Part I: the X

D’s new house had a long backyard.

Standard disclaimer. This blog respects the anonymity of everyone in recovery, whether in AA, an alternative recovery program, or nothing at all. Letters, applied mostly at random, have been assigned to fictional characters so there is no mistaking them for real-life persons. Any resemblance to real-life persons is purely coincidental. However, some of the shit about D is real.

D’s new house

D’s new house had a long backyard and never got too hot thanks to the shade of an apple and a willow. The fence was more moss than cedar and was D’s excuse for not adopting a dog, like her friends bade her when she broke things off with X. But there was honestly no need for a companion. She was fine. Plus, she didn’t like pets.

Animals, fine, but no pets.

She’d just broken up with one, for Christ’s sake.

The house’s last tenants were church people, from the landlord’s church it so happened, and they were apparently into St. Francis and into birds. They left behind a Francis bird bath, less than two feet tall but densely gaudy. It attracted sparrows and starlings and crows, and an owl to hunt them all at night. It had to go, the bath, but it was really heavy so it stayed.

The couple left hummingbird feeders, too. Three of them had cracked jars and had to be thrown out, but one was still good. It was a faded rose color with maybe a little rust at the base, colors that looked good on D, incidentally–she was a soft autumn. The feeder said HUMMERS in raised letters on the glass and it was cute, like an anachronism. Near where it hung you’d expect to see a milk delivery. Maybe she would have milk delivered. Some bit of excess, some farm to table. Farm to porch to table. All her rich friends had fresh produce delivered.

And pets.

This was the first house she’d ever rented, apartments only till now, and it was her first space alone in eleven years.

I never got to see her house. She only went to mine. Hers was for the birds.

Lucifers

The Berylline is a three-and-a-half-inch green thing from Guadalajara usually found no farther north than Arizona. You’d mistake the green one in D’s window for one of these if you had even a basic birder’s knowledge of Southwestern hummers. But he was no Berylline, he was a Lucifer, from Big Bend, Texas. Part of some twisted migration that sent a tune of Lucifers all the way to the Pacific Northwest. The stress of the flight, the spinning of their inner compasses and the added miles, caused most of the males to turn from purple to green. At first just some freckles, as it was a dry summer in 2022 and they could chalk up the extra days tacked onto their journey as some sort of collective fever dream, but when the first weeklong rain passed over them and they were still at a loss for where the agaves and the cacti were, they just gave up and went full Berylline green to fit in.

Most of them. The one at D’s window now? Not him. He kept some purple close to his barbs that made his plumage more olive than the others, which gave a peculiar streamer effect when he was in flight. The other birds you’d lose to the wind when they scattered. The green one looked like a brushstroke. He was at the feeder every day at first light, no matter how gray the day, brushing, brushing, brushing olive green on the canvas of D’s drowsy mind, and clucking. Imagine a dripping faucet, that was its pace, mostly on time, but no metronome. And you can’t tune it out. Cover your head with a pillow, the beat goes on. The beat gets louder, in fact.

I was supposed to have seen D’s house last night. I was supposed to wake up to the Lucifers, but something went wrong. She didn’t get drunk enough is probably what.

Every date is date one

My girlfriend had only yesterday blocked me. I learned that fact quickly, because I am a quick study. It went like this: she stopped texting me. Then I stopped texting her and we moved on.

There will be others.

Not since grad school have I had to endure more than four days without getting my dick wet, and never more than two months without being blocked on a trending app.

I like them young.

But I make an exception for D. Why? Everything I’ve just told you about me she learned just by looking at my signet ring, which matched a pin on my collar. A quick study loves a quick study.

She was trying, of course, to ignore what she was thinking about me, despite the fact that she was right, about all of it. She was trying to suppress a whole lot else besides, like judgment and caricature, withholding because she had recently decided to pick back up her latest resolution, from about six years back, something about charitability.

She was trying to find gratitude.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

More on her look in a moment.

“What about you is worth blocking?”

“Did I tell you she blocked me? I didn’t.”

It’s good to tell some people what they know.

She shrugged.

“I’m not the most likable person. Online.”

I was fishing, doing that thing I do that some women let me get away with.

“If you’re so unlikable, what am I doing out here with you?”

“Getting a drink.”

“You say that like I’m a lush.”

“Aren’t you?”

She was doing that thing now, that thing where you check your face without a mirror, in another person’s face. The easy way to put it is she was self-conscious of her face, or the faces she makes. D had only recently learned, well, slowly recently learned that not everyone understands her humor. What demarcates irony from sarcasm from jest from painful jab she from a young age artfully eroded.

