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Love ferver,

Mia

I send it and turn on the
news and fall onto the couch. Images and anchors’ faces slip by
like pictures on a View-Master, making me dizzy, so I turn to a
movie channel and settle back and feel something poking my skin
just above the waistline of my jeans. Some digging behind the
cushion turns up a bent picture of Jake that came in the stack
Denise brought. He sits with a skinny, big-headed puppy on an
uneven but sturdy-looking wood-planked patio in front of a square
brown tent. A sandbag wall surrounds the tent and everything else
either is dirt or matches the dirt. He is smiling and his hand
rests on the puppy’s back. I remember his hand. I remember it
holding mine. Stroking my arm and curling around the back of my
neck in the hangar before he left.

I put out my cigarette and
close my eyes.
No rushing
this
, I tell myself, fighting the random
images pushing their way through; daydreams speed forward like
they’re on a movie reel, but this I want to experience in real
time. He walks across the hangar toward me, one side of his mouth
slightly higher than the other, his eyes steady on mine. I hear his
feet hitting the ground, his pants rubbing with each step, his
voice when he says, “God, I missed you,” and, “You’re smoking
again, aren’t you?” I mumble no, I put it out,
See
? and I only get as far as circling
my arms around him before falling asleep, the first easy sleep I’ve
had since he left. In a hazy dream, we hold one another with
forever behind us and I see his hands in mine and feel his chest
against my cheekbone.

________

Screwdrivers climb up my
throat.

Between flushing the toilet
and returning to the couch, I check my email.

Nothing. I write
I can’t wait to see you
and turn the TV to the news, falling back into sleep without
hearing any of it.

MAY 10, SATURDAY

“…
President warning the
neighboring nation that…” I listen without opening my eyes,
thinking it just another recommendation from the President that the
countries bordering Iraq behave. Sunlight shines bright on my
eyelids and the news anchor reads, word-for-word, a not-so-veiled
threat to Syria: if it doesn’t
something
something
and it doesn’t even matter what
it is because it’s just another something the President wants, and
we—
we
?—will do
whatever is necessary to protect the interests of America, he
says.

We
.

Same as before, the same
speech he gave before Jake left, and I feel sick again, the
remaining vodka and orange juice rebelling against any lingering
red wine, but I clamp my hand over my mouth and will it away. When
I feel like I can, I open my eyes.

“Many of the country’s
natives rejoicing in the streets, but still others—Americans
included—arguing against occupation. The President saying, in
response, ‘It’s a democracy. You’re entitled to your opinions.’”
Gray hair and a carefree smile—aimed at a well-groomed
purebred—replace the anchor on the screen, whose voice continues
behind the image. “Up next: The First Dog getting a special
birthday tre—”

Small sparks light, then
disappear, and thick chunks of glass spray out like fireworks from
his face. Cigarette butts and ash litter the floor in front of the
TV stand. The ashtray, unbroken, rests lopsided where the
President’s face once was. Or was it the dog’s face? I don’t
remember. They’re gone, now, disassembled like a child’s puzzle and
strewn across the hardwood, and when the anchor’s voice still
manages to break through the hole in the box (“…and to this, Trippy
barking an enthusiastic ‘Woof!’”), I roll off the couch and squint
in the sun stream, blinded, but find my way to the television and
pull out the ashtray. I push and pull the stand until it tips over
and the TV lands with a piercing, heavy thud and shards from the
screen shoot around my ankles. The cord snaps from the outlet. I
smash the ashtray—solid, heavy glass—into the back panel again and
again and stop when smoke seeps from ventilation holes and the
voice inside dies. I stare at it, half aware of my heavy breathing,
and last night’s drinks—how can any be left?—come up so violently
my nostrils sting. I run to the bathroom with my hands cupped over
my nose and mouth to catch what I can’t keep in and bend over the
toilet, kicking the door shut with my foot. I heave myself empty
and crawl to the sink to rinse my hands, then use them as a cup and
suck down water until the taste is gone.

