Shallow Breath

I lost my footing yesterday, and I thought this is it. This is how I will be found - sprawled on my back, skull denting the ground, looking up at the grackles flying overhead like they do everyday.

My balance fought back just in time, as always, and gripped the earth. I survived with only a sore muscle in my back, one that hadn't been used in a while.

Later, I ground the muscle into the cold rim on the claw foot tub and massaged the lump under my skin, slightly embarrassed by the fading agility of youth. There had been nothing foreseen to cause the unsteadiness; no branch on the ground to stumble upon; no stripped spiky corn stalk to grab hold of my skirt, only the earth changing expressions beneath me.

Identity

She withdraws from her name, wondering why, as a child, she wrote it on everything she owned - black magic marker on a backpack, silver paint pen on a leather jacket, the image etched into her flesh by a man named Shaker. There aren't statues of cats, at least, posed and lined up on wooden shelves hanging on the wall. She never would have gone that far.

She forgot how it started. Maybe a joke or a boyfriend's observation about the shape of her eyes? It wasn't long after she heard the name in the hallways that she began painting her eyes thick and black, and started wearing stockings that left red crisscross patterns on her knees.

Then the nights came when her mother was gone, and her stepfather played solitaire next to a row of beer cans at the kitchen table, and she sat behind the locked door of her walk-in closest, taping pictures to the wall that had been drawn by boys with steady hands. Sometimes she would stand under the bare bulb, lick her finger, and smudge the lines until fine bits of gray paper peeled up, just to ease the time away.

She liked the name mixed with liquor in the mouths of sweaty boys, but even more when they screamed it through thin gaping lips. Naked, except for their tight black jeans and studded belts, they cursed her name until they forgot it, all of them.

It seemed fitting, she thought one day, while painting her eyes beneath the glow of a bare bulb in the dressing room, that the DJ should call out the name whispered in love so many times but soon forgotten.

A Lonely Moment

We hear him skulking in the backyard. He lingers over the snapped branch, and I imagine his eyes brittling like ice. We don't know when he will speak so we stand in the backyard with our fingers entwined, listening to his heavy breathing and the rain misting the treetops.

It occurs to me that I haven't been this still for a very long time, and I think if I could reach out and touch them both, I could mold this moment like a piece of jewelry to wear a groove around my finger. Then the rain comes down hard and soaks the trees until they are black and wet like my insides, and I know I have to move or shake or let go of his hand.

We walk up the hill together, one of them on each side of me, and I want us to keep walking past the parked cars outside the barhouse, cross the road, and stop for a moment at the pond. There, we could stand beside each other and stare at our distorted reflections as the rain comes down and laughter leaks through the windows in the bar. We might be happy, the three of us, gawking at the smiling faces in the water. I know I would.

Instead, we go inside and sit at a round table. They talk about the noise on the tin roof, and I buy the three of us double shots of whiskey. I should feel caught or busted but I don't.

The waitress brings a shot of Jagermeister, compliments of the gentleman at the bar.

They shake their heads as I drink it down. Cold, black, and wet, it coats my throat, feeling like victory inside.

Then there's just us, the empty shot glasses, the last of the acorns pouncing on the tin roof, and the man patting the stool next to him at the bar.