Julia Rose Eng

Dreamt last night of walking down a fire escape. He was wearing his boots, and I was in stockings  and holding my blue slingbacks. I was carrying them the same way that a guillotine cradles its blade, upright and precarious. I had held my arm there so long that it seemed I had never had an arm in the first place.

Every few seconds my mind would break through thick lake water to my consciousness, and in sky writing I would read my existence out loud. Just like JESUS LOVES YOU or HAILEY, PROM? I am spinning like a helicopter seed. I have a spoon in my hand, and I am eating a sundae. It is August 5th. I met a cat today in the park and I tried to carry it home with me on the subway.

The full, whole water would take me engulf me and drift me back to him in the cheap cotton of a hospital gown. I was mad at him, and maybe it was because he told me I looked beautiful when I was angry, like how I used to chew watermelon gum every English class because some guy told me that it smelled good. He would say That’s some Freudian shit because that is the only psychological term he knows. Maybe because I remembered that he once chased me around trying to cut my bra straps like umbilical cords that were tying me down to infancy because It’s not like you need them anymore.

He grabbed me by my shirt collar and held me over the sidewalk and all I could see were the frat houses that I used to be scared of with RUSH BETA painted on the roof. Where I met him for the first time. And he was wearing his stupid fake barbed wire necklace. Because he thinks he’s Jesus. He was the first man that was nice to me. I felt the rapture of the full moon sat upon the crest of the fullest, fattest fountain with water bulging like the belly of a whale with gaseous dynamite, like sputtering pipes and the sublime steadiness of a barn in the distance while watching from a moving car. My face felt like a hot German summer or maybe like a Mediterranean jellyfish sting, and there was dynamite in my throat, but all the blood rushed to my head and my nose started bleeding everywhere, all over his Dali shirt. He was mad about that. My blood went all over the pomegranate, the fish, and the tigers, and spilled all over the painted shores and everything was as raw as the way clay looks when it is at different stages of dry.

I blinked and the shoreline was green again, I was fourteen again, and I was sitting on his deck in the woods. He had just bought a new mattress and let me hold onto it in the back of his truck. He gave me a t-shirt that looked like the Budweiser logo but said Buttweiser and had a cartoon of women with perfect 1950s asses on it, and I held onto the mattress all through the plains, past the pissing cows swatting their tails at strange noises and the stand selling overpriced strawberries on the corner. I watched the foxtails bob in the wake of exhaust as they waved incomplete, half-hearted bye’s from the shoulder and felt the air dry my eyes out.

He never got mad at me then. He was straightforward and gentle and had the hidden wonder of a little one with an all consuming eye. We drove upstate that time and only played his jazz CDs. His family had a lake house. It was practically empty. I joked that we were going Into the Wild, Off the Grid, Waldening it, Little House on the Prairie-ing, and he just told me to restock the fridge with beer, and I was happy to. When he used to help me with my assignments on columns, the different swirls, the way they bulged in the center to convince the public that they stood straight up. He had the old books that smelled like fat loaves of sourdough bread and a filing cabinet of a mind. That was the best time.

I loved him the most then. He was perfect. He was a saint with a halo of gnats at a bonfire. No fire escapes, just a lake with no fish, very clean, and nothing scary at the bottom. No holes in my tights or blisters. No airplanes over the lake because the sky was an inch thick, an inch over our heads like a force field, like Saran-Wrapped fruit. We made up constellations, and he charted them on the back of my thigh in green nail polish.

And when I went for a swim in the morning, all of his fine work washed away, and I knew that he had simply fizzed down into a wind that I would close the door on. He does not remember the way I do. I still replay it on my eyelids when my head sticks gingerly out of the window on the twelfth floor, looking down at the doorsteps of a frat house where the policeman is calling his wife: him in his Dali shirt, wiping down the boat with a fresh rag with that deference in his stance, him in his Dali shirt, saying I am as good as a Jezebel muse, humming jazz from the radio. Because I am asleep in a silver suitcase, and because you are on speaker phone, the sound of your breath wordlessly articulates the sound of every pine needle falling to the ground on the most expansive timeline, and all I see is us on the largest highway in a car more beautiful than I am, driving to a ledge above an ocean with a trunk full of pomegranates.