<\/p>\n
Words falling, dropping against the floor in Cuban jazz rhythms.<\/p>\n
“What’s hid-ing in the ten-e-ment hawwwls?” she sing-songs, her
\nfingernails trailing against the old hallway that’s wearing thirteen
\ncoats of off-white paint.\u00a0 She looks over at me for acknowledgment
\nof her creation, and I smile and force an audible amount of breath out
\nof my nose to let her know I’m amused.<\/p>\n
I look back down towards the end of the hallway, the dark door to the
\nstairwell glowing red under the EXIT sign.\u00a0 This subtle
\ndisassociation is enough to annoy her.<\/p>\n
“Cassander,” she says.<\/p>\n
I look back over.\u00a0 She stops short for a moment, fingernails
\nfrozen still waist-high on the wall.\u00a0 She waits a long moment for
\nme to say something even though I’m looking right into those gift shop
\nbirthstone eyes.<\/p>\n
“What?” I whisper.<\/p>\n
Full-bore loud: “Wh-hat’s hiid-ing in these ten-ement-ement
\nhawwwls?!”\u00a0 The song gets bitten and swallowed by shrieking
\nlaughter.<\/p>\n
“There’s only one door,” I say, trying to synch up with her half-sane
\nmood.\u00a0 “The door to my apartment.\u00a0 The rest of them open up
\nonto Hawaiian diving cliffs.\u00a0 Blue thunder below.”<\/p>\n
“Ooo!” she squeals.\u00a0 “Let’s go, then.\u00a0 I’ve always wanted
\nto!”\u00a0 Before I can grab her, she runs to the nearest door and
\ntries the knob.\u00a0 It gave an annoyed rattle in her hand, and she
\nturns on me, mouth wide and eyes rolled back in mock devastation.<\/p>\n
“Fuck the Hawaiians,” I say.<\/p>\n
“Fuck the Hawaiians.”<\/p>\n
“Shoot to kill on my orders,” I say, edging towards my apartment’s door.<\/p>\n
She points finger pistols and me, Pow, POW!<\/em><\/p>\n She starts humming the same tune, only without the words this “You’ll never guess what I bought today,” I say, trying to distract her.<\/p>\n “What, what, what?!” She actually claps.<\/p>\n “The bullet that killed Kennedy.”<\/p>\n “You’re joking!” she says, now over-exuberant, really milking it.<\/p>\n “The<\/em> magic bullet.\u00a0 On eBay.”<\/p>\n “Your first religious relic.\u00a0 I’m so excited to see it.”<\/p>\n The door swings into the apartment, scrapes against the linoleum. “Give me the fuck of a lifetime,” she says and sticks her butt in the “You hungry?\u00a0 Thirsty?”<\/p>\n She puts her finger on her chin in the universal sign for thinking, I fall down on the bed, too, and start taking off my clothes. “Bullshit,” she accuses, but I don’t respond, and the echo of her curse …and later I will finally convince her to abandon her going-out “Clothesline. Pile-driver.\u00a0 Flapjack.\u00a0 Power slam, elbow “Maisy,” I say.<\/p>\n “What?”<\/p>\n “You are insane.”<\/p>\n “Then caress my ears with sanity.\u00a0 Tell me a story.”<\/p>\n “There were no landmarks, but it was definitely Tennessee,” I say, not meaning to pause and tease her, but I do anyway.<\/p>\n “What time was it?”<\/p>\n “It was mid-day or late-afternoon.\u00a0 I was on vacation.\u00a0 I was She says, “That’s not a story.\u00a0 That’s a fucking daytime TV monologue.”<\/p>\n “I’m going to slice all your ribs apart tonight while you sleep. “I can hear your commas.\u00a0 Did you know that?\u00a0 When you speak “What?” I ask, propping myself up, easing closer to her.<\/p>\n “Go cliff diving.”<\/p>\n “Okay.”<\/p>\n “Cassander.”<\/p>\n “Maisy.”<\/p>\n “Shh.”<\/p>\n “Ssshh.”<\/p>\n I smell the scent of lips and hear one whisper-quiet kiss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,352],"tags":[68,353],"class_list":["post-2484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cass","category-gsarchive","tag-cassander","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2817,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2484\/revisions\/2817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ntime.\u00a0 Her eyes tell me what she’s thinking, though, the same
\nquestion going through her head.\u00a0 Unasked, unanswered: who are your neighbors?\u00a0 Why don’t you know
\nthem?<\/em>\u00a0 For some reason it is a serious question for her,