Not everyone appreciates art.

She stuck her tongue out at me.

I pretended I had been wounded but was no longer.

“It’s easy to block someone. It might have had nothing to do with you.”

I don’t like when D gives up.

“Or if it did have something to do with you it was minor, like an inconvenience.”

“What kind of inconvenience?”

“Well, you’re an inconvenience.”

“I can be a little solecism at times.”

Now I had to look for it in her face, the question. Is he worth correcting?

She took a drink.

Finished her drink.

Tried to get the attention of our server.

“Solipsistic?”

She couldn’t let it go.

“Isn’t that what I said?”

“Maybe I misheard.”

“This place could use some acoustic panels.”

“Or they could not book DJs.”

Now I would pretend to like this song, so I could look a little more wounded. I took every chance I could. D’s nurturing, caring instinct is too strong, and I’m too addicted to care, to her kind of care, in fact, the care of a deeply cynical person.

She was wondering about me, though, especially the jewelry. Had she seen any of it before? No. I was trying something. Trying to look more pathetic, actually, and don’t give me that look. Look around the room, every man is trying to look a little pathetic, at a bar like this anyway. You need at least a modest income to play this simpering game. You see the way each man is holding his coat, the way he so carefully gives up space. He’s not uncomfortable, he’s not allergic to the wine, no, he’s working, he’s telling you he has money enough to be sensitive.

“I’ve been wondering. In the ladies’ room,” I tucked a foot beneath my thigh like I was warming up, become familiar, “do you have, what are they called, pin-tile girls?”

I knew what they were.

“What kind of girls?”

To clarify I went through a series of oopsie-poopsie poses. Ouch, I hit my thumb with a hammer, oh no, you caught me trying on this bra, uh oh, the faucet is spraying all over my thin blouse, yikes, I’m trying to stamp out this long dynamite fuse but my heels just won’t let me!

My mimicry was spot-on, I could tell because D was trying not to understand, trying to look like she was trying not to understand. Actually, she had just lost the word since I had fallen so short, and she knows that when she tries to think of a word her thinking face is awful.

She thought of the word asshole.

“But like with big breasts and hips.”

“Pin-up girls!” she laughed, oh did she laugh, and was immediately sorry, because she didn’t want to hurt stupid old simpering me.

“For soldiers, I think, that was what they were for, pilots especially. They could pin the girls up in their planes. Give them confidence, I guess.”

“Ah, pin up.”

She wanted to laugh some more, I could tell. God, it feels good. But I wanted her to think about her face some more, so I pouted for some reason, about nothing in particular.

When D first saw daylight, that’s right, when she was born, I know these things, she looked away while simultaneously closing her eyes. Her frown touched her collarbone and she raised her forehead as if to raise her eyebrows, but they stayed put, in fact inched down, think of an accordion squeezed out when its song is done. Everyone tried to coo, but they couldn’t. When she was twelve she learned the power of her face, like a gut punch to a bully or a “really” to a substitute teacher. But it cost her more than one friendship. She seemed always to be disappointed in them or to be laughing at them, her friends, or laughing at the world, with a Mona Lisa scowl.

People need breaks from her, and she knows it. That’s useful knowledge to someone like me.

The DJ stopped spinning but D’s decrease in volume was late, or to some ears, like mine, just in time. Like a beat drop.

“We don’t have any pin-up girls in the women’s restroom!”

The DJ riffled through what might have been a pile of set lists, that was the only other sound, until he found an index card, then he puffed up like a reverend.

“I’ve seen the men’s, though. They’re pretty great,” she said more quietly.

“Shh,” I whispered. I was pretending to like something again, this time sanctimoniously.

“I would like to acknowledge that the land we’re on first belonged to DJ Duwamish, the first house DJ of Duwamish and Muckleshoot origins to spin at Beer Haus’s LoFi Night, leading the way for DJs like me, one-sixteenth Coast Salish, to allow me to stand where you stood. Scratch on, DJ Du. Cheers.”

“Cheers,” everyone said.

“Cheers,” I said.

She allowed her knee to touch mine and she let me press back a little. Some knee play to regain the night, to give me a moment to pretend to smile again. She just wants to please, it’s instinctive.

“Do you want another Manhattan?”

“I should probably switch to wine or something.”

“Ooo, let’s get bubbles!” she ejaculated.

“Or maybe you want some water?”

Oopsie-poopsie.

“I’ll have bubbles.”

