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Flash

Anna Majeski

    It’s not that I’d never been with a man before; I had. A few men. And it’s true that some of those experiences left me a little bitter, swearing off the whole sex, because maybe I’d been lied to or belittled the same as anyone else. Maybe it’s true that there was only one thing about me—isolated and idealized—that some of these men wanted. The foreign part of me, the hardest part to figure out. And I did a little of that myself—glorifying a man, taking the shape of him and filling it in with my idea of who I thought he should be. It was never long before these relationships collapsed in on themselves, sagging where there was no center.
    But some of those experiences were good. Positive. Like, maybe I was worried that my breasts hung too low or that my stomach pulled from my hips in a gross and obvious way, but that was on me. No one was putting that stuff in my head. No one was telling me that I wasn’t perky enough or that I was putting on some weight. That was on me, and these men, these positive men, were only trying to help, saying things like, “Baby, you look fine,” “You’re the prettiest girl in the room,” or “We don’t have to if you don’t want to.” Good things like that. Kind things. And I lived off of that for a little bit because at least we weren’t cutting each other down, wearing each other into these thin, translucent pieces of what we used to be to one another.
    And then there was one great love, which seemed to have been, at one time or another throughout its course, every kind of relationship, but because it couldn’t settle into one steady thing that we could both agree upon, it ended in a slow and miserable way.
    But this wasn’t like being with any of those men. It wasn’t like being with a man at all.

-

    I’d met Lucy at Montrose Harbor in the early afternoon. A sooty haze had settled so that the city seemed to move just so slightly in the heat. I had decided long ago not to be her friend, but I couldn’t follow through with it.
    “So, I was trying to study.” Lucy was stretched out on the grass next to me, knocking her knees together as she spoke.
    “Mhmmm.”
    “When all of a sudden this couple next to me starts getting into this, like, whisper fight.”
    “A whisper fight?”
    “Yeah, something about him not calling her back or he was hanging out with some other girl. I don’t know.” She began peeling the skin off of a grape with her teeth and spitting the thin strips into the grass, putting the fruit into her mouth only when the whole pulpy body of the fruit was exposed.
    “What’s a whisper fight?” I asked, turning away from her as she split the grape through its middle before swallowing each half whole.
    “You know, like if they’d been anywhere else they would’ve been yelling at each other. But they were in the library, so they had to whisper.”
    “Oh sure, sure. I’ve gotten into one or two of those I guess.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah, I mean, yeah. So what?”
    “Joe and I never fight. It’s almost creepy.”
    “Yeah? That must be nice.”

    Lately, Lucy was throwing up a lot of red flags, saying things I wasn’t sure I was hearing correctly, and what she’d just said, it wasn’t your typical response to happiness. I wanted to tell her that maybe things weren’t really so peaceful between them, weren’t really so harmonious. Maybe it was just silence. There’s a definite difference between the two. But I knew she’d take it the wrong way. She’d tell me I didn’t know anything about it because I’d never been in a five-year relationship, I’d never lived with a man. All of which was true, but I did know that they weren’t sleeping together anymore, only sharing a bed. I did know that she wasn’t spending a lot of time at home.
    “Yeah, well.”
    “Well?”
    “Don’t be mad, ok? But I have something to tell you.” She picked at the grass in front of her in a nervous way.
    “What is it?”
    “I’m asking you not to be mad.”
    “Yeah, alright.”
    “I mentioned you to someone. Well, I told him about you.”
    “What? What’d you say?”
    “That you’re quiet. But not because you don’t have anything to say. And that you get good grades. You’re smart, Em, that’s what I was saying.”
     Lucy could only see people as one thing, and I didn’t notice it for a long time, not until I started seeing myself as that very same thing whenever I was with her. It doesn’t sound so bad, having someone thinking that you’re capable, making you feel good about yourself in that way, but let’s say I wanted to go out dancing, or maybe I wanted to get a little high, she wouldn’t know what to make of that. It’s not an easy thing, trying to pull yourself, some idea of yourself, from all of these conflicting and colliding projections made upon you.
    “I don’t need you to talk about me, ok?”
    “I was just mentioning you, that’s all.” She took a grape and began her slow skinning of it.
    “Let’s go.” I stood up, not wanting to watch the process again.
    “Yeah, alright.”

