WHAT IT IS

We had a going-away party for ourselves, but I thought of it as a going-astray party. We invited people from our work over, but once they were in our small apartment, I saw it was more of a trap than a party for everyone. We did not provide enough food or drink, for one thing. There were bottles of wine, but I had hidden them in the fake closet that had the heater in it. After everyone left, she spat on me, and the spit was purple because we had been drinking the wine. Her otherwise white teeth were gray because of the wine. She thought a lot about teeth. She liked them straight and white, and mine were neither of those things, so I worried when I saw her looking at my teeth.

At the going-away party, one of my friends got stuck in a wall. Somehow, he had been looking at one of my posters, only to find himself in a wall. I had to remove a panel underneath the sink to get into the wall and find him. I slid along, inside the wall, until I found my friend, who then urgently asked me for all the names of the people at the party. I whispered the names to him, though I wasn't sure of some of her friends' names. And, even if I knew the names of her friends, I was unsure of the pronunciation--that is, if I should stress the syllable before the last one or an earlier syllable.

She spat on me after everyone had left. She was upset because, once everyone left, I opened up bottles of wine and began to make omelets. She was upset because I left our bedroom door open when I cooked the omelets. She hated the smell of food--"kitchen smells," she called them--in our bedroom. Her name was Sycamore, which was odd because that was my name, too. She spat a purple wad onto me. She cried, and as she cried, she produced amazing quantities of snot, which she collected and cupped in her hand before wiping them on me.

She screamed that I shouldn't have gone to my friend in the wall. I should have left him there to die. I should have left him there and called the landlord to dispose of him. I shouldn't have told him everyone's names, and she was certain that, when we were in the wall, we had talked about other women and how we wanted to be with them instead of anyone else. She said we laughed about all this, and I told her I couldn't remember laughing. There were great blotches of wax in the carpet of our bedroom because, the other night, trying to be romantic, we had lit candles only to forget them. That happened the other night. Sycamore pronounced "wax" as "waz."

I tried to open the window in our bedroom. I wanted to escape, but she grabbed me and pulled me back in. I couldn't help but to laugh, and she said, see, that's just how you laughed about the women with your friend in the wall. I realized that, yes, we had spoken about women in the wall. I realized I had laughed. I made a confession to her, and tornado sirens sounded outside. That summer, we had heard the sirens so much that we didn't take them seriously anymore. The first time we had heard them, we had responded and scuttled into the basement of someone's house across the road. We didn't know the person--it was an old man--and we begged him to let us in. We begged him to let us in his basement. He had stacks and stacks of board games in his basement. He had hundreds of pairs of athletic cleats. We later learned that, like some kind of scary human magpie, he broke into homes and stole board games. He broke into school gyms and locker rooms and stole cleats. He told us that the best day of his life was when a pregnant woman cut his hair. He told us that when she shaved his neck he felt her big belly on his back. He didn't feel a kick, but it would have been nice to feel one.