Night fell, and just walking in the dark tightened her insides.
Outside, her lipstick slicked her smile, her hair hit her shoulders just the way she liked it, and her jeans hugged her hips nearly perfectly.
He will like me, she thought, and then it will all begin again.
From above, the highways became rivers, the traffic glinting like water droplets so tightly packed they streamed. In the oxbow lake of an exit ramp, red and blue lights flashed like minnows.
She would have preferred to remain above it all, but the plane descended, carrying her like a diving tern. Soon, she would have no choice but to join the rest of the water, swim the pre-carved channels and tributaries.
That season, I was sicker than I’d ever been. Cold, cough, fever, flu; my body would not carry me down the hall. The bed pulled me under and you, you made me soup and brought me Gatorade.
While I slept, though, you played me. When I woke, everything had changed, although it had been changing all along and I just hadn’t noticed. That was when I began to heal.
It is possible to hate babies, their miniature appendages, their powdery-shitty smell, their violent cries, their ham-handed eating.
It is possible, she thought, as she fingered the square of worn blanket in her coat pocket.
The banana apples overflowed their bins, but this year, so many fewer flowers budded into Asian pears. For that reason, she saved the small pear she selected for a moment when she could slice it thinly, hold each translucent half-moon against her tongue. After all, she had lost so much already.
A moment after take-off, the plane’s wings dipped left, then right. There was quiet flying for a time, then another bout or two of bumpy air. Toward the end of the flight, the plane descended through clouds, leaping and lurching toward the runway as if it were off-roading. The wheels smacked the runway as if the pilot had stopped paying attention when the ground approached.
But then it all stopped, and the bell overhead told me it was time to disembark, to ready myself for the smoother path ahead of me.
He pointed into the empty swimming pool. “There,” he said. “There is where it all happened.”
Leaves rustled where water once lapped. He pressed a book into her hands, filled with pictures and stories of the ways he’d made her smile. She declined to open it, set it on the lip of the pool.
He gasped as she dove, but her arms took hold, and she swam to one end and then the other, propelled through the air so much more easily than she expected.
100 Proof 