by Samantha Bell
This town is a mess in a sad state. The hills are soot and metal, the taste of dental fillings. In my friend’s apartment, the world is a ziplocked pyre of clothes and mold. The mirrors hold dust and not much else; my reflection is different in every one. The bathroom is the center of a black universe, with dark, diseased circles of black mold across the ceiling tiles. My friend has trouble breathing, and headaches: now I know why. His head always itches, and I am afraid to sit down, take a bite of the cheese he sets on a cutting board, afraid to put my lips around the rim of a coffee cup. From his kitchen window, the neighborhood slants in groping sweeps, nonsense planning for houses on a hill. There is no tract housing, no straight line. Instead, there is a mini-mart and poverty, whole lives wrapped around this town. My friend sleeps on a futon made with unwashed sheets, wrinkled from body grease. A cat claws at the downstairs door, but he won’t come in. I cannot blame him.
My friend winds me down the long streets, meanders me through the woods and down a path. The main drag is a piece of coal and steel, a windy tunnel of loss. In a bar, he sees college students that used to be his; they slap high fives. Behind me, there is a hole in the wall; I worry about the rats shuffling inside; I hear their nails on thin concrete. I hate this fucking place, so I keep drinking beer and swill it into the sides of my mouth, a sign that I am very nervous. When I met my friend, he was living like this, but we were in college and nothing made sense, and we smoked together and drank together and laughed about the undone laundry and the dirty dishes. Now, we teach others in two different states. We watch the students eye us, as if we know something they need to have, as if we have any fucking answers. My friend lives worse than most of them do, and he came from a good family. I worry that this state is the last that will see him, that his reinvigorated use of LSD and bourbon is somehow his way of saying help, except that he never says it.
Sober, we stare at each other like two little kids: our moms are away and we are done for. The mountains, I think, will surely eat us. I am not used to this hand-to-mouth living. I flew here in a fucking airplane and I am pissed and cold and stony silent because this is not who I am and I think this later, across my friend’s kitchen table as he sloshes some more bourbon into a clear glass. The houses do not light up at night; they just settle and shut down, wait for the next shitty day. The clouds muster some strength and spit rain at us, onto the windows, and we sit in silence. There are worlds among us that we will never visit, worlds I will imagine on my bumpy flight home, as promising as any bright day, as staged as the snow on the way back home.
Samantha Bell believes that animals could be very good writers.
