Fiction

It was the first day of April when I took from a man of about my age (though, I noted, not as hot as my boyfriend at the time) the light burden of his left eye. It was an accident, or at least as much of an accident as it could have been.

By that April, all my friends had reached their senior years of college and I was still living at home in Tucker, being what my mother in a bad mood called a “waste of space.” I worked at a grocery store in Atlanta and took (stole, really) upscale breads for my boyfriend. I’d spent the winter realizing in increments how much I needed to get my life moving in some good direction.

My life had been wandering for three years, ever since I didn’t get into the college I thought I wanted, Davidson, a college my boyfriend in a bad mood called “pretty enough.” It shouldn’t have been so bad, not getting into the right college, but that angry envelope unleashed gales that whirled my unhinged life into confusion. I mean, it really did—two days after the letter came in the mail some pre-thunderstorm weather devolved into a thrashing windstorm, which threw a rotten tree onto our garage.

In response, I retreated into my own body. I began to skip school, to ignore assignments. I fell into an easily-sustainable pattern of squalor. I was never a drinker, and couldn’t stand the taste of my throat scorching with weed, but nonetheless (and how could this be more easily forgivable?) I got almost nothing done. I would come home from school and lie down in my unmade bed and take naps punctuated by naps, and I let myself grow filthy. I would wear a shirt for days until it grew soft and tempered with skin cells. I bathed in my own odor and kept the lights so dim my eyes stung. I lay around pantsless, putting black sharpie dots over every reddened follicle on my thighs. When I did have pants on, I could not keep my hands out of them. I was furious every day, outraged with failure. Sometimes my boyfriend would come over, my river-god, to slip himself like cool gelatin into my nest. At the time he shared my fascination with unscented products: he used unscented soap, unscented lotion, unscented detergent, and I would close my eyes and breathe in his unscent.

I went to Georgia Southern for a semester, failed to complete a single assignment—hard drive failure, I’d told every professor every time, angrily like they were to blame—and came back home, thinking I’d try again the next year. But I liked being close to my boyfriend, who went to Georgia State.

I stagnated. I remember one early summer walking down to the creek that ran in the woods of a neighbor’s land. The center of the creek ran slick and green, but the edges, snagged with branches and rocks, were sluggish from the mosquitoes that laid their eggs in the water, clotted white with foamy arterial plaque. The image personally disgusted me. I had to run back to my house.

But really things weren’t all that bad, those three years. I was making money; my coworkers couldn’t smell me through the smell of the bread. My boyfriend and I were compatible in a spiritually gratifying way. I helped my mother cook dinner almost every night and I went on walks when I wanted to feel sweaty and purged.

So along came this April of my mock-senior year. That morning at my grocery store, Fowler’s, the four women who came every morning to bake the bread unexpectedly made pumpkin-seed cheese bread, which was supposed to be seasonal. I took three loaves and texted my boyfriend, who didn’t respond. He loved seasonal breads mainly because he found the idea satisfyingly non-modern, and he’d always liked pumpkin-seed cheese bread. Pumpkin-seed cheese bread has these cubes of bright-orange artisanal cheddar baked into the center. It’s a bread that refines itself. I was driving home, wondering if it would be as good in the moist springtime as in the fall. I was looking at my phone to start calling my boyfriend when my side mirror lightly hit the bicyclist.

On the first of April, this is what I became. I became a girl who could clip a bicyclist with the right side mirror of her parent’s car, causing the bicyclist to swerve, hit a rock, flip off his bicycle like a plume of water sideways from a swiveling hose, land on the ground seemingly safe from damage, and then, after skittering forward a foot, plunge his left eye into the point of a broken sign pole by the roadside.

He was lucky—how easily, sighed the doctors, the pole could have perforated his head, piercing its metallic trail deep into the lax oxbows of his brain. Lucky! Yet I removed his eye, destroyed it. I could have just as well laid my lips on his soft socket-skin and sucked the eye from his skull, wet globe with fire-red contrail, mine to round out my cheek and keep smooth in my saliva.