Amelia Gray: Gutshot: Stories

* * *

My apartment was just as I had left it. The sheets, stretched over the mattress on the floor, blended into the white carpet and bare white walls to lend a clean, institutional feel to the whole. The kitchen area, demarcated from the other space only by a change in flooring and flanked by white laminate countertops, was functional and airless. Taken all together, the place was immaculate — one room, but room enough for me. I plugged the television in and opened the windows. It was comforting to remember that I could keep a complete inventory of my items in such a small space. My books were stacked high in all four corners, with more on the card table. I moistened a paper towel and wiped dust from the counters.

She stood by the door, slouched under her two backpacks. Instead of carrying one on each arm, she wore one on her back and the second strapped to her chest, the overstuffed pack resting on her belly. They had a counterbalancing effect, holding her upright and steady under their equal weight.

“Take a load off. Want some water?”

“If you don’t have any beer,” she said awkwardly, as if she had read about people saying such things but had never tried it out until now. I had to remind myself that I hadn’t coerced her into following me, that she had gone willingly with me to the cab and into my home without so much as noting the street names.

I took two glasses from the cabinet and rinsed them out before filling them from the tap. “Put your things anywhere.”

Leaning, she let her arms fall forward. The pack slipped off her chest and hit the floor hard. She righted herself and deposited the second behind her in the same manner, almost going down with it. “It’s nice to stand,” she said.

“Dusty in here,” I said, more to the dust than to her.

“How long have you been away?” she asked, sniffing the glass of tap water I gave her. It was unclear to me if she was detecting odors in the water or the glass itself.

“Sorry, no ice.”

We drank our water in silence. There was something metallic about it, though I may have invented the flavor to understand what she was feeling. Empathy, I found, was a good and valuable skill and I tried to practice it at least once a day. While we drank, I glanced down to see if her name might be printed on her bag. She craned her neck to observe the junk mail piled by the door.

“I’m only around here half the year,” I said, sweeping the mail from the counter and dumping it in the trash. “Otherwise I’m in Texas with my brother.”

“Your brother’s in Texas.” She seemed very tired all of a sudden.

“That’s right. The state and I take turns caring for him.”

“What do you do?” she asked. “Out here, I mean.”

“I read and go to movies, and take classes at the community center. Business typing, supply chain dynamics, things like that.”

Her eyes were lidded to the point that it seemed possible she was asleep on her feet. “Cool,” she said. “Cool.”

“Do you want to lie down?”

“I don’t want to take up any space.” She had edged herself into a corner and crossed her arms before her as if to prove her point, the empty glass pressed against her upper arm. She looked at the bed, placed in the center of the room like a low altar.

“Go on. I’ll leave you alone.”

I rinsed out her glass in the sink. She was asleep before she got horizontal. I nudged her bags into a pile next to the door and went to clean up.

The bathroom was as I left it, with its tinctures lined up in the cabinet. I chose two of the little bottles for later.

The shower sputtered rusty. The human stink of the bus had gotten into my skin and hair, the inner folds of my nose and ears. I could sense it seeping into my bloodstream. I had become the bodily equivalent of a pair of wet jeans. It was fine that she was ruining my sheets. I considered the alternative: allowing that monster on the bus to take her away, to fingerbang her in the back of some Camaro he called home. The water drove welts into my skin but I couldn’t force it deep enough, even when I tugged my earlobes down, when I opened wide and sent it down my throat. The bus had left the kind of stain that coiled around my animal cells. Removing it would require weeks of pure living. I would have to throw out the sheets.

* * *

My brother and I were the kind of children who could spend an afternoon entertained by games of our own invention. We played Orphan and Soldier, shouting across the backyard. Or Leaf Lottery, where the winner could create the rules for the rest of the hour, maybe that berries were to become our only food or that we weren’t allowed to call for help. He was ten years older and my only protector. Sometimes he wouldn’t come home for a few days at a time, no easy task in the country. He must have made a camp somewhere.

Once, he was gone for a week when they sent me out after him. Stickers snagged my tights. It must have been Sunday and it must have been cold. I looked for him behind the shed and by the big oak, up the stream past the flat bank, past where we had ever gone together. I shouted his name, throwing sticks so the animals would be scared away. I took off my shoes, which pinched, and let the rocks cut into my stocking feet. I sat down and waited for an hour or two after I forgot if he was lost or if we both were or if it was only me.

Branches cracked and fell and the sound froze me toward their source. The sun had just set and shapes changed in the new dark. I bit down hard on my thumb, which I hadn’t realized I’d been sucking.

He emerged from the forest, which settled back behind him like a curtain. He was naked to the waist despite the cold and was thinner than usual, his skin seeming loose on his body like a paper bag covering a pear. He asked me why I was scared. The air around me was the same as the air inside my body.

He kneeled on the ground and made a cradle from his arms. We had played Child and Cradle before. I curled up and his legs made a bough under my back. His arms were as cold as any branch. “Before we grew hair and got dangerous, we were all babies,” he said. “Did you know?”

“Yes,” I lied; I could only think of my brother as a fully formed man, even then when he was young. I knew already that he would send our mother away at last so that it could just be the two of us. The scope of our shared future was too much. His hands were hands and my body was a nursing doll.

* * *

She was running in her sleep. Her legs twitched. When I lay down, she instinctively rolled closer. I considered the possibility that she was dreaming of the man on the bus and the thought filled me with a flashing trill of grief and rage. I had saved her from him and she didn’t yet understand how grateful she should be for my actions. I pictured her bloody in an alley, her gut ripped with a shard of glass; or perhaps she would be scattered across a public park in parts, oozing like a bisected worm. I thought of her hair tied to a buoy, a gleam of white bone from her open throat catching a fisherman’s eye. But here she was, whole within her reliable container.

I edged closer and she cuddled up. Her lips planted on the skin stretched between my armpit and breast. I was naked from the shower. She pretended to be asleep for a while, and then her eyes opened and she looked over my shoulder to the wall. I estimated her to be one hundred ten pounds. After a while, I extracted myself and got up to make dinner.

“Do you like tomato soup?” I asked from the kitchen. “I’ll have to make it with water.”

There was no response save for her quiet cough.

“Tomato?” I asked. “Or chicken and stars?”

She sat with her back to me.

“Here’s what we’ll eat if we have chicken and stars,” I said, examining the label, spinning one of the tinctures on the counter as I read aloud. “Chicken stock, enriched macaroni product, including wheat flour, egg white solids, niacin, ferrous sulfate, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid.” Her silence met me; she might as well have slapped the food out of my hands. Such cruelty in such an otherwise lovely girl. “Do you hear me? Cooked chicken meat,” I said, louder. “Carrots, modified wheat starch, lower sodium natural sea salt, chicken fat, celery, cooked mechanically separated chicken, monosodium glutamate. Salt. Sugar. Maltodextrin, onions, corn oil, yeast extract.”