I rest my elbows on the edge
of the sink, rest my chin on my arms. The sink is too white. And
all the walls are white and the sheer curtain hanging in the window
is white. I tug the curtain until the cheap, plastic rod springs
off its metal hooks nailed to the window frame and clatters on the
tile. I angle the window blinds to block out the blue sky and all
the light and lie on my side by the heater, my knees pulled tight
to my stomach. The discount-store throw rug is plusher than I
thought, even downright comfortable, and I hadn’t noticed the red
spots before. I touch one of them and it stays on my finger. I
check my hands and face and arms, then twist to look at my feet.
Blood-soaked bottoms, both of them. TV glass.

Funny. It doesn’t
hurt.

I let my feet down and rub
my cheek against the rug and stare at its loose coils, tall as
mountains close to my eye but shrinking from row to row.

“Mia!” Safia knocks, out
there, out in the hallway. “Are you okay? I heard a loud
noise.”

I pull the curtain over me
and tuck it under my chin and, with my fingertip, rub a
cotton-and-nylon rug loop one way, then back again. Over and back.
Over and back. My breathing comes in a shallow, bursting rhythm and
the loops turn blurry and warm tears bridge my nose and wet my
temple and drop to the rug. I can’t breathe through my nose, but I
don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to blow my
nose and I don’t want to close my eyes and I don’t want to stop
plucking the rug and I don’t want to stand up or even move. My body
is at rest, not counting my finger and my lungs, and this is the
way it is. This is where I am and this is my rug and this is
my—

“Mia! I will call the
landlord. Or the police!”

“I’m okay,” I say, but
nothing comes out, so I say again, louder, “I’m okay,” and she
says, “If you are sure,” and I hear her go down the
stairs.

I imagine her in her sunlit
apartment with the yellow mug I left outside her door and that
white hair, eating a piece of toast or a banana, dancing in her
living room or putting together her things before leaving for a fun
day of…whatever it is she does during the day. She’s already
forgotten me and here I still am, my body a rock, despair confined
to the bathroom instead of bleeding under the door into some kind
of collective unconscious, as I believe it should. Are we not
connected, after all?

Chancey pokes half a paw
under the door. I reach out a finger and he clutches it, then lets
go. He must be looking for something. A toy, a string. I scratch
the door with a nail and watch his foot searching for the source of
the noise. Through the floor, I hear Safia humming cheerfully over
running water. She taps something—her toothbrush?—and the water
stops, her song fading with her footsteps as she walks to another
part of her apartment.

Not for the first time, I
hate her.

Chancey accidentally snags
my skin and I pound a fist on the floor and say, without as much
force as I feel, “Chancey.” The pounding scares him enough and his
back claws slide on the slippery floor when he scampers to hide. I
want to smash his little head, but I don’t, not really, and tears
start fresh when I think of his paw drawing away from me. “I’m
sorry, sweetie,” I say. “Chancey, baby. Chancey.” I shift focus
from the rug to the gap under the door and see his nose, mouth, and
whiskers. “Hi,” I say. I stick my finger under the door and he
backs off.

“Chancey! You shitbag little
shit. Sit under the goddamn bed until you die, for all I
care.”

I pet the rug. Stare at the
floor. Take out one of my earrings and roll it around on the
loops.

Lying here isn’t enough,
anymore.

I throw off the curtain and
stand up, dizzy. The sink keeps me steady until the spinning
passes, and then I open the door. Chancey, who had only gone as far
as my bedroom door, skulks—his stomach an inch from the floor,
shoulder blades jutting like fins from his back—into the closet. I
follow only as far as the vanity and take William’s lighter—the
only one I haven’t lost—from the bowl it’s been in since Brian’s
visit and bring it to the living room.

The Christmas tree stands in
a perpetually tilted state, most of its dead needles still
clinging, branches holding strong under the light weight of
decorative balls and ornaments. No water pools in the stand because
it has long since evaporated or been lapped up.