She looked right at my forehead and reminded me with her eyes that I had shushed her just before the land acknowledgment. I had pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth and blown air out, or through, whatever, made a sound like a trumpet’s spit valve, in the quiet of the bar.

I took my knee away and put both feet on the floor and turned to find our server.

“D will have bubbles.”

Bubbles will make her face right and color the world the colors it should be.

The clog

Hummingbirds cluck. They breathe 250 breaths per minute and wingbeat 700 to 5,000 a minute and they cluck. They can cluck up to 30 kHz but potential sexual partners only respond to sounds 7 kHz or lower. Rivals get the loud clucks. And it’s not all bluster. Get out of my territory, this is my feeder, my flower, my bitch, I’ll snap your fucking beak, etc. They follow through. Just ask the red one and the thorntail that used to frequent D’s feeder.

The green one was lonely. An unusually tough talker, he drank alone and when he caught a rival he reacted in the accustomed manner, barking at his uppermost register, about 33 kHz, and zagging, he never zigged, zagging like an Olympic sprinter fresh out of the blocks, beak glinting like a noir murder weapon. He fatally wounded his cousin in Texas, and almost killed his reflection at the first house he fed at in Seattle.

Most mornings since the first day of spring the green one got D out of bed. The feeder was low on sugary water. Was that what he had the gall to ask for now?

She was pretty sure most grown adults her age would gaze on that marvelous little flower-kisser and offer the universe a prayer of gratitude, but she could only pray, oh for a broom and an open window. Not that she was fast enough or coordinated enough hit any one of those birds. She’d begun to keep a balled up pair of socks on her night table to throw at the window and she rarely even hit the glass. At first it worked, though, they’d all leave for about ten minutes, letting D get up and get to the shower soundlessly. Then green one figured her out. He would leave for about fifteen seconds and then return, return to his reflection, return clucking the second D was standing up.

Today was either a work day or a day she’d called in sick, she couldn’t remember, but she knew it was off. Because she drew out chores and hated work she often used her sick time, vacation time, personal time, bereavement and temporary leave, to cover her chores. She remembered having chores.

On the toilet with the shower on she thought she could detect a light flickering but determined she was just dehydrated. She refused to drink water when she was drinking. She was as strict as a Jesuit when it came to what she ingested on a bender. Demanded purity, strict adherence. Only that which furthered her buzz, that buzz that was the moment right before she went full drunk, that incessant calibration and recalibration good alcoholics know. She could keep herself there every night she drank, so, every night, keep herself right there, until she couldn’t.

Her urine was thick enough to need a second flush. She watched the yellow spiral down and away. She could hear the green bird clucking from outside, and her own heartbeat, too, like she was underwater. They were having an argument from apartment windows, her heart and the bird.

When did she stop loving her body? Twenty-eight? Thirty-two? There was a good period around thirty-three, thirty-four when exercise inexplicably came easy to her and fucking led to merciless orgasms and so did running. Now?

Did the light flicker again?

It did.

Now, she felt her own, actual weight when she exercised, every ounce of it, and on top of that a phantom weight made up of guilt when she merely stood or sat. She was as limber as a lead pipe and her joints clacked like bad plumbing. Try having an orgasm with all this on your mind.

She pulled aside the shower curtain. The steam that hit her was the same temperature as her face. She pulled her head back to gather her steam and then caught sight of the tub basin full of what looked like pasta water. Black fungus and other molds, too, clung to the curtain edges, and there might as well have been ferns and lilies growing there, there was so much pond scum. If she stepped in now she could finish before the water topped her ankles. Get in, get out, don’t linger, move on, that chestnut. She closed her eyes and waded in. She leaned her face and hair in the hot rain and spat, and spat again, again. She could feel her blood begin to move like traffic easing on the good side of a wreck.

Cluck, cluck.

She remembered, now. It was a sick day.

Cheese steak and soda

Here’s what D remembered about last night.

One, she was in line for a cheese steak. Holding a cheese steak?

She was in a line.

Two, there were musicians in line and she had yelled for them to play.

“Show me your instruments!”

Three, hot cheese oozed between her fingers. Grease drips glissaded down her forearm. Burn marks.

Four, I wanted her attention. I hadn’t had it, really had it, since the DJ honored DJ Du.

“Remember when you got our First Day Training Coach sick?”

“Do we have to talk Lexica? FDTs? Really?”

“It’s how we met.”

“Play us a song!”

“Leave those guys alone. They’re here for a sandwich.”