-

    I’d heard it from someone who had heard it from someone else: a girl I knew, well, I didn’t really know her, but we’d gone to the same high school and maybe we’d had a class together. I remember the things that I heard about her. This girl I sort of knew had gone missing. And I know how it sounds, when I say that it happened in the night and that she’d been walking home alone; at least that’s what everyone was saying. I know that it sounds familiar. But she wasn’t wearing any shoes. I read that in the paper, that she’d been walking along barefoot, holding her shoes in her hand, and then she went missing. You couldn’t possibly know anything about that—that couldn’t possibly be familiar to you.
    Let’s say that your feet hurt, and you’ve been drinking all night so now you’re tired. Or maybe you haven’t been drinking, maybe you’ve been dancing or walking across town in these steep shoes that are pinching your toes, and now you just want to go home. It’s warm out so you’re not walking too quickly, you’re taking your time, but you never get to where you were going. That’s the moment when everything changes, nobody is around to see it, and you’re not even sure what to do when it arrives. Nobody prepares you for this, not really. You end up somewhere you didn’t even know existed, and everyone who loves you or even sort of knows you is trying to figure out where you are, although they know on some level that you haven’t gone anywhere, that you’ve been taken. Your parents are thinking it would’ve been better if the world had opened up and swallowed you whole. They’d rather think you were somewhere in the Earth’s core trying to figure out how to survive. But that’s not the way it went, and that’s all anyone can be certain of.

