Myriad Excerpts in Body Language

Half of her face sags, like a sloppily-painted, over-saturated genoise in a failed vodka soak. Her body is pressed against the door frame in a pathetic quest for structure, substance, construction, form. She assures me she is fine and the words hang limply in the air before condensating, puddles of fiction on my bedroom floor. She trips over her own right foot when she finally turns to leave.

He is in the passenger seat of my ’92 Oldsmobile. Three hours ago I was at a gas station on the corner of my street frantically trying to understand how to use the vacuum. He smells like old spice and anxiety, and when I turn to look at him, I think see the moment unfold in his face. He leans over and I shut my eyes and he kisses my cheek and there is a fat moment for me to consider to myself how enormously I misread him. Before the thoughts have a chance to blossom he revises his action, not quite eraser to paper but more of a . His smile afterwards infects the air and we hold hands the whole way home.

Dry cake patched together with saccharine buttercream and hope. It makes her look sodden, weathered, older than she is. She has good posture, though, and she takes all her blows like a champ.

I can’t see my parents, I can only hear them, but I can see them in my imagination. My mother bangs pathetically on his bedroom door. My father sits on the worn chair in his attic room, its cushion tearing at the seams, pieces of its wicker base protruding out violently, like an overgrown death wish. His face in his hands, his eyes dry and shut.

The room is painfully sceptic. Four walls, a bed right in the center, a fluorescent light, the kind that tricks you into believing you are already dead, waking up in some kind of sick purgatory. She is asleep, though, tucked delicately beneath a scratchy white sheet, pulled up to her chin with both hands like a prayer. Her tray of food lies mostly untouched, except a half-drank carton of orange juice and a spilled water glass. I have a Snickers bar for her, and I suddenly feel like an idiot. As if a Snickers bar purchased hastily at the Bodega on the corner of 72nd could somehow stand up to her violent, consummate depression. As if it stood any chance at all to my mother, sleeping now in the fetal position.

A crowded street in Seacliff, populated with everyone my dad went to high school with. He has an unfamiliar bounce in his step and his face seems lighter somehow, the crease between his eyebrows less dramatic. He looks like someone returning home after a long day, a long life.

I tell him I need to end it, and he tells me to wait two weeks. Two weeks later and I find myself in the passenger seat of his car. We haven’t spoken. I can see that he wants to touch me, but there is a wall, and it is bolstered high with empty “I love you”s. We never touch again.

My dad, hunched over his phone at the kitchen table and furiously Googling the difference between “chopping” and “dicing.” The water boils too soon and we are frantic to measure the rice. A shit storm of dishes when we finally sit down to eat at a table littered with unopened mail and late electric bills. We are able to smile and talk about things that don’t hurt. We always eat too fast.

He juts six feet out of the earth, 180 pounds with gravity, and yet, when I see him sleeping, I can only see the little boy that he was. Sensitive and thoughtful and detesting his glasses.

We opt to stand instead of sit. We eat oysters and drink honey-ale and he says with some urgency that he wants to dance. The sun smudges herself apathetically across the sky in glorious shades of orange and grapefruit.

NG