A short story I submitted for fiction, and then re-wrote very slightly, ignoring all critiques of "I dooon't geeeet iiiit." So, like, get it. Or not. Just read. Or not. No, do.
Paperweight
As they lie on the bed, Leah is thinking several things. The first is more a background noise, pot-induced, a constant shrilly buzzing paranoia that she is the only one who wants to be here. Other thoughts catapult across her consciousness, rapid-fire and short-lived, but mostly she is nervous. She thinks about how she’s nervous. She sabotages other, more important nerves, for the sake of nervousness. Nervous nervous nervous. Adam shifts slightly, and his chin touches the top of her hair. Nerves shoot out of her brain and down her spine and around and around the pit of her stomach, until they land in puddle in her crotch.
“I don’t know what to do,” Adam says finally.
At first Leah is confused, thinks he means literally, that he doesn’t know how this works, the mechanics of it, what goes where, and she almost giggles (nervously). But, catching his real meaning, she shifts as well, so that her eyes are stubble-level, and peering up over the arch of her brow bone she meets him eye to eye.
“I don’t think anything needs to be done,” she says. But of course this doesn’t make sense, and they only stare at each other, until eventually her eyes begin to trip between his mouth and eyes, mostly unintentionally, and he follows her lead, falling forward (mostly unintentionally), and she runs a hand through his hair, and they are kissing, lips sliding around on top of one another, and he has rolled on top of her, pinning her to the bed, and time has passed so quickly that he is already running one hand across the curve of her hip, and she writhes beneath him, pushing upward, spreading out underneath him like something long frozen is melting into patterns all over the bed sheets.
Snap.
“Adam? Adam are you coming?” says a voice outside the door. And they haven’t kissed yet, as it turns out. Neither one has got up the courage in time, and Leah begins immediately to think that she is the only one who would have.
“Yeah. Yeah, coming.”
He looks back down at Leah for a measured second, then scrambles off the bed and out into the hall. Her eyes follow him until she loses him in the back of her head, and she scrunches her face as the door clicks shut.
*
Adam: “We were walking I think, by a river maybe? No, in a park, it was winter – December – and there was frost, like there is now, and I slipped on a stone maybe, or a leaf – it was something broad because it was covered in frost which made it slippery, not something that was sticking out for me to trip on – and, and I didn’t know you well at that point – you know that thing you have? – the laugh and the crinkle, or the quizzical look. It seems harsh to people who don’t know you and I still didn’t know you – and I didn’t think to laugh it off, I just sort of – sort of… I don’t know, but you laughed, and I was so worried about what the crinkles by your eyes meant right then and I remember I panicked because I didn’t know and I thought if I didn’t know then that meant there was some sort of secret key I didn’t have and I would never have and you would just continue laughing and I would continue slipping on leaves. It was – I’m serious! – it was terrible. Was, I mean, then, now it’s funny.”
“I don’t remember you slipping on any leaves. And I wouldn’t laugh at you!”
“Well, then it was a rock, maybe.”
“With y--”
“You’re laughing right now!”
“With you! Always laughing with you. You were telling a funny story!”
“That’s a talent.”
“What is? I am a talent for sure.”
“To laugh with me when I’m not laughing.”
“I’ll make you laugh, just wait.”
*
Leah had watched the vodka drain steadily from the bottle all evening. First on the table, and then beneath it, by the boots and maps and backpacks at the rear of the tent, in the entrance under the folds and zippers of the front door. She had stopped trying to hide it when he found it stashed in the outhouse with the shit and piss and lolling flies, and drank it anyway. Now she watches Adam from her perch at the picnic table, wary and poised to pull him off some ill-advised adventure. She imagines her hands at his face, palms at the jaw bone where she can force those dimmed eyes to look into hers, bore into him and change him back, make him suddenly vibrant, saying, “look at me. Be calm and look at me.” She is alert, her face set. And yet, rousing herself, she finds she had drifted again, allowing her concentration to falter from his actions or his company, to the curve of each leg beneath the thin clothing; his arm as he raises the bottle and lets it linger at his lips, as though in prolonging that moment he has reached some sort of peak; his jaw, rough with overgrowth and a constant grind and clench; his hair, so ludicrously close to his shoulders, his perfect shoulders… And he is speaking to the friend of Dave’s. No, not speaking. There is no formality in the way his face nearly touches the other. They are circling one another like dogs, the bottle at his side and spilling onto his pants and shoes and the ground around them. She is on her feet like a reflex, instinctual like the wolves in the woods behind them, but Dave is already leading him away, nearly carrying him as though he is a tired child in the dark night far from home.
