Allison Palmer
I left the shower running, even hotter than the broken radiator hot it already was. I hunched under the stream in the university bathroom until red blotches bloomed like carnations along the garden row of my spine. I turned my face into the spray and dropped my head back, gaping mouth like a baby bird, willing the water to fill in all empty spaces between my ribs and behind my eyes. I let it gush down the back of my throat until I gagged and spit it out against the tile. I played this game until my partner turned cold and the inside of my mouth was swollen and metallic. I turned the nozzle off and wrapped a towel under my arms, shaking droplets from my skin. I stood, angry pink, overripe and covered in goosebumps, waiting for your voice outside. I curled my toes on the bathmat and clung to the doorknob, even lighter and somehow, impossibly, more buoyant than I was before.
***
What scarce gravity I’ve ever had is still problematic. I fall, only slower. Hit the Earth, only leave less of a dent, with less of a sound. I remembered my dad telling me to jump. I teetered on the brink of a swimming pool, 60 pounds of overbite and chipped polish. He rested his elbows on the concrete lip, and his chin on his hands, grinning under chlorine ringed eyes. Chicken, he slung the word at me with ease. Come on, jump over me. I shook my head with enough vigor to rip it from my tiny frame, hysterical with something between adoration and complete terror. I took four or five strides forward and skidded to a ritualistic stop before I got to him. I peered down at his face framed by artificial blue, waiting for a flinch, a raise of an eyebrow, a ripple of movement from anywhere around him and found nothing. Sometimes he would yawn, feigning sleep. You’re crazy, he’d tell me, everyone’s looking at you, and this is getting boring. I tripped over my feet, barely even wet by now, on the way back to my starting line for the last time. I stood, locking my eyes with his, still slack with innocence, then shot forward with as much speed as I could coax from my legs to throw myself over him. Occasionally, I would manage a glimpse of his smile widen as I flailed over his head. He burst up from under me in a wake of water, shouting so loud every mother and floating bearing child would inhale sharply at the distaste. His hands never touched me as I crashed into the surface of the pool in a heap of spitty laughter and crooked limbs. I reemerged, rearranged, and paddled back to him, little body heaving love in a swimsuit, unlimited.
***
I leaned into the door as it opened, attempting to smother any possible groans or squeaks it might emit. I poked my dripping head out and pulled it back in again, a few seconds longer each time. Like the hesitant clownfish from Finding Nemo, flicking himself in and out of the sea anemone twenty times after his mother is eaten by a barracuda. I decided tentatively that the barracuda must be occupied. The only sound I could pick up came from my chattering teeth, an annoying betrayal and the heinous result of standing on the linoleum for too long. A breath came up from the bottom of my feet and carried me into the abyss between the communal bathroom and my bedroom. Little fish out too far over the drop off, keep swimming. My first fingertip landed on the metal handle in time with your call. Mellifluous, insistent. I paused, assessing the volume of my heart in the hallway. Hey, I know you can hear me. What could you possibly have been doing in there that long? Brush your hair and come out here when you’re done. Okay? Puddles formed in the curve of my lower back and shoved each other over the edge, down the backs of my legs. Just give me a minute. My pulse kicked up to the same consistency as rain and the words left on the last of my oxygen.
***
I drowned, for fifty-five seconds, at a hotel birthday party when I was nine. People say anything can happen in a minute. True, small things. Read a page, crack six eggs, brush your hair. But they mean the bigger things. Trip down the stairs and break a leg, say something ugly, lose an argument, your keys, yourself. Five seconds short. My best-friend, one of many nomadic best-friends I had at the time, wanted to jump into the deep end of the pool. I nodded, happy enough, and swung my feet towards the ladder. She grabbed my wrist to help pull me up. We scurried, poised on our tip toes, around to the white and black tiles that read No Diving. She wrapped her pruned hand around mine, and I winced at the unsavory hardness of her crystal ring against my palm. We counted to three and leapt, clumsily, intertwined. Our bodies sunk in unison towards the bottom. I started to kick, letting streams of bubbles out of my nose, but the haze of fluorescent lighting got farther away. I felt a pinch of metal dig into my shoulder blade as something shoved me. I recoiled and pushed even harder upwards, again and then again, feet swishing fruitlessly under me. The teenage lifeguard read a magazine. Maybe People. Black dots began forming where the light was, and I almost opened my mouth to quench the frantic burn in my chest when another set of hands wrenched under my armpits. Deposited in a plastic chair, gulping in air, someone’s mom offered me juice. The one who jumped in to save me was screaming at the lifeguard. Hugh Jackman, the sexiest man alive 2008, laid damp and forgotten. My best-friend sobbed. She panicked. She thought my shoulders were the ladder. She didn’t mean it. I told her it was okay and dried her tears on my towel. She sent a card to my house a week later. Written in vanilla scented marker were the words I’m sorry I almost killed you.