“If you really need to validate yourself.”

“What?”

“You can talk about how we met at work. I don’t want to talk about it.”

D’s brain is an early model thought machine. It works similar to later models that chainlink referent to referent to referent to create a mostly self-referential mesh of mostly incoherent thinking, back and back into the past until you reach birth, what brainmakers call the catalyst, what chiropractors call the first wound. D’s machine works a little more solipsistically, tragically that is, in that not only are all her thoughts connected, her thoughts are merely thoughts of other thoughts. She’s not lived a single moment as the moment’s transpired, except of course for that first wound, which, if pressed, she wouldn’t really be able to tell you anything about except that nobody liked her face.

Hungover on her couch, she was trying to remember when she held her sandwich and when she didn’t. If she drank her soda or if she hadn’t. Not that it mattered. She’d had enough to drink.

The night seemed to have ended in something regrettable.

It was regrettable for me, too. In the sandwich line it was turning out to be a what could have been.

“Fucking FDTs. I tried to call to take a sick day but they were like, it’s a great expense to the company and mandatory and a great honor and, quote, feel free to miss a day, but you’ll have to make it up within the fiscal year.”

“You would have missed the story, though. And would we have met?”

“It’s not a good story.”

“It is, though.”

She peed a little. Chose to, in fact, so she didn’t have to think about her bladder so much.

“I have to pee,” she said after the fact and stood up.

“Leave the cheese steak here.”

“I got it.”

“Leave your soda. Don’t take it to the restroom.”

Did a musician slap the sandwich out of her hand?

Did I wrestle her soda from her?

She couldn’t recall.

“The story!” she said when she got back. “About the call center rep.”

She was beginning feel everywhere at once.

“Oh my God, the story!” she said.

“I don’t tell it like you tell it.”

“It’s a story of a story! I just repeat it!”

“If you didn’t, the rocks would cry out.”

Difficult conversations

Standard work story acknowledgement: While it is universally accepted that work stories are the most boring stories apart from dreams, this blog acknowledges the existence of work in all our lives, up to and sometimes exceeding hourly one-third of every weekday, and therefore work stories are sometimes unavoidable.

Thanks in advance for your patience.

Regards.

Here’s how we met.

Sixty people in a conference room. Two coaches on a dais under a banner that reads: Lexica Leaders of Tomorrow. Their names are Earl and Witness. Or Earl and Anniversary, or Easter, something like that. Amazing we don’t remember her name but we can remember Earl.

Witness is calling for stories about difficult conversations.

“As leaders of tomorrow you’ll be asked to have a lot of difficult conversations. When that time comes, you will thank yourself for coming here to train your Lexica voice. Who can tell me about a difficult conversation they’ve had?”

No one raises their hand.

“A difficult conversation you’ve had, doesn’t matter if it went good or it didn’t.”

No one raises their hand.

“I have a couple but I want to hear from you guys first.”

No one raises their hand.

I was sitting next to D and I recognized her finally as one of a writing and editing team that had been contracted for nine months.

“Nobody? Earl, I know you got some–get these Lexicographers loosened up for me.”

She was hired, good for her.

“I’m glad you asked, Witness.”

D is large-hipped and big boned and hears how do you get your hair like that a lot, no doubt. Do you dye? No. She is wearing nylons and getting away with it, and soft, soft autumn colors. You can look at orange and think purple and think my god, what is she doing to me.

As I said, I like them young, but I was ready to make an exception for D.

Earl stands. He had been sitting most of the day, sick. Several others in the class appear sick, too. But D is patient zero. And she knows it and everyone knows it. She was the only one coughing and sneezing the day before, and was apologizing profusely. But today she’s so sick she doesn’t care anymore.

When Earl straightens his torso to speak you can hear a cavern distend and gurgle, hell-broth boil and bubble. He’s the color of a dry heave. When he walks, although he’s treading on industrial carpet laid over thick eighth-floor concrete, when he walks you can hear floorboards creak. Sweat beads like dewdrops on the tips of his hair.

“I worked at a customer service call center when I first became a manager. Had a team of four. I called them the Four Horsemen. That’s another story. Can I get a Witness?”

That’s right, her name was Witness.

“Well, the one I called Famine, he’s on a call and he’s turning white to blue, that way that sick white people do.”

“Earl.”

“Sorry, Witness.”

Witness now turns blue, too, perhaps to illustrate or confirm what Earl is saying. She winks and breaks the fourth wall. Fifth wall?

