SmokeLong Quarterly

Their kids aren’t friends. Yet the two women talk after dropping their kids off at school. It’s not every day, because the two women aren’t close friends either. But they like the talk when it happens. Thirty minutes. An oasis of uninterrupted, non-logistical adult conversation amidst slotting playdates on the calendar, marinating chicken, music lessons, soccer practices, listening to their kindergarteners talk on and on about parakeets who escaped their cages and created a liberated colony; work smushed in between.

“Emmett fell down the stairs last night,” the woman with a high bun and oatmeal stains on her powder blue sweatshirt says. “My middle guy.”

The woman with the worn baseball cap and forest green yoga pants responds, “Is he okay?”

“He broke his leg. We were in the ER ’til 1 AM.”

“Oh no.”

“It’s a clean break. It’ll heal.”

The woman in the baseball cap says she’s sorry to the woman in the high bun, because she can tell that something else broke besides the son’s leg.

After returning home from the ER, anxiety came for the woman in the high bun whose hair was strewn loose about her pillow. The feeling started low in her belly, like a rumble. You didn’t drink enough water, she told herself, a strangely selfish thought that wasn’t about her son’s broken leg nor the whimpering from his room the rest of the night. She replayed her day to herself: work on her laptop, a stale bagel, then hearing her three boys sounding like elephants upstairs after school. Dinner with the Clippers Nuggets game on, volume just high enough to deter conversation. Maybe cooking videos will help, she thought, holding her phone while lying in bed several feet away from her snoring husband. To feel more what, rooted? Love?  She recalled what her hands held. Never a vessel of water. She started to remember the last time she forgot to drink fluids for days, which led to a urinary tract infection, then an allergic reaction to antibiotics, then hellfire. Her skin—from inside her ears to the scalp on her head to the bottoms of her feet—burned, like her flesh had opened raw. The scorching worsened every time she moved, blood flowing to enflame one flank of her body, then another, pushing prescribed medicine that was, in fact, a fiery toxin through her veins, boiling up to her surface. She had slept in the bathtub, in lukewarm water four inches high so she wouldn’t drown. Though she wished she would.

This was why, gripping the roots of her hair with both hands, panic arose wondering how many glasses of water she drank. Not enough. She didn’t hug her children enough. Didn’t lotion their skin enough. She didn’t illuminate enough, like when the referee at her eldest son’s losing basketball game had zeroed out the 45 to 4 score, she had said to her younger boys, “It’s embarrassing.” When her youngest son needed more to understand why the scoreboard went dark, she repeated the same words it’s embarrassing, not bothering to check what didn’t click. Life often didn’t click. In bed, she wondered, did he think the referee was embarrassed? She didn’t pretty the house enough. She didn’t worry about her son’s broken leg enough. She was not enough.

The woman in the baseball cap notices her friend scratch her arms and grip the ends of her sweatshirt sleeves over her hands. She wonders what to make of the downward slouch of her friend’s cheeks, the heaviness behind her eyes—dread. A familiar expression that, from her bathroom mirror, stares back in the mornings; because mornings come after the dreams that wake her up steamed and bothered. Will she ever be found out? Not for the steamy dreams of other men, which are harmless, right? The sweaty nights with her daughter’s voice teacher, though, are not. The teacher is young, goofy, his singing a bit too Bieberiffic, but he moves hair out of her face, kisses the top of her forehead. Tender things her husband forgot how to do.

She shifts her baseball cap and turns to her friend wanting to confess. The high bun woman might get it. Don’t they say infidelity is a symptom, never the cause? She could tell her friend of her ignored texts, her husband’s I’m-getting-coffee trips on weekends that suspiciously last hours. Her friend’ll be on her side, and she’d finally sip up some validation. With her arms above her head fixing her cap, opening her mouth, a car careens around the corner, skidding into a mailbox, tearing it out of the ground. The flying mailbox hits the woman who still has her baseball cap in her hand.

She now lies on the grass of someone’s front lawn.

The high bun woman pulls her sweatshirt off to tie it, tight, below her friend’s armpit. She’s quick. Just eight hours earlier, she was in the ER hearing machine beeps, her son screaming out in pain. She’s unafraid, but her voice shakes. “I have to stop the bleeding. From your arm.”

The woman whose baseball cap is now by her side feels the wet grass beside her. The lawn was just watered, she thinks. Feeling a swoosh of dizziness and how the wet around her is warm, she realizes it’s not water. Her friend is gentle yet firm when she touches the injured arm. The bleeding woman thinks how pleasant her friend’s touch feels. They never reached their hands out to each other before. Up in the sky, she sees a blue so clear smattered with cottony clouds pulled apart. She’s comforted by her friend’s voice saying an ambulance is coming. She hears joyful chirps and screeches of birds above the high bun woman’s face, recalling how she never bothered to look up whenever she often heard this uniquely bright chatter pass overhead. At once, she sees the flock—parakeets’ lime green bodies bonded together in flight, their gold-dipped wings flapping streaks of sunny feathers—and she laughs.