Mostly Dead Things Read online

  “I’m gonna look.”

  I snuggled into the dirty comforter and waited for her to leave the room. Tried to wrangle my messy thoughts into something that would provide distance, the space I would need to reacclimate to how I was before she came over.

  Once morning lit my apartment, I knew I shouldn’t have her there. It was filthy, not a place for someone as promising as Lucinda, a woman whose underwear always matched, whose clothes were so clean I hated to let them fall on a carpet I hadn’t vacuumed in months.

  When I finally stumbled out wearing a T-shirt and some saggy shorts, I found her in the kitchen, scrambling eggs on the only skillet I owned, making toast on the stovetop using the coils from the sad, terrible burner that worked only half the time. She poured coffee for me, black, just how I liked it. Setting the cup so softly on the counter that it barely made a sound, she ran her fingers through the long length of my hair. I closed my eyes and let myself be pet, a kind of feeling I could sustain for only a minute before I’d tense up again. Remembering other hands.

  We could play house all we wanted, pretend like we were something larger than the six hundred square feet of my ratty apartment. But when it came down to it, I had nothing good to give and she was already giving it up for someone else. I knew there had to be somebody. It was how she stood with that woman from the gallery. The one who looked a lot like me. Their body language—how women who are fucking lean into each other like magnets. Bodies ready to connect again. The woman had nodded at me more than once. Short hair. Dimpled cheeks that made her look younger than I thought she might be. Forties, probably. Eyes that scanned over me and landed on something prettier, usually Lucinda. This woman had a type and it wasn’t me. But I never really liked myself either. Always out looking for someone who’d remind me of somebody else, somebody different enough to make me forget I had a body of my own.

  Lucinda liked to wear my cast-off shirts around the apartment. They swam on her in a pretty way, her legs long and dark beneath the hem. Looking at her in my clothes gave me a feeling so sharply pleasurable that I worried it would show on my face. I squashed it as a radical invader, a thing I wouldn’t let live inside of me. After she left I’d sniff the shirts, her clean, sunshine smell embedded in my clothes. A reminder that this good thing existed in my life.

  She squeezed fresh orange juice, a thing I’d seen done only on TV or in movies. I knew that I didn’t buy oranges, that I had maybe never bought them in my entire adult life. Why buy oranges, ever, when they grew everywhere for free?

  “Where did these come from?” I asked, sipping it slow, letting the juice cool my throat. I was hopeful for some vodka to mix up a screwdriver, but I knew there wasn’t any more of that in the cupboard. We’d finished the bottle together.

  “Picked them from your yard.”

  “I don’t have a yard.”

  “You know what I mean. Outside.”

  The apartment complex had a dingy central courtyard that boasted a shriveled acacia and what I’d thought was a stunted lemon tree. The peels in the garbage can were greeny yellow and small. I wondered how she’d even known they were good.

  “Why don’t we have this on the balcony?”

  I thought about what it would take to get the plates and cups outside; the glass top was filthy and so were all the seats. It had rained on and off through the night, and frogs liked to hide underneath the chairs, sometimes reaching out a small hand to tap stickily at your legs. It made me scream, no matter how many times it happened. I didn’t want Lucinda seeing me like that, ever. Goofy and afraid of a tiny amphibian, like I didn’t slice open animals for a living.

  “It won’t kill you,” she said, and I nodded, already feeling squirmy. I followed her through the sliding glass door and breathed in the humidity. She held both our plates, leaving me just my coffee to hold while I looked around sheepishly, scared a frog might pop out.

  My balcony overlooked the parking lot and some scraggly palm trees that waved over the adjacent rooftops. Outside normally smelled like other people’s food, pungent aromas of meats and spices steaming all day in Crock-Pots. I kept all my windows firmly shut in an attempt to keep out everyone else’s business. But that early, with the wind blowing heavy with unshed rain, it smelled more like the earth turned up next to the water: the heavy odor of crushed plants, mud teeming with life.

