Amy Stuber
In the late morning, the bar’s parking lot is thick with dead frogs, and the door has been spray-painted, “Go home, jackasses,” which encapsulates almost everyone. Corn fields surround the bar building, and the green of their husks has gone gray with dirt close to the road.
The sun hurts my eyes, but inside is the relief of black walls and bad music and Alice eating corn flakes from a cup in front of a mirror. Her fake eyelashes sit on the edge of the counter in front of her, and if she leans forward a little, they will ruffle her bare stomach like spiders or dandelions or any soft and unexpected thing.
It’s July, and the joyriding frat boys who delight in the lark of a strip club and know nothing of boundaries have gone home to golf courses and internships, and there is the relief of the regulars who fill the place at lunch hour, who rest what’s come to feel like a benign hand on my ass and talk to me about their son’s broken clavicle or the tiny pouch of a daughter’s baby teeth lost somewhere in a ranch house, never to be found.
Two years into college and working here and really my whole life as a human woman, I’m the master of disassociating: body and mind, moments when I wish to be anything else but in this body. But then also not to be in it would be its own catastrophe, not to bike over darkening farm roads in the evening with a few ears of stolen corn in my backpack and a rat’s nest of dollar bills in my pocket and the cicadas a shitshow of noise and a pickup full of teenagers in the back zipping so close to my arm and leg I can almost feel the raucous exhale of their laughter, and then they pass and I am as I usually am: alone.
***
Aaron comes in near the end of my noon-to-eight shift when only a few men are drinking and not even looking at Elena on stage in metallic shorts. He’s selling microgreens, which is weird because we are a strip club in a farm field next to a factory in Kansas and there is no need. But Aaron wheels his bike in and leans it against the wall. The basket on the front of the bike is stuffed with containers of microgreens, each labeled with a sticker that reads: “LIFECHANGING!” It’s a big promise, lifechanging, and who doesn’t want that?
I’m at the back table waiting for the clock to hit 8, and of course Aaron comes over and sits down and says, “You should be doing something else, not this,” like everyone says who gets to know me even a little, especially men. And usually it annoys me, and I have lots of ready lines about how owning my sexuality is empowering, etc..
But then there’s Aaron who asks only for water while his greens go wilted in his bike basket. “I’m saving cash to buy a van and drive to Moab,” he says. “There’s a kind of purity of landscape there.” Of course, he is a person who camps, but also: his face has a softness to it like anything could hurt him.
“You know, I am not here for you,” I tell him because it’s one of the things I say to boys, to men. And then: “I’m not going to fuck you.” And he says, “That’s fine.” The music stops and starts again, and Elena goes to the bar where she calls her son, and I can hear her walking him through the steps for making macaroni and cheese. A small plane makes a pass low-down, and the concrete block of the building shakes, and the few men in the room cheer and then get back to drinking.
***
When my shift ends at 8, Aaron offers to give me a ride home in his bike basket, which isn’t a perfect arrangement, but it’s better than getting a ride in Alice’s Toyota because Alice is always drunk.
He wheels his bike out and I follow. To make room for me, he stacks the greens containers in a tower in the parking lot, and their biodegradable plastic shells glow in the motion light, and they are like some army of future animals: half carbon life form/half manufactured.
Since I’m tired of folding myself up to accommodate, I let my legs dangle outside the basket, even though doing so throws him off balance, but maybe isn’t that the whole fucking point?
My house is a converted garage behind a large house in the old-house part of town. I warn him not to leave his bike outside the fence in the spot where mine had been stolen the week before. He shrugs, and I’m sure he’s thinking something about karma and the universe, which in any other person would disgust me. The sky is turning pink and blue, and the cicadas rattle so loud my ears hurt.
We sit in our underwear in the garden behind the big house and decide not to care about mosquitoes. It’s dark and he can’t see anything of my body, which makes everything easier and better. Amorphous love. Amoeba love. We eat nasturtiums. We get the yard-long tube of gumballs that someone gave me forever ago and chew every single piece quickly, getting all the sugar, and then spitting it out right into the yard before getting another piece. We talk and then don’t talk and then talk again. We look at the goddamned moon. I let him hold my bare breasts in his two hands without flinching. My mind wanders, and I’m thinking of sea lions for who knows what reason and blue-green ocean water, and his hands are still there, and I don’t move them. Maybe this is love. Does it matter? This is love.
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Amy Stuber’s fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in Witness, The Common, Idaho Review, Best Small Fictions 2020, and elsewhere. She’s an Assistant Flash Editor for Split Lip Magazine. She’s on Twitter @amy_stuber_ and online at www.amystuber.com.
