UB by I. Fontana

 

 
 
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UB by I. Fontana

01/31/2010

She doesn’t want to have any problems. She doesn’t want any trouble. She doesn’t want anyone following her around. She thinks you have to be ready for trouble all the time. Walking across some bridge, she looks at the cars, the faces and hands visible through tinted glass. The sky is low, reflecting the water, which is green and gray, dark green with nodal lines bone and ash in shards of breaking light.
     Her hair is red. It’s not a natural shade. Her boyfriend likes it. She looks good. She’s in his bathroom for a few moments. It’s a dangerous bathroom. Her face lingers in his mirror, as a quintuplet after-image. She puts on some blush. She likes to look different to herself, or to those other people -- it’s better than being so indifferent all the time.
     And Billy just plays the same beat over and over on the piano: he’s thinking about it real hard, making it more and then less staccato, varying an emphasis here and there. Frowning, he has pale, translucent skin… to such a point that sometimes he seems to be fading away. He hasn’t combed his hair.
     She is listening to him play. The music makes her hungry. The only thing she’s had to eat today was one of those plastic things of yogurt. She doesn’t know what flavor. Jukeberry or tigerberry, martian berry, david or da vinci berry, smite thine enemy berry or berry in your head. Fig berry, vagina berry, love me tenderberry love me not. It was red.
     Sometimes she wishes she was an animal, though she understands that animals have their problems too. She’s gotten sort of addicted to having sex with Billy lately. It isn’t just fucking. That’s the problem. It’s almost everything he does. If he finds out she likes some of his music he’ll stop playing it so much. He sticks his penis in her yogurt then gets distracted by some drumbeat in traffic or the flush of a toilet somewhere.
     Billy takes no responsibility for other people’s actions. He’s got enough to worry about as it is. This piano has some broken keys. In the middle octave he can’t play D-natural or A-flat. He’s learning to live with this. But he’s not perfect. His fingers forget.
     She likes to sleep alone. She wants to be in her own bed, in her own room. She doesn’t want to be disturbed by foreign bodies in the dark. She dreams about being captured and enslaved by barbarians, tied naked in front of a crowd. There are ziggurats and pyramids and earth-mounds here. She gasps when she is touched out of the sky.
     Another time it must be afternoon already and she needs to take a bath and wash her hair. She looks at the color as it hangs there, stringy, wet, dripping on the nape of her pale neck. She’s itchy. She takes a long time shaving her armpits. The remainder of her pale skin is smooth and sleek.
     She puts on makeup while listening to a record. The sound is all blurred. She can’t tell if someone’s singing or not. It’s good to have makeup on. It makes her feel different. She’s got kind of a headache. There’s a white tablet for that. She puts on more eyeliner in slow motion listening to the same song five times in a row.
     She calls up her friend Joolie, and they talk for an hour and a half. Then, tired of all of Joolie’s problems, she says I’ve got to go and puts on violet tights under a miniskirt. The violet matches her eyes or something. She goes outside. The day is slowly flashing and brown. She can’t stay inside all day. It makes her feel like she’s in jail. She’s never been in jail.
     She doesn’t mind getting wet. The rain is white and silvery and clear. It doesn’t last. She’s indifferent to the stares she gets. She notices some of them. She wants to get some stares. The light changes and she crosses the street. She looks at her reflection in the skin of a dark green car’s hood. She doesn’t know herself there.
     The sky is low and filled with silent, slowly crawling shapes. There are supposed to be planets on the other side of this sky. She puts a throat lozenge in her mouth and feels it start to melt and numb her tongue. Taste buds are stupid, she thinks. She doesn’t want to worry about what flavor’s coming next.
     Billy doesn’t want to do all these dishes in the sink, but he will because somebody has to. He can’t remember eating off any of these plates. Did they eat something red? Now it’s turning brown in an evil glaze. He’s always hated this spoon. The piano is on his mind.
     Billy has had some big arguments about it with his friends. They don’t properly appreciate the piano as an instrument. They think he should play something else, something he could fold into a briefcase and carry around with him in cars. Billy wants a piano made entirely of glass, with glass shards vibrating on the strings. He imagines a shimmering rainbow of sound. He wants a piano made of bronze, with the sonority of an ancient bell. He wants to slacken the tension on the strings and use glass rods to find his notes like playing a bottleneck guitar. He wants a piano with water in it, so that each note struck will cause a different tone-color splash. He wants a big piano with a circular keyboard: he’d sit in the center like a pilot -- if needed he could grow more arms.
     The sky is raining like an actress weeping big white tears from a big face full of emotion. Yes, it’s all so sad. Big white tears flash in the wet brown day. The face just gets bigger and bigger, closer all the time. The tears sizzle on the sidewalk and turn to steam.
     She sees a creature down on all fours crawling around. She avoids it but it looks at her. It’s all backwards somehow. Its face has been switched with its ass. Is that pain in its eyes? Exultation? The asshole gapes and shows the strangest shades of red and pink and wet magenta when you gaze inside.
     She shows up at Billy’s. The buzzer doesn’t work. The elevator does, though it takes her to a different number floor at first. The geometric pattern of the rug doesn’t look the same. She knocks on his door. But he doesn’t answer. The dark brown door opens, mysteriously, and she goes inside. There’s the piano, in shadows. There’s the phony owl. Where is Billy? Hey, man, where are you? She looks in the refrigerator.
     In the bathroom, he’s turning to jelly. The piano starts to vibrate. She looks over at it and wonders how you turn it off. She goes into the bathroom, with a knife. The shower curtain scares her.
     She sees something and doesn’t know what it is. It’s breathing, red, alive. It’s like a baby with the juice still on but it isn’t a baby. It isn’t pretty. It opens one of its mouths – if those are mouths – and extends some kind of half-formed tentacle or arm.
     She sits down on the closed toilet seat and tries to understand. She doesn’t understand. A knife flies around like some little bird.

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I. Fontana has lived in Avignon, Guadalajara, NYC and now Portland, Oregon. Other work has appeared in BOMB, Bikini Girl, Pindeldyboz, PANK, Gigantic Magazine and previously on Spork Press.