A single-serving slice of a story in progress.
Photo via HAPPY ACCIDENT
Boris and I were walking next to each other on a mushy day shortly after Christmas. Two days before, the water had frozen as it fell from the sky, and now the sidewalks looked oddly shellacked—in some places rough with ice, in others, where there were footprints, the pavement was so clearly visible through a thick layer of cold water—like a sterile tidepool, like a thick window with nothing but cement on the other side—that it looked more sharply real than naked ground.
That was the winter I learned the lunatic paradox of dieting to the point of self-starvation is you live in fear of getting too hungry. So on this day I had a plastic bag full of big red apples, always anticipating the urge for a snack. Boris, always anticipating the urge to escape, was gripping the handlebars of his bike, wheeling it along in the space between us, and neither of us was talking. I was distracted, gazing so intently into the crystal depths of the boot-shaped puddles and hoping to catch a glimpse of us in the intermittent glassy surfaces, that I didn’t notice my bag swinging a little too close to the thresher of Boris’s glittering spokes.
Photo by Jennilee Marigomen
A tug, a dull chomp, a flare of sticky mist: The bag was chewed up into a wet mess of flesh-colored plastic spaghetti, but the unlucky apple inside was sliced cleanly in half. I giggled and popped it through the new hole in the flimsy shopping bag, first one perfectly heart shaped hemi-apple, then the other. I was surprised at how easily I shrugged off the gloom I was wearing like a thin sheaf of ice, as the cold weight of everything I didn’t know how to say melted into the upside-down puddle world. When I handed him his half, Boris laughed at me gently, and said, “Look at that, I broke your heart!” And now I can’t remember what I had been angry about in the first half of that afternoon, or what he had done to make me feel with such certainty that he didn’t care.
1 Comment so far
Leave a comment
L.A.
Comment by lea November 19, 2011 @ 9:45 am