My face is an orange and Tammy is gone. The vertical slit in my orangeface leaks juice like a miserable, gaping vagina when I cry, and I have been crying a lot, lately. Often, I knead the rind of my brow and pulp my facial fruit-meat like Tammy pulped my heart when she left. The orange juice I squeeze out, the kids in the neighbourhood say, tastes of heartbreak. Bittersweet heartbreak with the zest of citrus. They tell me I should probably keep my orange juice to myself, the kids do, but they buy it anyway. Or, they give me money to leave them alone, at any rate.
Tammy was an asshole. She did asshole things, like leaving me, and taking the ottoman with her when she left. She wasn’t always an asshole, but she was always skinny, which is what makes her theft of my ottoman so remarkable: that thing is heavy. Not just heavy, but cumbersome, too. Severely so. My grandfather made it for me out of crushed cinderblocks and the deep, substantial regret of a life spent making ottomans for ungrateful family members. His face wasn’t an orange, but the skin on his hands looked like seaweed, which is kind of like food, I guess. Anyway, he stank of brine shrimp and disaster and was entirely unpleasant to be around.
What a bitch she was, that Tammy.
I found a fuzzy little birdling, once, hiding in the corner of my balcony. It was shivering and scared and its nascent wings were undeveloped and useless. I ushered it inside and spent that afternoon looking for its mother, even though I knew she was gone and unlikely to return. It was still shaking and nervous through the evening and wouldn’t eat anything except for the tiny sips it slurped out of my orangeface. Eventually, the little bird began to eat proper little bird food and became accustomed to my apartment, to me, even. Nightly, it would nibble from my fruit-meat and nestle happily into a discarded microwave-dinner box to sleep. But daily, it would stare with an air of melancholy at the flying seagulls passing the window, and I knew what needed to be done. Gently, I scooped up my now-feathered companion and let it peck my face with goodbyes as I took it to the balcony. I heard a dollop of my sad juice spatter against the railing as I watched it confidently spread its wings twice, three times, four. I let it go. It dropped like a stone.
Now, too late, I see the lesson: I should have dropped Tammy from the balcony.
Our relationship was as bittersweet as my juice, in retrospect. Every pleasant memory I have of her is tainted, each by a conflicting memory and by the fact that she somehow managed to take all my canned soup, even the mushroom. Even with the ottoman, even the mushroom soup. Incredible.
She hates mushroom soup.
I shot a seed out of my face at a homeless man on our first date, shot him right in the forehead, because he tried to put his hand on Tammy’s leg. He was groping her, that’s what she said, though the look on his dishevelled mug after my seed ricocheted off his melon seemed to suggest bewilderment. A lot of homeless people look bewildered. Especially so, I would imagine, after being cracked in the noggin with an orange seed the size of a drink-coaster. Still, the smirk on her face that night always bothered me. More, now, obviously, as I can see her in my mind’s eye smirking and cackling and hoarding my soup. A smiling sadist throwing cans of my favourite soup at homeless people right now. Maybe she picks the wrong vagrant, though, maybe gets a serious surprise from a particularly athletic homeless man familiar with dodging tin-plated foodstuffs. And maybe, just maybe, Tammy finally gets what’s coming to her.
Oh, what I wouldn’t squeeze out of my face to see that.
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