-

    You think you can do anything you want down by the harbor as long as you’re not near the boats. And you can get away with that for a little while, in the summer months, because worse things are happening around the city then. Families come down and take turns drinking from tall paper bags while their kids run circles around each other close to the water. Sometimes you’ll smell a pungent, forbidden thing in the air, but it’s gone by the next inhale. Most of it is innocent so nobody says much about it. Lucy was walking with one foot in the bike path, grinding the gravel beneath her heel and kicking up sheets of white dust.
    “You mad at me?” She was swinging the bag of grapes through the air, refusing to look at me when she spoke.
    “No.” And I meant it.
    “What’s the matter then?”
    I saw him from a distance; I thought my pupils probably had to swell just to take in the whole mass of him. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his belly was swollen and taut as if some hard tumor were pushing from the inside out. He was wearing sweatpants, and I remember thinking that he must’ve been uncomfortable because it was hot, and my own clothes were sticking to me in a needy, invasive kind of way. And then I remember wondering about his hands, because I could only see the fingers of one clutching at the band of his sweatpants while the other seemed severed cleanly at the wrist, the remaining arm swinging just at his waistline. I felt bad for him, standing there by himself, partially naked and partially whole.
     As we got closer, I could see the that his lower lip was sticking out from his face as if it were balancing some heavy, precarious weight, and it was so red, his bottom lip was so red and slick with a film of saliva, that he seemed starved in an animal-like way. And I could feel him looking at me, at both of us really, I could feel a hotness on the back of my neck that was nothing like the heat of the sun because it was coming from inside of me and spreading quickly.
    “Do you see that?” I turned to Lucy, wondering if this man was taking up her entire vision, too.
    “What?”
    “Ahead there.”
    “The man?” she asked, as if she were just seeing him for the first time. I wondered what else she could possibly have been looking at.
    “Yeah.”
    “What about him?”
    “He’s looking at us funny, right?”
    “He’s probably drunk. Just ignore him.”
     His eyes were round like open wounds and raw in the same kind of way, and when I noticed a quick, long movement happening over and over, just this quick, long movement behind the fabric of his sweatpants, I realized it wasn’t us he was looking at but some idea of us playing out in his head. I wasn’t surprised when he pulled himself out, erect and hooked at the top like a piece of hot bent metal, and even though I’d been with men, even though I’d seen before what I was being made to see now, there was something about his slickness that disgusted me. He shook himself at us and let out a laugh that seemed more like a growl, and the whole thing felt like a challenge, like maybe he really believed we’d walk over and take him in our hands and in our mouths. I just kept thinking why’d I ever feel bad for this guy? He’s got two hands. They work just fine.
    “Is that his dick? Did he just pull out his dick?” Lucy was squinting her eyes like maybe she wasn’t seeing things right.
    “That’s definitely his dick.”
    “Oh, what the fuck?”
    “Should we run?” I offered, because, really, what else would we do?
    “I don’t know.”
    “Maybe we should run.”
    “Look, just walk a little faster alright? He’s not going to do anything.”
    We headed for an underpass that would take us to the other side of the harbor, but we had to get closer to him in order to make our way to it. You’d think that it would be easy to look away from all the things you don’t want to see, like the stiff, unmoving bodies of crime scenes or men jerking off in public places, but, instead, some perverse curiosity pulls you into the moment, and you find yourself unable to turn away. I looked at him, his face twisted into a tight grin of anticipation, and I thought he’s going to do this to the wrong girl, some girl who can have her muscled-up boyfriend here in no time. And this boyfriend will have worked himself up into such a rage on his way to the harbor, thinking about another guy’s dick slowly becoming a part of his girlfriend’s memory, that this guy, this pervert, will really be in for it when the boyfriend arrives.
    I didn’t notice Lucy was laughing until we reached the underpass.
    “What’s so funny?”
    “Your face.”
    “What’s wrong with my face?”
    “You’re completely freaked.”
    “I’m not, I’m just—it was awkward, alright?”
    “Yeah well, he’ll be at it all day.”
    “Should we call someone?”
    “Who do you want to call, Em?”
    “I don’t know. The police?”
    “He’s not going to hurt anyone.”
    “I just think maybe we should tell someone.”
    The whole thing really threw me for a loop. Not that I’d never heard of this kind of thing happening, of men pulling out their dicks in front of women who’d just gone out to get some groceries, completely naked except for some trench coat they didn’t even bother buttoning up. Not that I believed it couldn’t happen to me the same way you might believe that the people you love can’t go missing or that you’ll never be taken advantage of in some raw, violent way. That isn’t to say that thinking something terrible can’t happen to you makes it your fault if it does, if it turns out that you couldn’t stop it from happening. Because, really, how could anyone accomplish anything if they truly opened themselves up to the possibility of their ultimate ruin or even some irreparable change?
    “You take everything so seriously.”
    “That’s probably true.” I turned around, worried that maybe he’d be barreling toward us, waving one hand in the air and holding onto himself like he were riding some wild animal, but I could only see the fat bulge of his belly sticking past the wall of the underpass.
    “Let’s just go.”
    So we went.

-

    I think about the girl who went missing, the one from my high school. I think they’re never going to find her. Later, when some time has passed but not too much, I think about mentioning her to Lucy, but I know she’d say that some guy waving his dick at us in public isn’t even close to a girl we didn’t even really know being taken in the middle of the night. I know she’d say that it was selfish of me to even bring her up, the missing girl, when we were fine. We hadn’t been forced into a situation that we couldn’t walk away from. Look, we were laughing about it now, already. That’s what she’d say.
    And I’d have to be really careful when I corrected her, when I told her that I wasn’t saying we were victims or that some terrible tragedy had just befallen us and that everyone we knew would somehow be affected by what we were made to see. I would tell her that the situations weren’t similar, but maybe there were similarities between them. That we had each been used to some end. That we hadn’t said ok, you can use me. That we had each been walking, that we had been spotted from some distance by those who would involve us in their fetish or their plot. That it was unfamiliar.
    But I couldn’t figure out how to say any of it in a way that wouldn’t make her laugh or scold. So I didn’t say anything at all.

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