“I can tell Famine is having a call. One of those calls you get in them customer-centric jobs, where you have to just go outside yourself and take this whole ocean of abuse. I can tell he’s swallowing buckets full of saltwater, or at least that’s what he looks like. I grab my feeder pad, that’s what I called my notepad, because that’s all I did with that thing, tell my team what to say, but that’s another bunch of stories. I write on my notepad and I ask him to put the customer on speaker. He shakes his head no. I write, don’t be a fucking hero!”

“Language, Earl!” Witness winks again, getting a little bluer every wink.

“We all gathered round. We were a tight group,” Earl goes on. “One Voice, that was our motto. But he’s shaking his head, Famine is all, nope, I can’t put the customer on speaker. What can he be hearing we haven’t heard before? Why does he need to shoulder this burden alone! Uh huh, okay, he’s saying. Sure, hm? Something’s got him rattled. So, I finally write on my feeder pad: I’m going to help you. Famine reaches over to cover the speaker button, but the Pale Horse and the Black Horse hold his arms, and I put the caller on speaker myself. And the office, mighty God! Ooh, oh yeah, mmm! Oh, it’s so big! You’re so much better than my husband. Yeah, does he give it to you here? It was like a pornographic movie set in our office! Can I get a Witness!”

Sixty people in the conference room.

Witness goes ahead and says, “Earl.” Just like that.

“Here’s the kicker, though, Lexica Leaders, and I feel like I can say this in front of y’all, the kicker is that up close you can hear clothes rustling. You know how some sounds is up close and some far away. This was close. Can you imagine? We all put our hands up so nobody thought it was us! Anyway, I eventually write on my feeder pad: I’m going to transfer you to my manager. That’s code for dropping the call. So, he says, I’m going to transfer you to my manager, and once he hangs up we’re all falling to the floor in unison.”

Witness’s face is ashen. Earl’s is a topographical map of his sinuses. He’d had no control over what he’d said.

D knows this feeling.

“Thank you, Earl. I had no idea you had that experience.”

“Sometimes you just have to avoid some difficult conversations.”

“Not really a Lexica Leader trait,” Derek says. Derek is that guy in the second row you get at every conference, participates in everything. He will one day be murdered for an insignificant amount of cash and no one will mourn him.

“I remember, I remember, oh Lexicographers! I remember I called Famine into my office right away to discuss how to handle situations like this in the future–but he didn’t want to stand up. Witness!”

He’s still going!

“I had no idea you had that experience,” is all Witness can say. “I had no idea you had that experience.”

“Do you want to do a stand test?” D says to me.

“Do I what?” I say.

“You heard me. Hot and bothered?” she says.

Fortunate for me, she winks. I have no idea where to go from here. I’m usually the instigator.

“We all got stories,” Earl is still saying.

“Ha ha,” says Derek.

“I had no idea you had that experience,” says Witness.

I ask if D wants drinks that evening, or food. I tell her I recognize her from the office. She says, okay, sure, I don’t know anyone else here. I’m sick, but it looks like everyone is, now. I laugh. After the day’s training and before food and drinks, I text my dealer and tell him about my initial impression of her. He tells me that she sounds like a real catch for real and asks if I want to get my hands on GHB, apparently Georgia Home Boy, and I say, no, this one’s different.

I think I could end up loving her.

Love is the only drug I’ll need.

Maybe some other day?

Cheese steak and soda: coda

That night, when we first met, we kissed. We kissed sick. It was phalanx against phalanx of lips and drunk teeth and oily noses and hot breath and slimy tongues searching for that answer to the oldest question: who am I outside of work?

We kissed and nothing else.

Last night, we kissed, too. But that was not the last thing D remembered. The last thing she remembered was my hand over her soda cup, popping the lid open.

Part II: the hangover

Her head is rattling against a bus window, a window 125 degrees to the touch. A heat that slow-roasts your hair and skin and skull and sure it takes a little longer than a conventional oven but you lean your head against this thing long enough you eventually get some delicious searing on the brain. It can permanently change you.

D is trying to nap in this danger zone. The jostling bus and the sun are putting her to sleep and then shaking her awake and she doesn’t believe she’ll have enough energy to lift her head off the window both now and when she’s at her stop, so she saves her energy for her eventual stop, risking a little motor cortex caramelization.

There’s a man in the back of the bus on the raised rearmost seat who’s been listening to music on a speaker dangling from his neck. A song about pussy worth doubling back for. To have that kind of pussy! She wants to turn her head, D does, but as mentioned she’s conserving energy, so she mutters forward plaintively, “Do you want me to buy you some earbuds?” D’d seen this man before and she knows she’s getting seared on the back of her head right now, too, that’s what it means when the music gets louder.

