Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

“Oh… nothing, I guess. I don’t know what I was getting at. I was just trying to help.”

“Then why’d you call in sick? You don’t do that. Remember when you broke your wrist sophomore year? You went to Spanish before you went to the health center. I could hear you whimpering under your breath the whole time.”

“I didn’t break it. It was just a sprain.”

Mallory leans back into her chair, regards her. “But you’re not even sick, are you?”

“No, I don’t feel good, really.” If necessary, Iris believes she can will a cold to strike. A flu, if she concentrates hard enough. She could still do it.

“You look fine to me.”

“It’s my… throat. My throat hurts.”

“Do you want some tea? I’ll get it.” Mallory starts to get up.

“No, don’t. I’m fine.”

“So you are playing hooky. Whole day. Free as a bird. What are you going to do with the time?”

“I don’t know.”

“You could call Marcus back. He said you never returned any of his calls.” Mallory squints.

“I don’t think he ever did call…” Iris thinks back and realizes she doesn’t know if he’s called or not, though she can’t imagine why he would. She can’t say she’s been checking her phone very regularly, or always remembering to charge it. She’s barely been paying attention to anything.

“Is there someone else you haven’t told me about? Is that why you never call the guys I set you up with?”

“Hm?” Iris inhales sharply, “what?”

“You really don’t pay a lot of attention,” Mallory says, and Iris is startled, as though her thoughts have been broadcast aloud without her knowledge or consent.

“Do you?” she prods.

Iris remembers then, how to defuse things when Mallory starts to needle like this. How to distract her. She tries to mirror Mallory’s smirk.

“You must be planning some sort of revenge, right? Against Countess… what was it?”

“Bitchface.” Mallory’s face softens a little into a smile, though her eyes remain narrowed. “I would like to let the air out of her tires.”

“With what, like a switchblade?”

“With my goddamn incisors.”

Iris laughs first, and Mallory follows, her teeth flashing.

“You could put sugar in her gas tank.”

“Too pedestrian,” Mallory sniffs.

“Superglue a quarter to her windshield, right in her field of vision? She wouldn’t be able to get it off without cracking the glass.”

“That’s better.”

“Or, you could wait until she goes out, sneak into her office, take her chair apart, and fill the legs with strips of raw meat. She wouldn’t notice at first, probably. Not until the smell got really bad.”

“She’d call building management and have them tear the whole place apart. You’re sick.”

“I told you I was.” Iris clutches her throat and makes a wounded face, making the two of them laugh again.

Iris decides then what she’s going to do today. She stops laughing as her own plans for a more benign sort of mischief begin to materialize.

“There’s only one problem,” Mallory says, grimacing.

“What’s that?” Iris asks, staring vaguely at the wall behind Mallory.

“No. I could never get back into that building. I was escorted out by security.”

“Why?”

“I said some stuff. I’m not telling you. You’ll think less of me.” Mallory narrows her eyes, pleased with herself as she takes another sip. “So. Now what?”

“I’ve got to go.” Iris stands up from the table and heads for the stairs.

“You should print that on a business card,” Mallory calls out.

Iris turns back with an apologetic smile, then continues down the stairs. She thinks it was a smile. She may have just swiveled her head, her face blank. But she can’t worry about that now.

She steps out onto the street and the morning is settled now, sunny and stagnant. She walks around the corner to her car, shining in the too-close, too-hot sun.

In the car, Iris begins to lose nerve. The air conditioner is broken, so she rolls her windows down. The wind blows hard in her ears and sets her hair flying as she rolls through the wide boulevards. It drowns out the radio, so all she hears is the flap and roar.

She is not even sure what she is doing. She should keep driving. She should go back home, where she can’t do any damage. She should count her blessings that she has a job, a home, a car, working lungs, and a beating heart.

But she makes the turn into the parking lot, parking her car at the far edge, against a strip of concrete filled in with low hedges. But instead of crossing the lot to the building, she steps down the small driveway into the residential area that overlooks the main street below.

She walks past bright, clean houses, small dogs yipping in yards. She steps out into the street to avoid sprinklers that douse the sidewalk, missing their mark, while the lawns gape, parched. In her sneakers, she is able to negotiate the heaving lumps in the sidewalk, where roots push up and out, unstoppable.

She turns down toward the main thoroughfare, and finds herself walking alongside the vacant lot, the one that didn’t used to be vacant. It is still empty. Emptier. The sign is gone.

I’m home. Are you?

I’m home. Where?

I’m home. So what?

She can see it sometimes, still, when she closes her eyes. She walks to the other side of the lot, her eyes never leaving the weedy ground inside the fence. There is no post. There is no hole in the ground. She grips the chain link in her fingers, searching for some sign of what she knows she saw, knows she did. The words exist only for her now. It is possible, probable, that no one else ever saw, because who else is looking off to the sides of things? Everyone she sees is facing forward, in motion toward a specific something. Her throat tightens and she swallows hard a few times, dry swallows, skin against skin.

She keeps walking, all the way to the hardware store several blocks west. She remembers it from a time her boss sent her to pick up a single 2-by-4, late on a Monday afternoon.

She wanders the aisles, sure of what she is looking for, but unsure of where it might be hidden. When she finds it, she approaches slowly, as though under surveillance. She can move so slowly that no motive can be assigned. She can move so slowly that any watcher would lose interest. This is where her power lies, and she is in just the right place now to claim it. She approaches the display, turns slowly on her heel to face it.

Iris doesn’t know anything about drills. She flags down a sales associate.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Can you tell me which drill bit will fit this one?” She holds the smallest power drill aloft, having chosen it for its smallish size, just the right fit for her purse.

“What kind of job is it?” he asks.

“The usual kind.”

“Um…”

“Just whatever will fit.”

“Okay,” he shrugs, and pulls a package from the wall. She snatches it from his fingers, pays, and ducks into the alley behind the store to assemble the thing, her back up against the hot painted brick wall, parts splayed out in the gravel.

By the time she arrives back at the office building, she is sweaty, thirsty, and made of steel. She creeps around to the back of the building, where she scans the parking lot for her boss’s car. She doesn’t see it anywhere. But the white van is there, dirtier still, and parked under a small diseased-looking tree, its slack branches laid out on the windshield and hood.

Iris climbs the stairs softly, stopping when a woman she’s never seen before passes her on the stairs carrying a stack of manila envelopes. She does not think it is beyond the realm of possibility that she is invisible when motionless. She has no evidence for or against. At the top of the stairs, she runs her hand over the jagged wall. It’s true that it opens up the space. It does feel easier to breathe.