Jac Jemc - A Different Bed Every Time

The giant twins, Bittern and Barn Swallow, cannot handle the uncertain gazes that fall upon them when seen apart from each other. Their secrets exist in the negative space between them. Bittern and Barn Swallow have ears like hands reaching, mouths that curl indication into their emotions. Bittern and Barn Swallow have shirts stained with distorting drool and don’t feel one bit bad about it. That’s just the way their lips spill. Deep in thought, they sink slowly through mindlessness. They haul sacks of wrist-watches to the Laundromat, shake the bags loose into the washers, and listen to the rattling machines drink up the mechanics of those portable clocks. Bittern and Barn Swallow don’t care. They keep reaching inside for some feeling and pulling out more of their blank white stuffing. They try to believe something is possible. They keep shaking their heads and nodding, hoping one of the gestures will feel right. Every minute they feel like nervous soldiers with nothing to do. They collect useless items from garage sales, slap their dollars down, and carry away whatever is handed to them. A plastic flower, a peg doll, the sneaky thorned stem of a useless length of barbed wire. When they get home Bittern hula hoops till he’s tired out and Barn Swallow fans him absently with a silk palm frond. Their eyes droop uneven and careless. Bittern and Barn Swallow look at their junk and feel nothing. They watch a space exploration special on an old black-and-white TV. Seconds into the program the spacemen arrive in space and exchange knowing smiles. Bittern and Barn Swallow look at each other, not understanding the meaning of a shared experience. In a bright and oversized world, Bittern and Barn Swallow look out of their brains, like one thing keeps fading into the next. They do not look up information in books or read magazines or have a clue what is going on anywhere. They prop themselves up on their front stoop like gargoyles and look down instead of out. So much time on those godforsaken concrete stairs, all sorts of people and things moving by, and Bittern and Barn Swallow stare at the cracks in the sidewalk. Bittern and Barn Swallow are grown but still afraid of haircuts. They pay a brave girl to come to the house and urge them to sit still and stop shrieking: it will grow back; it always does. Bittern and Barn Swallow will walk this girl home with some hope in their minds they cannot quite get around. Bittern and Barn Swallow will pick blossoms that do not belong to them. They will give the girl fingers she does not want. They will hide cherry stems, threaded needles and their tongues low inside their mouths. Bittern and Barn Swallow will share their friendliness like it’s something else. The girl will get herself home. Bittern and Barn Swallow will smoke and put distance between themselves to test their limits and then hurtle back together, like losing the grip on a strip of elastic. Bittern and Barn Swallow will chew off moles that look suspicious and spit them into the gutter. They will fail to understand why it is still just the two of them leaking beside each other. They will peer into the hairdresser’s window and she will try not to notice them. She will arrive at other people’s homes, one hand tight around mace and the other fist clutching a horror story. Those men will live simply and long-haired a while longer and then they will attest to each other a mixture of joy and sorrow that seems to convince them they have lived long enough. They will clarify after the fact. They will decide and then forget their decision. They will remember too late that the ground has gone and fall from the sky.

Roadrunner doesn’t know what it is to be contained, to look at things you’ll never touch, to be stacked and lined up and smeared but separate from everything else. Roadrunner and I go and see her papa in the prison, and his eyes get all yogurty and wet when he sees us. We hug hello, the fat cotton of her papa’s jumpsuit scraggling against Roadrunner’s skinny cotton T-shirt. I dig into my purse for the baggie of quarters and hand them to Roadrunner to buy her daddy treats. All around us, old men and penny pinchers and wise guys sit alone on one side of tables, and their families sit on the other. The laminated tile and drop ceiling remind me of cafeterias and church basements At the periphery of their vision, you can see nowhere sliding into view. All these men have the electric buzz of the catatonic stunned awake. They tell stories; they want to let their nightmares jester around in someone else’s ears for a change. The edges of these men have been filed off, the guards watch to make sure of that, to ensure no sharpness comes through eager for sudden harm. I leave my cheap legs naked when we go see Roadrunner’s daddy so he can have something to think about after we leave. If Roadrunner acts up, I tell her I’ll sell her to the five women who live down the block, with their hats and their teeth and a neighborhood’s worth of tall tales raising them up. “Roadrunner,” I say, “sing your daddy the anthem; sing him that sea shanty you learned in music class,” and she does, and everyone’s silence sticks tight to the walls until she’s finished. I stare at Roadrunner’s daddy and remember well the muddy swerves of his temper when he drank too much. I remember his tongue, carnivorous and dozing against my own. I remember wishing I’d washed the floor as he laid me down and the smell of him after his suit had cooked him for an entire hot day in the sun. I have dreams and don’t even try to decipher them, because as much as I want them to come true, there’s as much I want to ignore and forget. I bring Roadrunner’s short shoulders under my warping hands. My voice cracks and drains. The ragged engine of my tears starts up when the bell rings and it’s time to go. A blue fever of sadness slugs through me as we file out onto the street. Roadrunner flips a pack of playing cards in the air and catches them. I have been tipped over. Roadrunner, with her breathy exhales, runs to the corner quick and then rushes on back to me.

Minnie Fishman, burdened with a funny name by hippie parents, wants to hide in a corner at the office party, but her awareness of the wallflower cliché forces her to be social. Minnie Fishman, thirty-one, whispers in her coworker’s ear that she’s exhausted. She doesn’t say that it’s all these people who are exhausting her, that she’s tired of being “on” all the time, that she’s scared that if she finds someone she might actually like she’ll be too jaded to connect. She finds herself at the bar with Bobby, the handsome gentlemen all of the women coo over at the water cooler. He’s friendly, and it’s not difficult to strike up a conversation. Bobby isn’t interested because Minnie isn’t a conventional bombshell and she doesn’t have the confidence that must support strange beauty. Minnie isn’t interested because she’s talked to Bobby before and finds nothing beyond his jawbone appealing. There is no sexual tension. The jokes are lame on both sides.

Minnie excuses herself and sees the door to the pub open. It’s Daniel. At the office, Daniel is the one she watches over the cubicle dividers. While sitting at her desk she can recognize the cadence of his footsteps down the carpeted “hallways” and adjusts her body language accordingly to open herself up to possible interaction. She is a producer at the ad firm. He is a creative. She thought he might not come to this holiday party, but here he is. His loose curls fall onto his thin face. He runs his hand through one side of his hair and behind the exposed lens of one of his round wire rims, his bloodshot eye rests on a purple crescent of fatigue. Daniel wears an oversized Christmas sweater with a Rudolph appliquéd on the front, complete with a light-up red nose. Before he closes the door behind him, he takes a last pull on his brown paper bag and chucks the package in a trashcan by the door. Minnie grimaces; she knows this is the sort of behavior that’s endangering his position at Maximum Creata. This is someone she imagines being able to swallow whole and fears will devour her entirely if given the chance. He is the one who makes her want to empty the liquor from her belly in one go, and here he is after all.