The Girl in the Flammable Skirt_ Stories - Aimee Bender [28]
9. Mine
I sit with the bush for a long time but it says nothing to me. It continues to burn, still mainly near the bottom. I listen harder and harder, feeling a certain despair build, wondering if it will ever reach out and talk, if ever I will understand the message meant for me, but then, just as I’m listening as hard as I possibly can, it hits me, pow, like that: of course. It is saying nothing. It’s a listening bush. It wants me to talk. My burning bush would be different, my burning bush would be like me.
So I clear my throat and I tell it things, I talk to that bush. I don’t think I’ve ever said so many sentences in a row before, but I talk for at least an hour about myself—about me and my husband and my mother and my allergies, and sometimes I don’t know what to say and then I just describe what I see. The street is gray and paved. The ground is dry here. The sky is cloudless.
It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful to talk like that. After a while, I’m exhausted and I think I’ve said enough. I feel great but my throat is dry and I need some water, so, thanking it over and over, I leave the burning bush by the side of the road for somebody else. And I start to walk.
It’s hours later when hunger and fatigue hit, and I find myself in front of one house, the only house on the block without bars on its windows. That’s the one I knock at. And that’s the one that answers. It’s a nice place. It is quiet inside. Just as I’m dozing off, ready to really sleep for the first time in a long time, I think about my husband and where he is, what he’s doing. I like to think he’s limping around the house, shouting my name, sitting on the bed and looking where the mirror was and staring at the grain of the wood. I like to think he opens the refrigerator and sees me inside.
But truthfully? Let me tell you what I honestly think.
I think, maybe he hasn’t even noticed that I’m gone.
But. I have.
DRUNKEN MINI
There was an imp that went to high school with stilts on so that no one would know he was an imp. Of course he never wore shorts.
He bugged the girls; he had a few friends whose parents were drug addicts; he was the greatest at parties—he’d take any dare. He propositioned mothers. He told stories about airplane sex. He claimed he knew everything about women. They were all fifteen; no one dared contest that.
One thing he didn’t know was that there was a mermaid at the school; she was a sophomore as well. She wore long skirts that swept the floor and one large boot covering her tail and she used a crutch, pretending like her second leg, which of course didn’t exist, was hurt.
She was a quiet one, that mermaid; she excelled in oceanography class, but she also made an effort to not be too good; she didn’t want to call attention to herself. On every test she missed at least three. (What is plankton? A boat, she wrote.) She was very beautiful; hair slightly greenish which everyone attributed to chlorine. Eyes purplish which everyone attributed to drugs. The girls called her a snob. The boys shoved each other and agreed.
The imp sat behind her in the one class they shared: English. He had a perpetual monologue of jokes going on under his breath. Did you hear the one about the square egg? he’d say to himself, laughing at the punch line before it even happened. Often, it never happened anyway. One day he reached forward and dipped a strand of her long mossy hair into his beer. He snuck beer into class, no problem. He was a clever imp. He’d poured it into a Coke can.
What he didn’t know was that her hair had nerves; it was different than human hair; it was not dead skin; it was alive. The mermaid felt the change instantly and woozed with contentment: liquid. Lifting. Home.
Had the imp lifted the can, he would’ve been stunned: it was so light! Where did the beer go? Had he looked closer, he might’ve seen it riding up the strands of her hair, brown droplets on a lime escalator,