What are you doing? That’s what her mother says, what are you doing? Meaning life. They can say everything to each other is their problem, D and Mom. Families shouldn’t be that close, that’s my policy. Her mother knows it’s the colleague that’s pretty much the reason for the new house, which her mother should actually be proud of but she’s not, and the colleague that’s responsible for the couple times her ex, X, hit her. Thank God D had the sick time to cover those days, though, and insurance to pay for couples counseling. She did that right, at least. She was so proud of her daughter and that grownup job. But D didn’t use her insurance for couples counseling. She’d used it to get stitches and to consult a dermatologist to get her face just right again. What’s wrong with counseling? What’s wrong with seeing something through for a change? The deal, Mom, is that there’s not much better in life than fucking at work. How you talk to your mother! Sorry, there’s not much better in life than fucking at work when you’re getting beaten at home. You had sex at work! I’m salaried, Mom, so I technically represent Lexica in my wet dreams. Yes, I fucked at work. Him at work? Who else, my fiance!

The music, though.

What’s so bad about somebody’s music on the bus?

He has no concern for anyone around him.

Stop focusing so hard on fixing strangers.

Do you hear yourself?

It’s an honest question.

What question?

The boutique

The music follows her off the bus at Alaska Junction by the Shadowland Bar, which she thinks of entering to shake her would-be assassin, but she doesn’t because she remembers it smells like bleach in there even at 2 a.m. on a hot night when everyone is sweaty. Then it hits her, and from this point on you should just take it for granted, it hits her she wants a drink. Could use a drink. Needs a drink. There’s sweat rising in her. You can feel it, feel waves crashing against her skin, you can smell and taste and hear it, and the music coming up behind her stops it cold like ice she knows will melt and she cannot move her feet fast enough but if she speeds up she’ll trip on the burning sidewalk and probably die and she can only escape really with a lateral move, into a boutique, the kind without a sign, probably a popup. She swings the door open and of course it has welcome bells. Welcome in! Jingaling.

The music is shut out, but it lingers, stays behind the glass and she can see him without looking. He’s tenting his face with his fat hands in the shape of a heart and his speaker’s knocking really just kind of tapping on the glass. Man, fuck you, bitch! he improvises. And the music fades then as D’s pores release the night sweats she’d been saving up for the last thirty-six hours. She’s not sticky, she’s wet.

Proust at picnics

Should we get into how D dresses on her days off? Dirty work casual. Footloose after a night shift at 7-Eleven. Ripped jeans cut for quick discard on a sidewalk, flecks of paint on her wife beater, collar stains, pit stains, a somehow wrinkled do-rag. The look says fuck me on the shop floor right but let this poor old mule finish first.

Contrast her with the sales associates. The boutique owner, actually, and her somehow older-looking daughter. They are in neutral colors, a summer look, a winter look, the other two seasons, they belong in them all and they can’t believe what you’re wearing. D is just now seeing them. She would run typically but the music is still out there. Pacing by the sound of it. So she says the only thing you can say at a time like this, I’m looking for a dress.

A dress.

Someone must acknowledge how she looks, they all realize, but no one is yet brave enough to speak what’s obvious. The younger one, the mom, blocks her nostrils with her forefinger. The older one says, Mom, don’t breathe through your mouth.

I’m not.

It’s worse, you get the germs.

I don’t look like this, D says. She means, normally. Do they take it as so? Who knows.

Feel free to look around, mom says as the daughter says simultaneously, well, if that’s everything.

Then silence except for the music.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Suddenly in focus are racks of pastel-colored blouses and crispy clean ripped jeans, ripped the correct way, some suit jackets with sleeves meant for rolling and there, aha, a rack of summer dresses, one on a pin-cushion beige mannequin, there is so much beige here, so much neutrality, even the panels near the ceiling, and there it is on the headless mannequin, a summer dress that says, I read Proust at picnics.

I want to read Proust at picnics, she says. Then, this is small.

Yes.

Do you have a large?

We do.

It’s not as small in the bust as you need, I’m afraid.

It’s summer, it can hang.

Another silence here. Except of course for that music dangling that won’t leave.

One second.

Mom, you’re not.

Not now, a customer.

She’s a customer?

I’d like to try it on, if you don’t mind.

Yes, if you’ll wait right here.

We’ll have to fumigate!

One minute, ma’am.