“What are you doing?” she asks, in the door of the tent. She is wary of his wet lips and the empty bottle in the dirt in the dark.
“What are you doing?” she says again, more to herself, and cupping her hands around his face in the way she had planned. His eyes are out of focus but he finds the light fabric of her dress with his hands as well.
“Eh,” he says, and he is grinning a grin worse than the angry stare he had given the stranger. “You’re here to fuck me, eh? You’re here to suck my cock? Suck it all better, eh! Suck it all away!”
And the front and back of her hand stinging to match each side of his face, she leaves him half laughing half crying and calling for more booze and more whores.
*
Leah arrives at the house one afternoon in mid-November, flakes of early snow on her shoulders and hair, a patch of colour on the skin of each cheek taut in a white smile with red lips. A sort of awe follows her through the dark house as she pulls cold into it from outside still clinging to her clothes, and walks through the halls as if indifferent to the contrast she makes against them. When he catches her in the upstairs hall he is halted, stunned as though literally, and he looks only at her, noticing not the difference she makes in the green-grey halls, noticing only the hair in wisps escaping an elastic, the tendrils pulled back from her face, tight white skin and the redness of each cheek, snow on her shoes. A glow, or perhaps just the outdoor cold hovering around her and away from her, and he can only stare, and still she smiles so wide and laughs a small laugh bigger than anything else in the house or the city or the sky outside reaching up indefinitely to the clouds and the birds and past those stars and planets and a million asteroids in a belt circling an alien moon.
“Hi,” she says. “I’m Leah.”
*
“It would appear,” Leah says, “that I am having a relapse.”
Silence.
“Which is funny,” she continues, “because I’ve been feeling so good lately. I was doing really well. I was excited. I stopped drinking. As much. I haven’t had this stinking shame sitting in the pit of my stomach in months.”
Everything is quiet in the relative lull of seven P.M. A few shouts from the baseball park, the clink of a pot or a pan upstairs, the dull swish of laundry in a machine in the hall.
“I guess it all came down to the fact that I want to hurt you, and I just couldn’t manage to keep quiet about it. I just love that feeling, you know? Of doing everything together? Killing two birds with one stone, that’s what they call it. I love that. I do it at every possible turn. Getting my exercise in transit. Conserving energy wherever possible. Fucking your best friend to get back at you. I wonder if you’re mad at him or mad at me. Transferred embarrassment is probably closer to it. Huh.”
*
When Leah is twelve, the paperweight is beautiful. She finds it in a junk shop, which is lucky, because it is a valuable antique. It is a golden-coloured ship with sails in full bloom, resting on a golden-coloured wave, all carved in porcelain and glazed a golden-coloured glaze. A birthday present, because, though Leah has no papers needing weight, she is in love with it.
*
Leah freezes, and instantly there is an icy anger in her gaze, muscles clenching across her face as though from the point of impact of a slap; they stare, eyes dark, hard, and glittering with malice, suspended at their opposite ends of the room. Then she turns, a sharp corner navigated briskly, and throwing words over her shoulder, shakes off room and occupant.
“Fine. That’s fine.”
Then turning at the top of the stairs thinks better of her benignity.
“Don’t let me make you miserable. I didn’t know. I don’t know. You find something to make you happy, I’m not here with you anymore.” Then slamming the door; and down the hall come cries of surprise from innocent bystanders, and in the kitchen he kicks the stove on a pivot yelling FUCK and sloshing liquid over his hand from the mug in it.
*
When it finally happens they lie for hours afterward, side by side, staring up at the ceiling. Vaguely tracing patterns on each other’s skin, they drift in and out of consciousness and bliss. Leah keeps forgetting that it is real, and waking she momentarily wishes the hand lying heavily on her thigh was his and not her own. She imagines saying silly things to him, and he will reply equally sheepish, but mostly they lie in silence, breathing, stroking, tentative. No one comes to the door.
*
Adam has followed Leah upstairs, his hand still wet and clutching the empty mug. Mid-fight, words no longer suffice, and he picks up the antique golden paperweight from the desk and hurls it at Leah, fury and sheer exertion shouldering a shriek out of the the depths of his chest where they have taken root, and when the pointed tip is one half-inch away from her forehead, so that she can see perfectly the bubble in the glaze of the bow sail, Leah is suddenly twelve again, seeing the golden-coloured glaze and all it’s imperfections for the first time, and, standing amongst the bugs-in-boxes and fake antique cola bottles on dusty floorboards in late spring sunlight, she falls in love.
