Inklings Fall 2019

Inklings Arts & Letters
David’s humming had floated through the doorway and into the
kitchen, and I had tried to start my counting over again. But the heat of
the apartment made his voice sticky, and I felt it seep into my ears and
clot the sound of the knife hitting the cutting board as I made another
slice in the apple.
The weekend was usually the only time I had the mornings to myself,
when David slept in and I could peel away from the bed and eat in
front of the fan and exist in the calmness of my own uninterrupted
body. During the week, we woke at the same time for our jobs. We both
worked in HR, but in different companies, in buildings ten minutes
apart from each other. We rode in the car together, and he dropped
me off and picked me up, and the space that our separate jobs gave us
reminded me of when we first met, in college, and we’d lay together on
the lawn between our classes and every breath of air around him was
like something crisp and new.
Moving in together after we graduated felt like something that would
bring crispness and newness to every day. I imagined falling asleep and
waking up each morning to his brown eyes. I imagined him caressing
my pinkie every day while we ate every meal and took every shower
together. I imagined the romance of two bodies fusing into one, of two
lives becoming one set of lungs, breathing in the days together.
But when it was the weekend, and we ate together and slept together
and were together every moment, I instead searched for the parts of
him that I wanted to rip my skin away from. His loose jaw, his cheerful
hums, his hot touch on a hot day.
One two three four…
The apple didn’t sound crisp and sweet anymore. It sounded like
something else in my life that I would have to rip into two pieces;
something that I would hate so much that I would press it down into
my body and boil it and boil it and never let it out. I felt like if I put
an apple slice inside me, there wouldn’t be room for it. My entire self
would overflow and every crack in my body would seep with meanness
and ugliness and red, hot blood.
Suddenly the knife was above my pointer finger, right on the joint
below my fingernail. I heard David’s hums as he turned on the sink. I
heard his hums and my throat was boiling and I pressed the knife down
hard, so that the hot world would stop and I could step out of it.
………
In the morning, I told David that I was still feeling up to seeing Jamie
and Eric. I put more white pills in my body, and David and I walked
through a sidewalk of heat to Jamie and Eric’s apartment. He was
trying to hold my normal hand, but I told him it was too warm and our
skin was sizzling. I told him we’d be humans with puddles for hands
by the time we made it to their place.
But Jamie and Eric’s apartment had an air conditioner that worked,
and when Jamie offered me a cup of coffee, I was able to say yes. The
caffeine soared through my veins, and I wondered if maybe that was all
I was missing. Maybe if I had made a cup of coffee the morning before,
I wouldn’t have given myself a hand that would look wrong forever.
“I just can’t believe it was so hot in your apartment that your hand
slipped on a knife,” Jamie was saying as she poured more coffee into
David’s cup.
“I’m just glad she’s okay,” David said quickly, because he knew I hated
it when Jamie made comments about our apartment. He reached over
and rubbed my pinkie and his touch felt like it should, like a warm
blanket on a cold night.
“So is your finger always going to be missing its tip?” Eric asked.
I nodded, and I could tell they wanted me to seem more upset about my
pointer finger’s fate. But I didn’t care about my finger. I cared about
clouds, and about my throat, and about living with someone I loved and
still having something inside of me that could become so angry that it
would do anything it could to escape, to take off the lid of a boiling pot
and let my insides rise out of me like steam, finally, finally released.
“Well, at least it’s not your ring finger,” Jamie smiled at David, and I
felt the white pills inside of me, making my body noiseless and numb.
“Did you keep the tip of your finger?” Eric was stuck on this idea of my
incompleteness. “Couldn’t they just stitch it back on?”
“We thought so, too,” David said, “but I must have stepped on it when
I came into the kitchen or something. It was too dirty and misshapen
Fall 2019
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