Ma’am? D and the daughter say, in unison, incredulous.

Back here.

The mom’s tone suggests she’s worried D will be confounded by the dressing room mirrors and may get lost, like in a corn maze or a wonderland. She threw up in a dressing room once, the mom did. It was carpeted, she was a girl, five. Her mom had to ask for a wet towel and a dry towel and she cleaned it up in the dress she intended to purchase because you break you buy, and her tits were swinging like floppy arms dancing, it’s called flossing now.

Price tag is on it, so don’t get scratched.

What are you afraid I’m gonna win the scratch lottery?

No laughs.

She slips inside a mirror and slips inside the dress and the thing shimmers. If it looks this good in fluorescent lighting, imagine what it could do for her out there. Why is the light so terrible here? Is this her color? It isn’t then it is. See how it changes when she sallies? That’s her color, that’s it, changing all the time. I wouldn’t like it, she knows, but I’m not a reader and I’m too pale to picnic.

She’ll take it.

Is the dress flickering? It was only shimmering before? She is out of it before she can remember trying it on and has paid for it before she remembers she is not paid that well. Still, cause to celebrate. Maybe Lexica’s cost of living increase will help her out next fiscal. And she can determine what color the dress is when she’s home. Damn, she looks fine. It’s good to know your color.

Ace

There’s a bar she celebrates at, it’s the West Five, and it opens at the same time as Shadowland, early. It’s dark so you have to you drink fast when you daydrink there or the transition from within to without can collapse you.

D drinks fast, anyway, especially in emergencies.

She pays after two quick martinis dry no vermouth, so vodka?, no, in a martini glass, twist. She drinks them, pays, and says I’ll be right back to a man who is not wondering.

Can I leave this here?

You’re coming back?

I have to, it’s my color.

In Ace Hardware she swears she smells bacon and she flutters around the space trying to place just from where it emanates. Where’s the signal? She goes in and out of the restroom twice, once to vomit, another to try to vomit, before finding the source, a castiron pan display. She’d always wanted a castiron. There is a cowboy on YouTube that cooks only in castiron, from cupcakes to casseroles, and she imagines him sometimes as her dad and that’s a tiny comfort when she has certain hangovers. She summons the figure in her checking account after the dress purchase and determines she might as well purchase a pan, too, and begins the process of sniffing each one to locate the bacon-seasoned one. Looking for a scratch and sniff? asks a man with a nametag marked Tevin.

Is there bacon in here?

Here’s what you should do. See that Thriftway? Once you have your pan picked out, head there and they can get you your pig product. We got mainly things in here and things only.

His tumbleweed eyebrows are on fire.

Where’s the Drano?

Tevin plucks a basket from the floor and hands it to D and she puts her castiron in it and Tevin says, you got a drain problem?

That’s what the pan is for, she says. She immediately doesn’t like it. It was not only kind of harsh but also nonsensical. Tevin has dog ear clumps of hair coming out of his nostrils and his ear canals, too, the color of red pepper flakes.

How does Drano work, anyway?

It’s not for pans, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s got lye and bleach and some other sodiums in it, I think aluminum, too.

His hairs wiggle when he talks and the effect is like talking to a burning bush.

When you pour a few glugs down the drain these chemicals break down the clogs. They also create heat, almost a boil, I felt it in a demo once, felt the pipe, very hot, it’s why you don’t want to use it too often on the thinner PVCs. While they’re heating the pipe up, they bubble and loosen the debris and make like a soap chute for it, so when you blow your hot water down later it’s slicker than snot. Four Bs, if you need it easy: break, boil, bubble, blow. Like an Alka Seltzer you don’t want to drink.

What kind of death would that be?

It wasn’t a question.

I got National Suicide Prevention and Poison Control on speed dial, lady. Don’t make jokes or insinuations. Life is good, you got it?

My shower backs up to my ankles before I can get my hair wet.

You get your drains under control, that’s the first thing, just get that one little thing under control, it’ll make you feel better about the rest. I guarantee it. Buy two, get one free today. First pass, pour one whole jug down, really give her hell. You a drinker?

I’m a drinker.

Open a beer and once that beer’s gone you run hot water ten minutes. Second pass, you wait that recommended fifteen minimum back of the bottle, just fifteen though, and you give her hell again, ten minutes’ hot water. Final pass, and just give ‘em three this week, final pass you wait twenty-five to thirty before hot water. You got it? Run good and hot water at least fifteen minutes the final. But keep your eye on that drain when you hit it, if it ain’t loose you’ll be flooding.