I can’t have the tree out
back in the woods, so close, a reminder of him, or of him and me. I
read somewhere, once, that death doesn’t really exist. It’s not an
‘end,’ but a energy’s change in form. If there is any energy left
in the tree, it must be struggling to escape the cage of dried,
damaged bark.

I don’t bother to remove the
decorations before holding a flame under a low branch. One of
Jake’s ornaments, a hard molded teddy bear stuffed in a camouflage
knit stocking, blackens at the heel and is quickly followed into
the fire by one of mine and, in an instant, the full tree.
Whoomp!
I tear out my
earring and toss it in, then hurry for the one still on the
bathroom floor and throw it in, too.

The flames are tree-shaped,
wide base to narrow tip, and dance to a melody I can almost hear,
if I turn my head just so. In seconds, the tree will disappear
completely, and might never have been here at all. With no
remaining evidence—like the bird Jake hadn’t been able to save from
Chancey the first and last time we’d let him outside, beak and feet
and bones all barbarically ingested—who can confidently say that it
ever was? that it ever sat in our living room under cheerful white
lights with presents—my earrings, my not-engagement ring—decorated
in Santa-faced paper and piled around it on the floor?

I run to the closet and tear
through the Christmas box until I find the crushed star,
accidentally stepped on after I told Jake I thought it was the
ugliest thing I’d ever seen, but then saved by Jake in case it
could be salvaged for next year.

I toss it into the flames.
It burns fast.

“Star bright.” That strikes
me as funny. I giggle.

In the distance, a smoke
alarm screams and someone is pounding on a door and voices ramble
incoherently. I squint at the firelight and scoot back a few feet
from the heat, and the cliché of hypnotic flames proves true when I
find myself jolting at a sudden grasp on my shoulder.

“…are you
doing?!”

There are five or six,
including Safia and Paul, but only Paul thinks to grab the small
extinguisher from where it hangs in the kitchen. The others stand
out in the hallway, craning their necks to look into the room,
while he sprays the shelves (which latched onto the flame pretty
early and continue to burn) and the wall behind where the tree once
stood, until half of my living room is covered in foam.

I listen for sirens, angry
that one of them probably called the fire department. I don’t want
to be bothered with all of that.

“Are you okay?” Safia kneels
beside me, and the rest of the neighbors—strangers to me, people I
have seen once or twice each in passing, except for the red-haired
girl, who might be smiling—file away with sideways glances at
me.

I nod and say, “I’m okay,”
and, “Did anyone dial nine-one-one?”

Safia shakes her head.
“There was no time, and now everything is okay.”

Paul carries the
extinguisher into the kitchen, then comes back out to stand behind
his wife.

“What happened?” she says
while looking at the downed TV.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It
was an accident. I was lighting a cigarette, and I guess I was too
close to the tree.”

Paul says, “They go up like
tissue when they’re dry like that.”

“You are sitting there,” she
says. “just beside the tree when we come in. Why did you not call
out or answer the door? We could
all
have died.”

“Shock, I think,” I say.
“But thank goodness you all showed up. Thank you. You saved my
life. And Chancey’s, too. I can’t thank you enough.”

“It was nothing,” says Paul.
“You need us to do anything? Want to come downstairs and take a
breather from the smoke?”

“Oh, no,” I say. “I’ll open
a window. And I should clean up and make sure there are
no…uh…embers. I’m okay.”

He laughs. “No embers here.
I foamed the hell out of that fire.” He lightly tugs Safia’s hair.
“Ready?”

She nods and gives me a
brief hug. “Please, come if you need something.”

Her accent bothers me today,
and I don’t know why. The more I hear it, the more pronounced it
seems and I’m starting to wonder if she’s faking. “If you don’t
mind,” I say, “where are you from, anyway?” The ‘anyway’ made me
sound rude, but there’s nothing I can do about that, now. And I
guess I don’t care.