***
I clicked the door shut and inhaled the thick incense of my “Beach Walk” candle, flickering low on the wick. You said you thought it smelled romantic on a day when the fragrance managed to stick to my skin. It’s funny how binaries can exist endlessly inside of each other. My room was messy. Strewn socks, pillows, Styrofoam coffee cups. A mess made of one thing is still a mess; just more decisive, better understood. I brushed my hair so slowly I started to give myself arthritis. A mess made of a hundred things is just a mess. Throw a blanket over it, you sometimes told me with a flash of a smile, no one will ever know. I nudged one of the cups over with my toe, but the liquid had congealed to the bottom. I wondered what it was like to be shapeshifter. You were a good roommate at first, I supposed you still were. My parents thought you were vivacious, bubbly. You might have been a bad roommate only in this room, only because of me. I could hear your voice, filmy, gossamer bright, and tinkling around in our box of a living room. The type of voice that was best suited to tilted chins and concave chests that seem shy and perverse all at the same time. I shivered and dropped my towel, hunting around in my drawers for the sweatpants with matching holes at the bottoms of both pockets. I pulled the drawstring tight around my waist and a t-shirt over my head. My collar and hip bones strained lightly against the fabric, so I added a sweatshirt. You liked to joke about how big my clothes were. You’re positively swimming in that, tiny thing, you’d giggle and bunch the loose ends of the sleeves together in your hands. You reached low for something you dropped behind the couch and told me you couldn’t remember the last time you were that small.
***
Lots of things are defined by their proximities. Luck, damage, season. I think comparisons help us cope, minimize. When August nights were quiet and mild, my dad and I would float down the North River. The currents reverse in and out of the ocean. We drove with patched up inner tubes to the opposite end of the flow and let the brackish carry us back in. He didn’t talk much, neither did I, but he gazed up every few minutes to check I was still with him. On an evening when the greenhead flies were particularly bad and the air tasted like salt, he told me that we leave traces of ourselves everywhere we go. A dot of russet blood on a tripped-over rock, a smudge of sweat on a store window. I slapped at another fly on my exposed elbow and rolled my eyes at his atypical existentialism. His eyes were closed, chin on his hands. I tensed up, half expecting him to come up from behind and flip me out of tube. We aren’t locked into ourselves like we think we are, you know, although we give very little back in return for what we screw up. I mused and popped bubbles on the waters’ surface, green-gold, elastic. Give and take. The current was quick enough that I could settle all of my muscles and still move forward, entirely kinetic. Tips of river grass tickled the soles of my feet and the flies stopped coming after a while. An inlet surrounded by a cluster of mossy boulders signaled our stopping place, before the river’s mouth emptied into the bay and then the Atlantic. We angled ourselves towards it about 100 feet back and drifted in. My dad anchored his foot on the same sturdy rock and reached for my hand to hoist me out. His fingers connected with mine but slid out from my grasp. He tried again but found no purchase. And so I went with the late tide, partly laughing partly screaming, digging into the current, as he jogged along the bank. The river widened out before me, dipping and in and out of the horizon. I shrank smaller and smaller as it carried me and eventually I gave in, letting my head tip back, stretching all of my limbs out, powerless even in all the physicality I could muster. I cut the side of my calf on a branch when my dad finally caught up to me, stinging and bluish red, trading blood happily for sun-colored water.
***
Voices over your old lap-top clung to the insides of my ears, forcing me to focus inwards on the weight of my footsteps, the chill of damp hair on my neck. You seemed to shed clothes like old skin, unneeded, restrictive. This was your nightly metamorphosis but what good is testimony with no witness. I folded myself into the corner of the couch and my thumbs found their homes in my holey pockets. Hey there chickee, you called me pet names like a little sister. How’s the week been? You asked me questions about my homework and the status of my laundry avoidance while you scrolled through chat rooms and requests, bending into shapes that would fit nicely in the video screen. Men from Louisiana or Ireland or the fourth floor of our dorm invited themselves into the room, into you, and into me. I told you my workload was heavy, still haven’t done laundry. Your cheeks were back lit pink from heat and thrill. I took very few breaths. If I let the air out of my tissue paper lungs I might fly away, or worse, I might not. You arched over the furniture like it was made to contour to you and drew your hands over your legs like cracks in a breaking dam. I wondered if the cushions and the floor held more of me by now or you. My throat was too water-logged to ask. You muted the men for a moment and remarked that I smelled romantic again, you have to borrow that candle. Is it a perfume? You gazed over at me, bright eyes clear and unpolluted, I said I’d have to check on that. I sat high on my heels until my back ached and chewed on the soft parts of my cheek, already familiar enough with the rust taste and slight burn of resistance. You appeared on the couch and wrapped your arm around me. A boy from Jacksonville whistled, screechy, off pitch. You waved your hand in his direction, unbothered. You know, you could do this too, if you wanted. They’d like you. Your sweeping gesture took less than a second and covered my entirety. It’s easy enough, maybe help with stress. You seemed pleased with the suggestion. I smiled, it must have looked gentle to you, earnest even, and peeled myself out from under your arm. I just have to run to the bathroom. Voices flooded down the hall behind me and seeped in under the door. I left the faucet running on high, steadying myself with both hands on the counter. I counted the tears that trickled off my cheek bones. I watched them spin down the drain, suffocating, and tried to figure out how to stop swimming in circles.
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Allison Palmer is a student and writer attending Hobart and William Smith Colleges in central NY, where she studies Biology and English. The rest of the year she resides in coastal MA with her family and pets.
