12/27/2010

Maybe love doesn’t fill people up entirely. She moved from room to room. No one at the party interested her, but she didn’t feel very interesting, anyway, dressed as a farmer with braids in her hair. A farmer? She was bad at dressing up. She was bad at small talk and bad at knowing where to put her hands. She thought about him, across the city. In the living room she could see a devil talking to Larry King. She sighed, and kept her mouth open a beat extra.

*

Neither of them believed in God, but they talked about gods all the time. Their own gods, driving them around like Mack trucks. She chose a short green tweed skirt to wear to an event. Hi, god, she thought, and she was talking to his hands between her legs.

*

He might not end up with her, but he’d never leave her. He knew that now. She was solid, a piece of matter, a red tip rising above the treeline. It doesn’t matter what love is, because love is atoms. He walked to the store and back with his hood on. He thought about his dad and the long walks they used to take, the dog.

*

They were drinking gin and tonics, and were still salty from the beach. Someone suggested making it into a drinking game. They sat on the floor and got splinters. The men looked at the women and the women looked at the women. A light glowed from the kitchen. It was so important to be there, young and about to die.

*

“I’m afraid of everything,” she said, and took a bite of her duck confit. He didn’t buy it. She was fearless. He watched her cut the meat with her knife and poke the food into her mouth. “Tell me a story,” he said. She looked him in the face. In the dark her eyes were small as a mouse.

*

She hid in her apartment for most of a week. Who were all those people, out in the world, she wondered? They were jogging and eating eggs. They had futures, each with a hue, like paint chips. She was red. Red as a god, hiding in a baby. She was red as rain.

*

He took a long hot shower and put on a black shirt. He sat on the couch. It was fun, feeling free again. He looked out the window at the trash and the old people. He wanted certain things, and he might get them. He walked out into the street and ignored the crows, the stringy golden clouds, and the future that love was a part of.

*

Drinking made him calmer but also harder. After a few drinks he could bend time. He looked down the hallway at the clock on the wall. Where’s my mother? he wondered. He was a baby all over again, pushing at incalculable space. He was aware of his hips, his cock in his pants, the minute shifts of water and temperature. He put more ice in his glass.

*

The doctor came in the room, shut the door, and asked how she was doing. She was doing terrible but she looked great. Her eyes were blazing and her skin was a field of berries. She wanted to say “I don’t know who I am and I can hear the birds of death at all times.” Instead she sighed and started taking her clothes off. The doctor quickly reminded her that she didn’t need to undress.

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Emily Kendal Frey is the author of Airport (Blue Hour 2009), Frances (Poor Claudia 2010), and The New Planet (Mindmade Books 2010) as well as three chapbook collaborations. Her first full-length collection, The Grief Performance, will be published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2011. She lives in Portland, Oregon.