  Lucinda’s hair caught the sun and glinted shades of red. Brynn’s hair always caught blonde, sometimes amber. She’d loved the sun, but hated getting up early. Brynn always ate breakfast after 2:00 PM. The week before she left, I made her Belgian waffles on an iron I’d bought at a garage sale. She seemed so happy, ripping the waffles apart with her fingers and dipping the mess into whipped cream. We fed each other pieces and took a nap together, drifting off in the afternoon sun. She leaned into my ear and told me she loved me more than anything. How can a person seem that happy and leave you a week later?

  “This is nice, right?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, sipping my coffee. No frogs in sight. “It’s nice.”

  We ate our eggs in silence, dipping crusts into the drippy yellow yolk, watching cars slide past on the street. It was relaxing, the kind of lazy morning I’d watched my parents share growing up. Lucinda handed me the paper and I opened it while she sipped her juice, wondering if we were gonna do the crossword or some other weird, coupley thing. It felt strangely normal, a domestic scene I’d only ever thought about when it came to other people. I took the rest of the eggs off her plate, she snaked my last bite of toast. I knew I could ask Lucinda for a crumb of affection, the barest bit, and she’d stay over the rest of the day. Did she have someone else she went home to when she left me? I didn’t know, but it seemed likely. The stocky woman I’d seen coming and going from the art gallery talked with Lucinda the way I wanted to; with a hand on her arm, thumb stroking the crease of an elbow. Lucinda was the kind of woman who would make someone’s life easier. If I wanted, I could ask her to stay and maybe she’d do it for a while. Instead, I sat silently while she waited for me to ask. When we were done, she gathered up the breakfast dishes and carried them inside. The shower turned on and I went to get dressed, pulling on a pair of holey old jeans that were coming apart at the seat.

  Once Lucinda came out from the shower, she was inaccessible again. She allowed me to kiss her cheek goodbye, but wouldn’t give me her mouth. I watched her walk out, taking all the good of the morning with her, and wished the room would swallow me.

  Because he’d lost his license and didn’t have ready access to a car, Bastien needed rides to work. I picked him up from my mother’s house as soon as Lucinda left, and the two of us got coffee at the gas station down the street from the shop. It tasted burnt and was always full of grounds, but we could refill our giant foam cups all day long. Chugging from our bottomless supply of tarry black acid, we stood side by side in the back, working over the pelts and mounts. Sometimes he’d do the scraping, sometimes I would, but we took turns with the most monotonous tasks: stitching work through the legs, boiling flesh from skeletons until our hands sang with blisters.

  I preferred the tedious work. It got me out of my head. Bastien didn’t seem to mind it either. He took every task I gave him in stride, even petrifying hamsters. Once I let him work on the pieces with me, we got into a good groove. It was comfortable now, most of the time. He’d learned my routines. How to be quiet. Minimal talk, just another warm body. He studied reference material for the various animals and how to utilize the death masks to find the best angle for the neck and ears. He kept his own scrapbook with tabbed indicators for different species he’d worked on: rabbits, squirrels, foxes, deer.

  Being alone too long, staring into the dead eyes of an animal, had a way of making you feel you were nothing but a sack of meat. Working with Bastien reminded me a little of being with my dad, who’d known exactly when I needed a specific tool or a cut of thread. Like my father, Bastien had a natural way with bodies; knew what to do with their legs and how to pose their
necks so they didn’t look stiff. He turned out deer capes faster than Milo ever had, and sometimes gave me a run for my money. These parallels to the past gave me vertigo: I was my father, Bastien was me, and those dead animals—always the same empty faces—forever perched on the table between us.

  “Are you going out early?” he asked, finishing up the last pelt of the day. We’d been working for hours, hunched over a stack of deer mounts. Sweat plastered his hair to his neck, dripping a damp line into his shirt collar.

  I took a sniff of my armpit and winced. Sour. “I’m meeting a friend for drinks.”

  He scrubbed his face with a clean rag and tossed it in the direction of the sink. “Okay. Guess I can close up.” Bastien didn’t ask me about my personal life and I didn’t ask him anything either. The feeling—that neither of us needed any additional baggage in our lives—was completely mutual.

  “Call your dad.”

