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First day so heavy that the bowl stays candy-striped even after the hard double flush. My husband says, ‘Hon. you gonna do that, close the door.’ And I’m like, ‘If? If I’m gonna do that?’ First day so heavy the tunnel turns crimson, you know I’m gonna flush the toilet.
So I give him the eye. ‘If?’
‘That was audible,’ he says.
I mutter he’s the goddamned ‘audible’ one. Pacing through confinement with those nubs inserted in his ears like tampons. He’s the one leaking corporate blather and management-ese through every door I close. So, no, I begin to make a point of not flushing and then a point of not washing hands. Just blood, I say. Not virus. I hold my palms to his face like Lady Macbeth. Like a hand-jive raspberry, immature and perimenopausal at the same time.
Later, sleepless from cramps, I watch the streetlight wobble like an infrared melon in the quiet night. I imagine the spring bulbs saved from a nursery and dispatched for my floral distraction: dahlia, dianthus, and cockscomb. A poppy, I think, or 500, would put me to sleep, my womb wrapped in PPE. I doze, dancing with more unattached bits of my body – the slough of sight. Vitreous gel, it is called. It comes unmoored, floats in colonies – bats against the blood of my lidded eyes, and I dream of a sunset in the American west – a crimson streak across a mesa, a plateau, a flattened curve.
About Elizabeth Kiem
Elizabeth Kiem's novels are about spies, dancers, circus carnies and runts. She's new to short fiction, but is digging it - both as a reader and a writer. Elizabeth has lived in Alaska, Virginia, Moscow and NYC and calls London home for now.
