Creamy Bullets (2 page)

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Girl With Shaky Hands

“
I
thought that was a bird but it’s a rollerskate,”she said, looking at my shirt. Her fingernails looked clumpy, as if painted by a child. Her neck stuck out and her chin led her face. Her face seemed lost in my chest. “I don’t suppose you like this cheese,” she said. Her head popped back when she said this and she stuck something in her mouth. She chewed in an up-and-down manner and then in hard circles, like a strenuous exercise. She looked at me and waited. The music of the party, a mixed selection of music unfamiliar to the guests, made everyone feel insecure and dumb.

Someone screamed from the kitchen and I saw a flash or a spark out of the corner of my eye. “Emergency room!” someone shouted. A girl with a towel over her hand bustled toward me with a stunned white face. A man in a green angora sweater steered her toward the door. An older man with a beard followed them with something bobbing in a ziplock bag of ice. “We’ll take my car,” he shouted ahead of him.

Many people left after that. Someone said something about another party. A party with familiar music and some empty rooms for people who didn’t like the small talk or fake socializing. The girl who asked about my shirt was on the front porch, smoking and crying. It was dark outside and the orange glow of her cigarette shook wildly in front of her face, like she was tracing a picture of something she couldn’t focus on. I smelled the menthol smoke but I also smelled something else, more private and disturbing. I stood close by, wondering what to do next. “That could have been me,” she said. She dropped the cigarette finally, and crushed its light.

What Great Tragedies

S
he tried to explain to me how people always had throw up inside of them. It’s there in your stomach too, she said, and poked me there. You just haven’t thrown it up yet.

Everything we talked about was something I’d never talked about with anyone else. When she was eight, she went to the hospital twice. Once, she said, they tore a hole in my neck to get a fishhook out.

The other time was for a finger that was bit off by their pet parrot.

I looked at her neck, her fingers. I looked at her mouth as she spoke, her eyes—gray and calm. Maybe they were blue.

I was thrilled to be with her. This kind of love was lucky, I told myself. I actually did talk to myself about it sometimes, usually while driving, and then I would wonder if someone were hiding in the backseat.

On the flipside though, I thought she must have been bored with me. What insights could I share? What great tragedies had I endured? I told her about the time when I rode a motorcycle into an empty ditch and then burnt my hand on the exhaust pipe pushing it off my leg. The lip sting I suffered at age twelve when a bee snuck into my orange soda can.

I wet my bed until I was thirteen. That was tough, I said.

See this ear, she finally said, as if waiting her turn. She pointed at her left ear. Sometimes it hears things opposite. Like you could say cold and I’ll think you said hot.

I wasn’t sure if she was kidding around. I usually had to wait a good beat or two to see how the silence played out. So I hate you is I love you? I asked.

Sometimes, she said. Yes. Sometimes, yes.

Stomach

“
I
hate food,” she said. She looked around the restaurant sadly, then picked up a plastic squirt bottle of sauce. “Have you tried this sauce, it’s really good.”

There was a lull in our conversation. She came to lunch heartbroken. We were longtime friends, but in this case, I wasn’t helping. She tried again to explain. “It was just so perfect. It was the first time I’d been able to stay in the same room as someone else while I worked. He’d just lie in bed and wait. He was always ready.”

The food came and I waited for her to take the first bite. She stuck the point of her knife in her burrito and cut a straight vertical line. It was a stomach, opened for surgery. She put a hand over her mouth. I watched her shoulders shake a little and then she dropped her hand. I wondered what it would be like to have meaningless sex with her.

She took a bite from the beany insides. “I don’t feel any better,” she sighed.

I couldn’t look at her. I tried to say something but it came out ordinary and useless. She didn’t seem to hear it though, or it didn’t penetrate her despair. She had the look of a lost, confused animal. To make matters worse, the woman at the next table was wearing the same sweater.

I fiddled with my tacos, holding one with my right hand, at chest level.

I tried to eat without pleasure, for her sake.

Fresh Salmon

T
he fresh salmon arrived Fed Ex. Jake and I would eat it that weekend after killing the coyote. We slept in the backyard wearing motorcycle helmets and garlic. Sally said she could smell our knees and she made us wear long johns. She watched over us from the back window as she made tartar sauce spiced with the eyes of the fish, from a recipe created by her suicidal father. He was scarred years ago when a coyote attacked him and toppled his fishing cooler. It’s something in this family we can’t bury fast enough.

Girl Drummer

I
used to stay out late and sometimes let a man earn a blowjob. I was loud and pretty and popular in certain abusive circles.

But there was that one time when I offended a friend of yours at a book signing. He was non-literary.

But now it seems I’m settling down. I get up early in the morning and eat healthy foods. I’ve even learned how to drive.

I would much rather go fishing in the quiet morning than fuck you in the basement on the broken chair next to the drum set.

