Marmalade
an excerpt from Waves Freeze Here
by Brenna Lee
The absence solidifies into a pit in the hollow of my mouth. I lap at the bumpy texture with my tongue. Round and porous, it is palpable enough to suck, so I do. I suck and suck. It pulls my face into a funny heart shape. It leaves dents in my cheeks. N bends me over the couch. He runs his thumb up the back of my neck. I can see in the reflection of the sliding glass door that his eyes are closed. The cold spreads from the lake and through the dilapidated pastel housing plan. A trash filled wave rolls across the yards, stopping mid swell. A precarious lurch of pink disposable razors covered in crystalized chewing gum, cotton balls and Plan B wrappers. Then the partial thaw, soaking down into the earth. Tides suspend here. If I squint my eyes hard enough, the moon is black. In the warm months, bits of garbage drift in and out of the open windows. Fragments of abandoned pornographic magazines and receipts tangle with press-on nails in midair, floating around the ledge. They are easily mistaken for hummingbirds or mosquitos when observed from the peripheries of one’s vision. N stops moving. The weight of his body pressing down until my ribs ache and my own breathing shallows. Outside the window, chalk outlines from a protracted corpse in the street pulse and shake the patches of lawn. Each time I suck, the cycle duplicates.
As he leaves, the front door latch clicks shut, causing the television reception to speckle from imperceptible tremors. I flip through the channels and chew at the loose skin at the corners of my lips. In this program, federal agents travel to the Arctic where they investigate the disappearance of scientists. They soon discover that the researchers have dug too deeply into the earth’s core, releasing microscopic alien parasites that have been hibernating for thousands of years. They are hungry.
I envision the wave outside the window regurgitates the subterranean ice squatters onto my front stoop. Sticky fetal things sliding like liquid through the cracks in the door, then wriggling into my dog’s ears or nostrils, my own mouth. It is impossible to bar so many holes from simultaneous intrusion. Bodies are soggy, open things.
How do they choose a host? A life span is a matter of location, whether one wants it or not. Maybe choice is an illusion in this matter. Are they attracted to certain smells, girths, disease? Or is everything genetically predetermined? By which I mean no deliberate, analytical thought, just lunging forever forward on instinct. Gorging, purging, circling through life in a pointed herd like migrating geese. Do they degrade the longer they are kept without a nest? Suddenly without tails, then legs, waning. It is essential to arrange for one’s own scarcity.
“Is that the point?” I say aloud to an empty room.
The air in the house turns, stinging the inside of my nose. I roll the seed to the left side of my cheek and lodge it between my lower molars. Looking out through the frosted pane, the ice inches its way out of the water and up to shore again, reaching. The sky is afternoon white, spreading across a monochrome landscape. I barely make out a fingernail of moon hanging in the sky. It is either snowing or not.
In the warm months I like to sit in a wooded valley that floods every few years, wiping out shacks built on abandoned coal mines, opening and filling sinkholes. Other times I stand in an outdoor shopping plaza next to the tire factory, feeding lake gulls french fries. The air smells like burning rubber for miles. N plants strawberries in a garden box in his yard. I do not tell him that I am allergic. I lay beneath the hovering berries and watch buds form in tandem with the welts on my wrist. When the bumps begin to itch, I move to the shade of a nearby trellis and watch ants imitate zombies. They seem disoriented, walking in patterns to nowhere. Finally laying down, mouths splayed open, affixing themselves to any available plant matter. Green veins jut out through the top of their heads, spearing them permanently.
The wave abruptly shifts, twitching. I tongue the pit. For a moment, I locate something animal in its movements. A facial gesture between a smile and a wince. The way children look in sleep. A shudder moves down my leg, leaving an ache in my left hip. This happens when I am on the brink of losing focus. It is like I am looking over the shoulder of the actual event, past it. This is a way to suspend time. In this space, I am an object of offering like I am supposed to be. I will be looked at when I want, which I have read is always. Here, it is easy to sublimate vulnerability to desire.
I tap my stomach. I imagine it filling the entire room. Ballooning out until ice bursts through dermis and falls out onto the fluid splattered floor. I see a handsome piece of detritus fly off the water and land in my neighbor’s front yard. It is oblong and violet, glistening. It will make a nice present for N.
I open my front door and run quietly across my yard to the other, leaning down and cradling the flitting object in my hand. I stop to watch the corpse. I place myself on the ground in front of it. I lay supine, then I lay prostrate. I move my limbs bit by bit until I am perfectly simulating the shape of the decaying mass in the street. It feels comfortable, almost reflexive. My body remembers this shape.
It becomes clear to me as I suck on the pit while falling asleep that evening that the wave will never completely diminish. This realization is both comforting and confining. I have not agreed to this committed relationship. I do not have an answer to resolve this situation, and my psychic is too infatuated with my potential as a mother to talk about much else lately. She is more confrontational than usual, telling me she prefers the title of spiritual counselor, and that my eggs are drying up. My arms and head are covered in scratches from her sharp, manicured nails. N observes the fresh abrasions on my neck suspiciously, placing his fingertips across them.
I wake at three in the morning. The digital alarm clock blinks, synchronizing with the noises emitting from my stomach. I cannot remember the last time I have had a proper meal. I pull the seed from my cheek and place it on the nightstand. I move through the hallway in a somnambulant manner, shuffling slowly with fingers outstretched and eyes half open, as though pushing aside a web of gauze. When I get to the doorway, I turn on the light switch.
Standing in front of the refrigerator is a giant insect. A creature resembling a praying mantis with the wings of a beetle, but not exactly, something off, and at least six feet tall. It hovers, eyes fixed on mine as it smooths marmalade onto a piece of bread with a butter knife. The insect’s cerci are surprisingly agile. It is careful, precise in its movements without even glancing in the direction of the crust. It places the toast on a cloth napkin and hands it to me. I can tell this is a gesture of respect. I bite into it. I stand by the window and look out into the dark, towards the direction of the lake. I begin to cry. The salt falls onto the bread and mixes with the jelly. The insect is patient and calm. The marmalade is delicious, and soon winter will end.
Brenna Lee is a Detroit based writer. She received her MFA at Naropa University where she was the recipient of the Leslie Scalapino Award. Her work has recently appeared in Bone Bouquet, BathHouse, and Everything In Aspic, and is forthcoming in Reality Beach.
