Obsession
“I don’t know how to make it better for you. You say I smother, cover you like an itchy wool blanket, heavy in a stuffy room. I say ‘I love you’. I want to feel you and be felt by you. Why don’t you listen? What can’t you hear?”
Her tears fall in slow streams. The windows weep as well, with condensation.
No reply. No sigh. No shuffle or shifting in weight. His fingers lay still in his lap.
Over her naked body, she pulls on a hot pink slick raincoat, green and pink gingham boots, flings a woven yarn scarf over her shoulder and front again to tie a firm knot. Legs bare, chest tight, she clutches a masculine black wallet and closes the apartment door with a click.
Cold rain pelts her naked face, softens her curls much like thick clumps in a new garden.
“How are the peaches today?” she asks Mr. Wallace inside the neighborhood fruit market.
“Just peachy,” he smiles his broad lazy smile, left eye drooping. Maybe he just had a stroke.
Mrs. Wallace pats his shoulder and points to the empty crates stinking of rotting fruit. Skin once firm, succulent, and springy to the touch. Now sunken, swollen, bruised. Fruit flies had lived and died their entire 26-hour lives in those crates. Mated, made more flies to carry on.
In the next bin of peaches, the softness of the purple pink skin tickles the pads of her fingers. Like a newborn’s fontanel. Delicate, vulnerable. She selects two and places them into a brown sack. The melons look neon in their green mounds of freshness on the next display.
He would never touch them. “Like a watered down martini; hint of flavor, just a tease, only to fill your bladder but leave your brain bland.” He had once said.
She stroked one, threads of white running over the rind.
“Oh! My favorite!” squeals a tall brunette with dancing eyes. She drops her voice to a whisper, “Honey-pie, look! Melons! We can have some for breakfast. And then to quench our thirst after, and…”
Honey-pie put his fingers on the brunette’s lips. She nuzzles his neck. He drops four large melons into their green shopping cart, already piled with packaged oysters, boxed chocolates and two expensive bottles of wine.
She used to drink wine. She selects the smallest melon and cradles it in the crook of her left arm. Two bottles of sparkling water and the morning paper. Cinnamon stick gum, three packs, one opened right away. She folds a slim red stick into her mouth shooting pleasure on her tongue. Cash, not credit and back outdoors. The ding echoes behind her along with the brunette’s watermelon giggle.
Aroma of greasy eggs and bacon waft through the spring rain and her stomach squeezes. No grease, no fat. The stench would cling to her. She just wants to be pure and natural. She walks on.
In the elevator, the old lady from the fifth floor stares at her bare legs covered in goose bumps and specks of rainy mud.
Ding. She steps out, that melon now very heavy in her arm, she pauses outside her door. ‘Watered down martini.’ She walks to the south end of the hall, places the melon at the door of apartment 8 where kids giggle inside, above the blaring morning cartoons, a crash and a mother’s groan.
With the turn of a key, back inside the silent apartment, she suddenly wishes for a furry companion to wag a welcome for her.
She twists the metal seal from both bottles of sparkling water and pours even amounts into two separate crystal goblets, a twist of lemon taken from the saran-wrapped preserve in the refrigerator, decorates each rim. Caps replaced and half empty sparkling water bottles returned to the top shelf in the fridge.
First round: warm with a twist, second round: cold with crushed ice and no flavor but the purity of spring.
Two creamy colored ceramic salad dishes placed side by side, their vines of green skipping along the outer circle. She grips a paring knife steadying her index finger on the handle. With a deep breath, the blade punctures the fuzzy skin, breaking the flesh, yellow sweet juice oozes as if from a wound. Once the blade is halfway through she wrenches her wrist to split the piece from the whole exposing the brown shriveled pit and a starburst of orange-red, which looks like an erotic pose.
She licks the juice from her finger and continues the half-slice quick break with both peaches.
She lifts the two warm crystal goblets by their stems, overlaps the salad plates piled with cut peaches across her right forearm and walks to the living room.
Silence. No air. No breath. Scratchy, wool suffocation.
She places the two new plates atop two old ones, which have grown sticky and dried with corpses of fruit flies. The two new goblets next to the two old in a line, although the coffee table was getting crowded, something would have to be taken away.
She bites into the orange pink flesh, juice dripping over her bottom lip and chin.
The paper — how could she forget? In the kitchen it lies on the counter, face down. They always read the headlines together. She folds it in half, the cover on the inside and returns to her seat on the soft gray couch.
His plate was untouched. His goblet spare of his lip prints. She picks a wedge up from his plate and juices his lips with the fleshy side.
Silence. No air. Scratchy wool. She licks the juice from his lips and pops the wedge into her own mouth. She swallows it whole, along with the cinnamon stick gum that lived there.
She lays the paper, open now, across his lap and tucks her booted feet under her, dampening the cushion of the sallow skin gray couch.
Different day, same headlines. Taxes up, stocks down, ‘Family continues search for missing man.’
She places her head on his shoulder. “I don’t know how to make it better for you,” she says. Fruit flies spin up from the plates, from his lap, from his lips.
The children from apartment eight are rolling the melon down the hall, giggling over her silence.
#practiceinpublic day 6 of 30 via Jeff Goins