  “Right. Guess I’ll be here for a while.” Milo wouldn’t be off work himself for another few hours. If he’d even gone in; it was hard to know where he was or what he was doing. It was just as likely that he was home sleeping. He hardly ever answered his phone. Most of the time he didn’t even have the thing turned on, just kept it tossed in the back of his truck, a lifeless brick.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said, grabbing a spare shirt from the cabinet near the door. I pulled the dirty one over my head and Bastien turned around to give me privacy, fiddling with some of the tools he’d already cleaned. “Good work today.”

  “Right.”

  I knew he was disappointed, but I didn’t care. Only drinks and the dark, close hours I spent with Lucinda in the wreck of my dank apartment made me feel okay anymore.

  We met at the bar and holed up in the back, drinking pitchers of shitty domestic beer and making heavy eye contact. As I took that first sip and stared across the table at Lucinda, I couldn’t seem to care about how sorry my guts would feel come morning. I didn’t dwell on Brynn or my mother and father, or any of the worries that burdened me all day at work. There was nothing but the drinks and the smooth coolness of Lucinda’s fingers dragging across my forearm.

  “Why don’t you keep taxidermy in your apartment?” Lucinda poured us each a taster’s sip. That’s what she called our first glasses, doling out an inch. We’d see how long we could last until one of us broke down and drank it. Then we poured full glasses and really went to work. The pitcher sat between us, a safe space to rest my eyes when I looked too long at Lucinda’s cleavage.

  “Why haven’t I been to your apartment?” I let the smallest edge of the beer touch my tongue. It fizzed there and lingered, yeasty as bread.

  “I don’t have an apartment. You don’t like taking your work home?”

  She wore three gold bangles on her wrist. The wires were thin and chimed when they clicked together. Light bounced off them with every delicate turn of her hand.

  “No, it’s not that.” I took my first full sip and let my taste buds weep. “You got a house?”

  “I live in a condo. I have a roommate.” She smiled as I took another mouthful, and then took one of her own. “You’re losing fast today. So, if you taxidermy animals for a living and you don’t keep any in your own home, what does that actually say about you?”

  I drained the last of it and let Lucinda pour me some more, still stuck on the word roommate and trying to wash it out of my head. “It says I don’t keep them in my apartment. Who do you live with?”

  The last of her own slipped past her red mouth, lip prints gumming up the rim. Roommate could mean anything, but the way she said it, it sounded like wife. The woman from the gallery. I mean, I’d already known. Could tell from the body language. A hand. An elbow. That single stroke of flesh against flesh; I knew what that meant. I’d spent too much time watching their faces when I should’ve been watching their hands. I poured her more, but she stopped me when the beer reached the middle of the glass. “Why don’t you keep taxidermy in your house?”

  One long sip for me. “I don’t want it to feel like home.”

  Two more for Lucinda, who wore a black velvet top that clung to her body like a second skin. “That’s sad, Jessa. Everybody needs a place they feel safe.”

  Home and safety weren’t synonymous. The times I’d felt most vulnerable had always been with my family. There was my mother, with her sudden deviation from anything I’d ever known or expected from her. My father had killed himself in a place where he knew I’d find him, leaving me a note that said it was my responsibility to take care of the things he wasn’t strong enough to handle. The only woman I’d ever cared for I’d shared with my brother, a person I simultaneously loved and hated for it.

  Lucinda rubbed her finger along the indentation of her lip and I wanted to smack her hand away, ask why she was turning something that was supposed to make me forget into another agony of remembering. I wanted to kiss her, badly. I wanted to feel something else.

  “Jesus Christ, could you just answer the question,” I asked, pouring the rest in my glass. Roommate, a word that you could use for a friend or a fuck buddy. Even though I’d fought to keep things casual between us, I wasn’t sure if I was up for another person I had to share. Based on the way I’d seen them together in the gallery, it didn’t feel like it was over. At least, it didn’t look like it was over based on the other woman’s body language. I knew what it looked like when you still loved someone after the person had long given up the ghost of romance. And that woman had longing written all over her butch baby face.

  “I have a roommate because I bought the condo with that person and now I can’t ask them to leave without dividing up the property.” Leaning forward, she slipped an arm across the table and dug one of her fingers under the band of my watch. She left it there, wriggling below the face.