Why doesn’t it just boil and melt everything right here in the bottle?

He explains.

He’s on fire today.

At checkout there’s a huge display of hummingbird feeders, plates, saucers, single-serving ramekins, bottles like the one she has at home, and what looks like a decorative pneumatic tube, but there are only two types of feed: premade or powder. Same brand.

Is there a difference between the two?

Looks like the same. You gotta shake the liquid up pretty good, like you would the powder. Best bang for your buck’s the powder.

He rings her up and quotes her total, inverting the two digits that make up her cents, something D presumes he does frequently.

You go spoil those birds.

Like they’re her pets.

He hands her back her debit card.

West Five

She feels immediately less hungover at West Five again as she watches her bartender, who calls himself a mixologist, mix her her next first drink, a third martini with a sweat rim. He is beading up like it’s the last quarter of a Finals game. But he is not an athlete. No, he is a blimp with what you hope has three hearts that work in shifts. Each time you see him it’s the last, you’re sure. She sees him a lot. Keep coming back. He is humming while he mixes, he hums like fucking Orpheus. She feels amazing.

What’s that?

What?

Death By Alcohol.

That! It’s really good.

Is it, like, alcohol poisoning? Like a pint of flaming Bacardi as a shot or something?

No, it’s really good, like Death By Chocolate cake, you know? You wanna try one?

No, thank you.

He hums, not disappointed. You ever notice that about bartenders? They’re rarely disappointed.

You know it’s really common, death by alcohol. My dad.

Mine, too.

Cheers.

There are four types of people in the world. Your dad drank, so you drink. Your dad drank, so you never drink. Your dad never drank, so you never drink. Your dad never drank, so you drink. I’ve never understood the last two.

Not my crowd.

Takes all kinds.

I’ll try that drink.

What’s in it?

Proprietary.

I’d like to know what’s killing me. She imagines ripping the mask off a burglar before he plunges a knife into her. Liver serrated, a few other organs, too. She is bleeding out.

Home

She boards the bus that’s changing drivers because there are no other choices. Two routes go past her house and only one is sitting at Alaska Junction now. Her forehead is crying sweat through her eyes and it’s dripping on the bag that holds her new dress and she does not have the strength to wipe her brow or move her bag or hold her eyelids shut or move at all.

The bus jerks forward, you could say it’s learching, and it drives past Ace and eventually the Puget Sound and a Seventh Day Adventist church near her stop. There is a shopping cart there, a Target cart that’s strayed very far from home. She looks around, there’s no one around to claim it so she loads her things into it and gives it a push but it only grinds on the sidewalk. An anti-theft wheel lock seems to indicate Target must be closer than she previously thought. By the time she is home she is dragging her Ace bag on the ground. A hole is spreading in it. She’s carrying so much. At least she hopes so.

She imagines her stomach lining and she shakes her key into her lock as if she’s in a horror film. She drops her things inside and locks the door and falls on her couch and hopes she’ll have no dreams. Dreams are just ordeals.

There are hooks outside her living room window where she will place her new, pneumatic tube hummingbird feeder. She thinks about this, over and over, over and over, banal repetition wards off dreams, over and over until she passes out. When she wakes up she remembers the trick to hair of the dog is that you cannot stop, so she props a ladder on the side of her house and grabs one of the bottles of Tito’s she keeps in the rain gutter because she can’t keep liquor in the house. New Year’s Resolution.

Part III: the letter T

D followed Tevin’s steps to the letter T. Somewhere between steps two and three her drain pulled water down so fast it splashed like a drowning victim. She emptied the full contents of bottle two down the drain for step three and prepared her new hummingbird feeder while she waited twenty-five to thirty minutes. She was deep into her vodka and a six pack of nectarine ciders and her thinking was clearer than it had been in months, maybe even days.

Most of her attempts to hang her new feeder ended up forgotten. Some ended on the ground. D, the ladder, the new feeder, the sugary drink. So she just grabbed the one intact old feeder and filled it with water and feed mix and shook it with her palm serving as the lid. It slipped a little and about half the sugar water sprayed over her clothes and the kitchen.

Good thing my shower is draining, she thought.

She took one.

She left the water running scalding hot and hopped in and opened up her pores. She left it running when she toweled off, too, why not? It’s the heat that clears the drain. She brushed her hair and dried it and dressed in her new dress. Then she poured two capfuls of Drano in the old hummingbird feeder and hung it by the living room. Once it was hung she poured a few glugs into St. Francis, too.

END