UNAPPLIANCE

for Katie

A mustache

Some years ago, I met a young man. He was trying to grow a mustache. He was someone's friend. My friend slept with him. He was trying to make some films. I didn't know much about him. I didn't think much about him. Next time he occurred to me, he was married, and in love in a way I wouldn't have expected. He managed to grow that mustache. And a beard. I guess that's just the age we're at.

A MESS

"Something, something, something, letting go is tough," F said, trying hard to keep a stiff neck from lulling under the weight of the drinks. "It's like Holden Caulfield said, how you can fall half in love with someone just by sharing an intimate moment." The bottle slipped through F's grasp and fell to the floor, foaming and spilling as it rolled. K quietly stood up, picked up the bottle, placed it in the sink, and mopped up the mess with a towel. Then K dabbed a wet nose with the back of a soft sleeve and wiped the corners of lightly-teared eyes with worn fingertips.
"I'm leaving you," K said.
"You shouldn't've let it get this bad," F said as K opened the door of the apartment and closed it quietly.

Five scenes in a car

I am standing in the street, somewhere between fury and civility, and a squat middle aged man is sneering out from his balcony and calling me a mad woman. The man in front of me, who rammed into the back of my car half an hour earlier, is smiling in triumph. I am searching for something to make sense of this malice. I can't. And as I ask once more to be heard, my fingertips and toes and the ridges of my ears turn suddenly cold.

*

Fields are passing to my left, and though it is dark, I know they are bright green and ripe with rain. Some image of a sickle slices through the brief calm, and I feel it hook into my pelvis. I am dragged into the field, I don't know where my limbs are, mud in my hair, one foot bare, a grip pinching the skin of my wrist, breath, screams, slaps, footsteps. The chaos is sensory, my horror is absolutely physical. I blink in the car. I grit my teeth, enraged by my fear. Would I feel this way in another country?

*

He approaches with his towels, as usual. It is hot and I am aware my hair is fluttering. The sharp clack of his ring on the window, his tight frown and intense stare. Once, he broke into a smile as I was refusing him, which flattened me. But today his aggression seems heightened. It is hot and I am sure the window is cool. He knocks again and I shake my head again and for a brief moment I will him to punch through the window and grab my throat.

*

I have had more pleasant a time than I really deserve. I have become so brittle and unpleasant that the mere idea of enjoying a slow evening in someone's company feels distant and uneasy. Ease, comfort, laughter, wonder, long absent visitors, their company has saturated me and I feel heavy with them as we come to a halt. You reach into the back seat and hand me something and once I thank you there is an open moment when I am terrified you will lean toward me and I am afraid you won't.

*

I shouldn't have drunk that last whiskey, but something in the way my life is composed is making me reckless. And that courtyard makes me look at my whole life together and fills me with impulses. One hand hanging out of the window, ring gleaming in the rearview, bass drumming in the car doors, pedal pressed all the way down, head back against the rest, face smug with youth and stupidity, ears full of the rush of road and the slick of wet tyres, I am racing. One of these days, I may not make it home. My body already knows what it will feel like as the bonnet folds obediently like an accordion against the back of a truck and my bones crumple into my flesh.

IDYLLIC ROMANCE

There's a place in the corner of the bottom of the glass where the smell of my last drink lingers. I stick my face into the rim, the cool glass indenting a perfect circle around my mouth and nose, and inhale the fumes. No visible remnants exist and the world looks upside down. I breathe in again, the tangy odor bringing back memories of moments before. Pulling the glass away, I look into the bottom once more, searching absentmindedly through my teeth for a hint of the taste that had made me cringe with a frozen promise of happiness.

Sighing, I set it down and, again, pour another. I drop some ice cubes in afterward, skill-lessly spilling drink onto the counter. Another deep breath and I take a long drink.

A thing that happens

There is a thing that happens in my head and heart when I see a particular kind of photograph, by a certain kind of person, of a certain kind of person, with a specific affect I can't describe.

Sometimes there is breeze in her hair, sometimes it is a field or a forest or a mountaintop or a European street or the back of a southern pick-up truck or a sweaty third-world backdrop. Sometimes a smile half-formed, sometimes a good dress, sometimes a casual sleeve. Sometimes his face is slack, like the photograph is beside the point and he doesn't even see the camera. Sometimes a twinge of self-awareness, sometimes a breathtaking candour. Sometimes a banal moment, an ankle, a wrist, an elbow, a spoon, crumbs on the table and on the plate and the corner of a crumpled something, maybe a napkin, or a newspaper, towel, shirt, or scrap paper. Scrap paper. Let's just call it scrap paper. It may as well be in all the photographs, standing in for creativity and recklessness or whatever else was making the air thick wherever that shutter clicked.

There are doodles behind these photos. Doodles, notes, post-its, plans, blueprints, rough drafts, I know, and I'd like to read them because all of it is worthwhile. There is a before and an after and the debris and preparation for either or both. But there is only ever one frame, one point on a line or a curve or a spine when something lands or hurts or makes you feel THERE. That. This.