what the doctor said, the last time, she said maybe you were just unlucky, and maybe this time, but no, and the last time, do you even want it to be the last time, because what wouldn’t you give, sometimes, to be back there in horror, god, because at least you were still worth rooting for, then, and oh, look at this nostalgia for your own assassination, because in a way you don’t want it to be the last time, you don’t want to be this, you want to be that, you want to behave, you want to be and to have the hold you’re supposed to, perform the wife, mom and Instagram blogger in the PTA with a name like ‘consciouscacaomama,’ click link in bio for easy school snacks, be who you still could, could you be that instead of this, you could just try again, you could play the game, you could get some play kids or at least some pugs, you could play that, but then you became this, and now it’s time to clear dishes and scrape what’s left down Lindsey’s drain and sing happy birthday or strike a gong for the moon or whatever and after you clear your plate, saying to Nella, it’s ok, when she says I’m sorry, but that’s not the end, because Nella pulls you into tenderness, a hug with a million hands, a cocoon that for a moment lays a palm over each and every mouthy hole of you, and says no, it is not ok, and as the garbage disposal grinds away, a hole that metabolizes things in a way you never could, but then you also know this, that nothing ever goes away, and you’re both upset about that and not, because in you, the residue, that makes you this.
THE END
Author Bio: Jean Marie is a former lawyer turned yoga teacher in Park City, Utah. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Bennington.