Bubbles

M
y elevator ride stops abruptly, between floors six and seven. A woman I’ve never seen before is in the elevator with me. I try to call an operator on the red telephone inside the emergency door but it only rings once before going mysteriously dead. “Can I see your wallet?” the woman asks me. After looking at the contents of my wallet, she hands it back and then looks through her purse. “Aha,” she says, pulling out a pack of gum. “We may as well make the best of it,” she tells me. She hands me a big cube of purple gum, the kind that junior high school girls chew. “You go first,” she says. I chew vigorously and then push out a nicely-rounded bubble. She raises her eyebrows in approval. She chews slowly, her lovely lips curling, her jaw moving in a smooth little dance. Her bubble comes out confidently, without fear. It grows bigger like a puff of smoke. She pauses for a moment and says, “Mine’s strawberry.” It’s bright red. She stares into my eyes. “What next?” I ask her. “Bubble fight,” she says. We stand close without touching and press our gum together.

You and They

O
ne of the first things you do is figure out ways to shorten their name. As if you’re trying to make your utterance of their name sound original in your own voice. Jacoline becomes Jackie becomes Jack becomes j. Dennis becomes Denny becomes Den becomes d.

And then you make your touch unique. You use just your fingers or your thumbs or your hands or your whole right arm when you touch. You clench. You breathe in sharply when you do this.

In the morning, you wrap your legs around them like seaweed. You run your fingers down their back and hear them make pleasing sounds. You see the lines, the scratches, blood under the skin. You press harder.

When they leave, you embrace by the door and pay attention to how you fit this way. Whose arms go where and where their face lands in your chest. If you feel the heartbeats, count them until you part. Measure them. Learn the rhythms.

This Old House

E
mbarrassing ways to die: Getting hit in a crosswalk. Experimental aircraft crumpling into a tree. Dying in my sleep, not man enough to do it awake.

I wish you didn’t watch over me like a hawk. Sitting behind me, clipping your toenails. Breathing your drunk wine breath. You’re obsessed about cancer. About what causes it, how long you can live with it or suffer through it. About knowing people who have it. You seek them out and then say to me, I told you so. You make me feel your breasts for lumps. Your throat. Everywhere. I think about what’s inside me too. If I look close enough I can see my own purple blood in my veins. When people change their bodies with the help of doctors and money, it reminds me of a house. Fixed up on the outside. Inside, it still looks like shit. I hold your hand in the dark. We talk about cancer in the dark. If I look at you I’ll just see the outline of your hair. Is death like a song whose words are forgotten? Or is it the eight ball, scratched, falling into a hole, before the table is cleared?

Cold Cream

H
e can’t stop chewing his fingernails. He likes the grit inside. The chewy finger dirt. A blind date once told him it was bad for him. She said, “You’re chewing on shit. That’s actual shit.” She was the same girl who later made him lick her fake leather boots. Then she got all prissy and wouldn’t take her shirt off. He noticed that she had a dumb tattoo on her calf. They were making out on her couch while her roommate, a tall awkward girl with thick glasses, watched porn in her own room. Their wet mouth sounds were drowned out by the moaning television.

Every time he tried to paw at one of her buttons or zippers, she told him she looked better with clothes on. He told her he couldn’t see anything anyway, with all the lights out. She said even his hands would like her better with her clothes on. He started to wonder if there was something wrong with her. Maybe she had a scar or a fake appendage.

Finally she said, “Okay. Wait,” and he heard a zipper being pulled. Untoothing itself apart.

It was just her bag or purse.

He heard some unpacking of things and the ketchupy squirt of some lotion. “Let it out,” she said to him.

He felt her hand move toward him then, something cold poking him in the stomach and moving down. There was so much of it in her hand, he could barely feel her fingers. They felt like cold breakfast sausages.

When she was done with him, she gave him a wad of toilet paper to clean up. A bunch of it stuck to him. His penis looked like a papier-mâché puppet.

“Can I do it to you?” he asked.

“Not today,” she said.

It really bothered him that she said Not today instead of Not tonight. It sounded snide the way she said it. Like thanks, but no thanks.

He didn’t know what to do with himself. He felt a deep connection to the couch.

He thought he heard her laugh. But maybe it was coming from her roommate’s room.

Remembering Her

H
er name was a small town name, an unusual name…a long, dark, spiraling name.

A boy’s name from another country.

Her name was said by others over baskets of chips. It was the name of a mermaid or a mermaid’s pet when they’re lost—posters on telephone poles…a lost name, a wanted name.

Her name was like mine without all the breathing.

In the dark it was like a clock radio that wakes me up too early wondering what her name is.

What did it smell like?

How do you spell it?

Where Goal Posts Go to Die

I
went onto the field where they were tearing the goal posts down and several people were stuffing the various parts under their arms and carrying them out to their cars (right crossbar, left crossbar, the actual net where the football lands) and I asked one of them what they were planning on doing with the goal posts but he was interrupted by a fan of the other team sulking away and spitting into the astroturf, “If our fucking kicker wasn’t a shitheel, we would have stole the game,” and I wondered if that was the right word: stole, stolen, stealed—I wasn’t really sure because sometimes in the excitement of post-game goal post tearing down, I lose track of grammar, of the way words change with time and tense and as I was getting into my car to drive away two men tapped me on the shoulder and I noticed that they were both exactly twenty-five pounds overweight (as if they each stuffed a bag of dog food down their sweats) and they held out part of the lower crossbar, asking if I had room in my trunk for it and saying they needed a ride out to the beach because that’s where everyone was going and that’s where the goal posts would be buried and that’s where we would drink more beer and that’s where we would sing into the wind and that’s where we would wait for something to bloom and grow further.