  “I don’t keep photos in my apartment either,” I added. There was no art, nothing but the cheap eggshell paint that they’d slopped on the walls long before I’d arrived. “It’s just a place to sleep.”

  The finger, still wriggling, slowly worked to undo the band. “You know I’m here for you,” Lucinda said, thumb smoothing into the crease of my palm. Her voice took on an edge. “All you have to do is ask. Give me a little, Jessa. Trust me not to hurt you.”

  Trust was a word that carried too much with it. Things were already moving too quickly; unsurprising given the fact that so many queer women U-Hauled after the first date. It wasn’t how I operated, that level of emotional openness, but even the ladies I casually slept with occasionally tried to make things more than they were. I could feel it happening with Lucinda: I thought about her constantly, ignored her when she wanted attention, then got upset that she might be seeing someone else. Knew that she was seeing someone else. I didn’t know what I wanted. I exhausted myself.

  Lucinda took the watch from my wrist and turned it over. My father’s, the one he’d died in. I wore it every day, the band slid smooth from his skin and my skin and my grandfather’s too. I could tell her all about me, maybe feed her bits of myself. But what happened when you chummed the water was that the biggest predators showed up and ate everything. There was no giving a little. It was all or nothing.

  Large patches of sweat lined the back of my shirt and ran below my arms. I drank the rest of my beer and then I drank hers. “I’ll go pay the check,” she said once I’d drained everything and was looking around for more to dump into myself.

  Outside was dark and unusually still, no noise, not even a rumble from the cicadas. Lucinda placed her hand at the meaty joint of my hip and squeezed, twice. I clenched up both times. “It’s quiet,” I noted stupidly. Lucinda nodded.

  “How come nobody ever sees cicadas?” She leaned into me, smelling like the cinnamon mints she always chewed after drinking.

  “What?”

  “You hear them all night here, especially in the summer. So how come we don’t ever see them?”

  It was a good question. Cicadas always hung out in the tops of the oa
ks, secreted away in the bark, or tucked below thick clumps of Spanish moss. There was a lot of shrieking, but I’d never seen them crawling anywhere. “I have part of one,” I confessed, breathing in her sweet smell and licking my lips. “The shell. It’s called a carapace.”

  Lucinda’s hand crept down to the vee of my jeans. She pressed there lightly, waiting. There was no one else outside. The sole streetlight flickered overhead, one spasm, two, and then went out. Darkness overtook us. I leaned back into the side of my truck and let her navigate. She rubbed me gently, then stopped with her other hand wedged beneath a breast.

  “Tell me more about the cicada.” She licked the lobe of my ear, sucked at it. “Everything you know about them.”

  “Not a lot.” I breathed out slowly, considering my words. “I just have the shell. Found it in my backyard.” Every sentence prompted the movement of her hand to a different place on my body. First, she rubbed the tender inside of my forearm, then slipped below the hem of my shirt to stroke the skin above my navel.

  “What else?” Her breath was a heavy, live thing in my ear.

  It was hard to collect the memory. Her fingers crawled over my ribs, slipping delicately beneath the wire of my bra cup. “It was under the basketball hoop, by the shed. My brother tried to crush it with a basketball, but he kept missing.”

  One finger lazily swept along the bottom of my breast, just barely grazing my nipple. “What did it look like?”

  “Waxy yellow. Like cellophane tape.”

  “What did it smell like?” With the other hand she scraped along the seam of my jeans, back and forth. Lightly at first, and then hard enough I could hear the scratch of her nails against the fabric.

  I took in more air and paused, the memory bursting from static fuzz at the back of my brain. “Nothing. There was nothing to smell.”

  What I’d done was taste it, licking a hole right through the middle of the thorax. Brynn dared me to do it. Dared me to touch my mouth to the hollow shell, holding it up like she wanted me to give it a kiss. A bit of shell had come away from the body, stuck to the tip of my tongue. It melted there, gluey, the way that tapioca pearls tasted when stripped of the pudding. Brynn screamed and ran back into the house, leaving me there. I’d cupped the body in my hands like it might try to escape too.