Amelia Gray - Gutshot - Stories

I sat beside her on the bed, ran my hand roughly through her hair. “You need to eat,” I said. She didn’t move. She wasn’t disturbed by my nudity, by anything about me. It was as if we had known each other for a very long time indeed, our whole lives, or maybe our lives began in that moment, and either way she gazed clear-eyed into my heart and forgave me for all my future sins.

“Modified food starch,” I said more gently. “Spice extract, cornstarch, beta carotene, soy protein isolate, sodium phosphate, and chicken flavor, which contains chicken powder.” I squeezed her and put my lips to her shoulder. “It’s important to realize all of the angles,” I said.

She let me lead her to the table and sat while I made the preparations for her meal. “Table for one,” I said. We were going to have such a time together and learn so much. Lucky girls like her didn’t have the capacity to be truly grateful and so I felt grateful on her behalf.

There was nothing wrong with him, really. She watched him snoring there on the old couch his parents had given them as a wedding gift, a sleeping bag half swaddled around his big body. He was a good husband who listened to her stories from the grocery store, where she worked behind the customer service desk and had to deal with the guys from the bus stop bringing in lottery tickets they unwedged from the trash, changing the numbers, insisting they were real winners. Jim’s thumb rested in his open mouth, a bad habit he had long tried to break with hypnosis tapes.

A good man. He would hold her face in his hands and say the sweet things. He spoke of soothing topics like yard maintenance, the work he did with pine bark and fish compost. He hadn’t saved the violets the neighbor kids had trampled but figured the bare patches brought some realism to the scene. It would be properly summative to say there was nothing wrong with him. There were certainly things wrong with her, the blood pooling into her slipper suggested. The layer of tendinous muscle in her belly curled back to reveal a scroll detailing exactly what had gone awry in her own personal history. It fell from her and unfurled, inked script declaring ills: the time she overhanded a pair of bronzed baby shoes at the neighbor’s dog; the time her boss found a tray of refill razors in her purse.

She bent over her sleeping man, feeling the intentions of her heart suspended in ego like a kitchen sponge in dishwater. Gathering up her nightgown, she tucked her knee under his. The penknife snapped a few seams in the couch frame as she hefted up beside him, holding his shoulder to keep herself aloft. He moaned, turning and settling back. He must have been such an easy child.

The disposal was stopped up. It had begun to produce an odor, which she had noticed earlier that evening while making his sandwich for the next day and considering the ways Miracle Whip could truly be called a miracle. She had rolled up her sleeve and plunged her hand to the blade, discovering it dull enough to mangle a lemon half without destroying it. Or else it was a problem with the motor, something prohibitively expensive. Either way, it held the fruit to rot, drowned and steady against her scrabbling hand and then the knife, yielding to the slight attack. She didn’t have the strength or skill to fix it. There was so much that was out of her control.

Angie was in the road, leaning against the curb. She had kicked her feet like a child until one of her crummy ballet slippers tumbled into the street, where it was run over by a bicycle. “I wish I had a dog boner,” she said.

Mason made a noncommittal sound. He got down beside her. She was crouched between two parked cars, her arms all cut up. He reached for her chair to roll it closer but it was just past the grasp of his free hand.

“We are good friends,” Mason said.

“To better express my feelings,” she said. He could feel the scars through her thick tights like seams on a fabric doll. Her legs made a graceful arc, ankles as delicate as a fossil of an ancient sea creature, like her body progressed back in time from head to foot.

“It’s late.”

He grasped one of her wrists and held it gently. She thrashed and kicked up a soaked piece of cardboard. “I wish I was a dog boner,” she said.

“We should go home.”

“I don’t want to,” she said.

“Your girlfriends said I should take you home.”

She made a choking laugh. He was trying to heft her body onto his lap but only managed to pull her torso halfway over his knees.

“It’s true,” she called out. She reached for one of the cars, hooked her fingers around the bumper, and pulled. Her fingernails came back dirty. She smudged them across her face.

Mason appreciated the independent spirit that soared above her condition. Always since they had met he imagined standing beside her on a television program, maybe with his hand on her shoulder in a public show of pride and support.

She was vomiting. He turned her body to the side so she could avoid her dress. His hand grazed her breast and he moved it away, down to her belly because he was a gentleman. “We need to go home,” he said.

Someone stopped above them, a man and a child. “We’re fine,” Mason said toward the man’s knee. The child put its foot in the vomit and Mason placed his palm on the child’s face and pushed it off. They went away.

“If I was a dog boner I would be vanished,” Angie said.

“It’s past our bedtime.” He pressed his hand against the side of her head.

She produced a high growling noise. He saw her jaw working. He shushed her and she shushed immediately, which made him feel good.

“Cookies,” she said, after a while.

“Let’s go.”

She moaned. Her bare feet looked cold and he closed his hand around one to warm her. He thought of himself as a gentleman.

He showed me a bottle and said he could use some company. I figured I could use some, too, and so I went, as he was my neighbor and we had common ground between us, I mean underfoot. Think about all the times you ever wanted to rest. He was my neighbor and I saw him around every now and then walking. We went to his house and picked up lighters from the corner store on the way. He didn’t seem that strong at the time.

His house was big and there was a grill on the porch. In Vegas we were all trying to stay low to the ground like lizards, but here, houses can be three floors. There was a lady sitting on the couch and, not being friends or strangers, I said Hey, and she gave me this look and I said All right. And then going up the stairs he put his arm around me and said Honey, hey honey? We walked together like that, like I was his old girlfriend.

Quick as that, we were alone. We smoked and kissed some; he seemed very strong all of a sudden. He tied my hands together above my head with a power cord and got my shorts off, watching me the whole time, my face. He said he was preparing to kill me and there wasn’t anyone who would notice, not during and not after, since he was right there by Ted’s, and he had a point, Ted’s being a place that sells meat.

I thought to myself Well now you are in a predicament. I decided to act as if this was a normal thing and we loved each other very much. I would have held him gently if I had use of my hands, but I did not and so talked of the weather, which had been fine that morning. Once he was finished he started crying and talking about the things that made him do it, for example a girl he was dating and the drug. He was trying to understand something and I realized if he figured it out, this might change things in a way I was not prepared to handle. I suggested we rest a little and work things out later. He fell asleep right away, which I found stranger than anything.