\na deep flaw in my character.\u00a0 It bothers her to be with the guy on
\nthe floor who keeps to himself.\u00a0 She stares at me as I pull out my
\nkeys and put them in the lock, staring until I feel paranoid and
\nvaporous.<\/p>\n
\nDisaster, economy.\u00a0 She tiptoes over the scattered clothes,
\npapers, odds and ends, and approaches the bed that takes up most of the
\nonly room.\u00a0 She spreads her arms wide like takeoff and falls face
\nfirst into the quicksand of blankets and sheets.\u00a0 I lock the door
\nbehind me.<\/p>\n
\nair.\u00a0 She says this every other day.\u00a0 I take one step towards
\nthe bed, and she rolls over quickly onto her back.\u00a0 “Oh my
\ngod.\u00a0 You were going to do it, weren’t you?\u00a0 You really were
\nabout to just rip my skirt and shove your cock in my ass!\u00a0 Don’t
\nlie to me, Cass.\u00a0 The thought didn’t even cross your mind, did
\nit?\u00a0 It was pure instinct.\u00a0 Mad, primal instinct.\u00a0 You
\nwant to impregnate me, don’t you?\u00a0 Deep down, that’s all you want
\nout of ol’ Maisy, isn’t it?\u00a0 To leave your slobbery seed on the
\nwalls of my uterus like some kind of cave painting.”<\/p>\n
\nthen just blurts again, “Whooooo’s hiding in the tenemenemenemenement
\nhawls!?”<\/p>\n
\n“Old ladies.\u00a0 Not to put too fine a point on it, but they’re all
\nold ladies.\u00a0 They’re all grandmas who knit all day.
\nSometimes I can’t sleep for all the sounds of the knitting.\u00a0 Kit-kit-kit-kit<\/em>.”<\/p>\n
\nabsorbs into the walls eventually and the room is silent except for our
\nblinking eyes.\u00a0 For a long moment, we both consider nothing.<\/p>\n
\nclothes, the long skirt with maroon and black diagonal stripes and the
\nwhite blouse and the pins in her hair and her hose and she will be left
\nin a black bra with itchy frills and my arms tied in a sailor’s knot
\naround her, my chin on her shoulder, and we will breathe and float and
\nglance cross-eyed at the digital clock and before we fall asleep we
\nwill end up saying something tender, something viably affectionate and
\nlet each others’ saliva cool on our exposed skin, but until then I can
\nonly edge closer to her, bit by bit until she is ready to be touched
\nand try to make out what she is saying.\u00a0 She is mouthing words, I
\ncan hear her lips touching then pulling apart in syllables, and now her
\nbreath is rising up and giving the words tone and whispery shapes, and
\nnow she is barely audible, her vocal chords vibrating at the lowest
\nlevel, reciting something:<\/p>\n
\nsmash.\u00a0 Vertical suplex, knee drop.\u00a0 Backbreaker, half
\nnelson, scissor kick…”<\/p>\n
\nin the backseat, laid out, looking up through the window.\u00a0 On this
\ncar…the cab or whatever it’s called sort of slants in.\u00a0 Like
\nthis.\u00a0 So that if you’re laid out in the backseat, you can look up
\nand your vision isn’t blocked by the roof.\u00a0 I was looking up at
\nthe sky, which was terribly dark for mid-day.\u00a0 A hurricane or a
\nstorm caused by the outer fringes of a hurricane farther east was
\nchasing us down.\u00a0 We had been driving through it all morning, but
\nwe were slowly outrunning it.\u00a0 We were on our way to
\nGraceland.\u00a0 My mom had a fetish.\u00a0 Or a…collection that needed
\nadding to, at the least.\u00a0 She looked over her shoulder and said,
\n\u2018Are you all right?’\u00a0 I nodded.\u00a0 She winked at me.\u00a0 \u2018The
\nsky is breaking up, up ahead.\u00a0 You’ll see it soon.\u00a0 It’s a
\nvery beautiful kind of breaking up, the split between black and gray
\nand blue.’\u00a0 And I knew that my mother could understand me.
\nShe knew what I was looking at and why I was looking at it.\u00a0 The
\nsky.\u00a0 She didn’t tell me to sit up or to read a book or
\nanything.\u00a0 She let me be.”<\/p>\n
\nYou won’t even feel it.\u00a0 Then when you wake up, you’ll sit up real
\nfast like you always do, and everything will just slide out in thin
\nlasagna layers.”<\/p>\n
\nI can actually sense punctuation.\u00a0 You’re anal even in your speech
\npatterns.”\u00a0 She blinks.\u00a0 “So let’s do that sometime.”<\/p>\n