the Dented Car

By the time my high cheeks had met the peach of June, bruises had already begun cascading down my shins like a 12-year-old boy’s summer of baseball. I side-stepped coworkers’ request for origins, lighting cigarettes and spitting sunflower seeds from below the awning. Anemia, a coffee table too low, a bicycle. Amongst discarded fruit skins and shattered dishware, I pull small rocks from the base of the city tree. Lining them up, I kick towards the sides of cars, covering my mouth in calcified shame, before setting up the next round. When one car leaves, pulls away tightly, the tune of the industrial piano shifts until another fills its place. I kick until the shift starts.

Warmth seeps through folded windows into the main dining room, and I press my chest against the stand to reach my arm into the patch of sun. In a moment like this, with silence behind me and the increasing volume of obscenities trickling from the kitchen, I clamp my jaw against comedy and wait for the shade to pock my skin. I’m waiting for a hand to pinch the overflow of skin peeking out over my skirt, the small of my back, the lowest hanging necklace that brushes my breastbone. I draft a scream, my elbow stings for a gut to fold into. 

I pat my stomach, turn my head toward something no longer standing. It could’ve made them mimic my facial expression, I’d laugh, we’d dick around and buy more beer. We’d have become narrow in line on tight sidewalks, cut across green lights, trashed a clean baseball. I pat my stomach harder, too hard and I hear my lung catch, hoping it’ll make a funny enough noise to elicit a laugh on my own. 

Man…

I’m loose fitting in my living room. I am big, and take up all of this space so that no one else would even feel the need to. The window unlatches itself and cracks to the wood, the screen wavers and ignores its loss. I’ve taped it, tied it to the frame, pressed weight against it, and the summer storm sucking in its own humidity rocks the house again. 

There it is, the dented subcompact with out-of-state plates, my warmth and my muse, my neighbor and something less. I’ve chased it in mediocre rain, stained my cuffs and wished for it to speed up a bit more. I could follow it back home, view it parallel and empty, attach my need to it without the driver. I see it, and I let it pass me. I rock my head to skew which direction the engine pulls to, and tick the keypad to forget it entirely.

Art:

The Past by Olympia Bouchlariotou 

Oil on canvas.