Jac Jemc - A Different Bed Every Time

In the dark of the night Ciara-Bianca’s face becomes the moon becomes a chemical fire becomes a belly of dead moisture becomes herself and her.

Which is true? Ciara-Bianca could flower and bear fruit at once, could watch herself without touching a mirror, could read her story without laying eyes on the page.

“Holy God,” we say. Lory has crinkled all of the wire hangers into a meaningless Venn diagram on the wall. Lory tries to wink and tit in some sort of meaningful way, but she is covered in flowers and downy hair, and it all feels like too much to be honest. Lory, standing on top of the covers, like some conquest, Lory hears out of one ear and pouts against her shallow chin. “Lory,” we say. “Go ahead, explain it.” But Lory knows the rules. Lory presses the meaning deep inside her and reaches with a blunt thumb between her teeth to dig something out. “Come in,” she says. “Take a look.” And that’s all we do. We whisper, and Lory beams proudly and stirs within herself. We coo a bit and think that we’ll forget this by tomorrow, but a handful of tomorrows come and this image still pops up like floaters in our vision.

The next time we see Lory, Tuck is disappearing behind her, doing that thing where you stand behind someone and stick you arms under their armpits so it looks like the person in front has four arms. We wait for them to get still before we laugh, and their elbows are waving and tangling again, and then we have to fly our hands to our faces, because the image of those wire hangers returns. Lory, with her piggish eyes, looks down, and sees all four of her arms, and tells us twice about her confusion headaches. Tuck sends out a stray hum behind her, to remind her he’s there, and her arms get heavy and trap his hands right where they are. The two of them stand for hours there, free and yet tied. We leave and go to the mall, where there are salesgirls and gold and the slow pace of age. There are hollow prayers in the air that look just like window shopping. We hop around in our slender skins and ogle the sagging, elderly patrons on the benches. We stick out like sore thumbs, or the old people do. Whichever it is, someone doesn’t fit in.

In this messy room, three rumpled girls toss themselves down on misshapen couches, melting with their ignorance of enterprise. Their eyes loll around lazily, never stopping. Their arms drape down to the bubbling shag carpet. Soft tufts of breath emerge from their pillowy cheeks as their minds move nowhere. In this loose, open ocean of a room, three slugs will never even know what it is to scrape their full bellies along concrete or punch pulpy holes into the tissue of fruit. Torsion is taking hold of their insides, twisting them to make explanations for the doctors, who haven’t a clue.

I hated when they made me wear the bear suit in public and hated it more for how comfortable it was when I was alone. A conundrum. The heat had been turned off in my apartment for almost a week. Wearing the bear suit in public wasn’t making enough money for me to pay the bill, but it kept me pretty warm. If I quit to find another job, I would have to return the bear suit, and then how would I sleep? I avoided making a decision, which meant deciding to keep the bear suit and living without heat.

At that point, I’d been confused for days, like trying to see through dense foliage. I hoped it was just the mescaline wearing off. When that effect faded, suddenly, random birds began falling from the sky every few minutes, and when I looked for them near the ground, they were nowhere. When my coworker offered me another of the small pills at the drive-in several weeks later, I declined. It was warming up. I was thinking of ditching the bear suit. Not only did I not need it in my apartment, but it was getting miserable to be inside of the suit on the hot sidewalks all day passing out sale flyers.

I lived on the fourth floor of a big semi-converted warehouse and my best friend lived on the fourth floor of the building across the alley. I spent that summer trying to rig passageways between our windows. First, I thought big and worked on designs for a rope bridge. By the end of the summer it was just a tin can telephone, and even that proved to be tricky.

My friend and I crowed open the door of the landlord’s storage space downstairs, convinced he’d been stealing from me. We navigated the dark basement, through unknown detritus, and then, as we got deeper in, our eyes adjusted. With the blindness arrived a sensation in which everything I touched felt like something I had owned. Then lights seemed to click on in my brain and everything I touched was bright and clear. And then everything took shape, or real light appeared again, and it was fantastic. A whole scene unfolded as if another world existed in that basement: there were tattooed ladies and strongmen slumping in laps around carousels and Ferris wheels, carnival barkers presenting me with fantastic options, everything wound and rotating. I looked at my friend, to share our amazement at what was hidden in this basement, but she was unfazed, unaware of the circus spinning behind her. She was still looking with her hands for anything that had once been mine. Suddenly, I felt very alone, sure I was seeing everything which blinded the rest of the world. In the darkness, from the light of the carnival, I looked at my friend, and she held up a set of magnets she’d given me, not even freed of their packaging yet, which had gone missing weeks ago. They were ugly, some bubble sticker of a teen TV-movie character pasted onto an oversized paperclip, some kind of joke I didn’t get. I hadn’t been upset to lose them specifically, but they were not the landlord’s to take. My mind started wandering to how often he went into my apartment, wondered if he had been hiding behind the shower curtain while I danced in the bear suit to keep warm. “I think I found the birthday gift I gave you,” my friend said. Her hands were running all over the package, figuring it out. She still couldn’t see. We pocketed the proof and lifted our knees high over the stacks of old newspapers, dirty piles of rags, stained fish tanks. I looked back for the fair before we left, but it was just that blank slate of darkness we’d seen when we’d first cracked the door.

Later that night we terrorized the open galleries down the street. Art had metastasized on walls which had been blank days before. Photographs of people wearing scrappy helmets that looked like weapons. Sculptures that triggered my gag reflex, a disgusting network of roots and plugs extending from the undersides of everything. Paintings of rockets announcing themselves against absurd skies, everything reminding me of a time when the world seemed covered in gluey strings of resistance and life had me convinced I needed a reason to do anything I got it in my brain to do.

On the way home, my friend looked up into the sky and told me about how the planets would dissolve from one side to the other until we could stare straight into their hollow centers. I shoved her and we didn’t bother saying goodnight before we climbed to our respective towers.

Back in the apartment, alone, unable to sleep, I spent the night making myself sick, spinning in a loose office chair. I spent time running my hands over my body looking for that lovable cancer monster. I convinced myself I was full of putrid and secretive cells. I thought about what I knew was true, even if it couldn’t be proven or if I’d never read it in books: that more comets flew than suns rose; that everyone slept on the job, so no one needed to apologize; that someone must have lined those apples up outside the fourth-floor bedroom window I couldn’t budge, no matter how impossible it seemed. I had chameleoned d into this life, or maybe it was the other way around. I stopped trying to distinguish anything from itself. I tried not to look at the moon directly. I stared at the bear suit piled in the corner and took off all my clothes.