Rach (Out Loud)

“Excuse me! Hey! Hey, assholes!”

Val cranes his head reflexively Val cranes his head reflexively toward the sound and there, leaning out of the dormer window of the duplex he’s been working on, is a gorgeous redhead, a scowl on her otherwise pretty face as she glowers at Val’s crewmate, who is halfway through his lunchbreak cig; Nick twists, confused, and freezes in the ice-cold blast of her glare, but she doesn’t miss a beat.

“Could you losers please stop smoking in front of my window?” she snarls, and Nick, wide-eyed, pitches his cigarette over the side without a second thought. Val finishes the climb and the window slams shut – without even a thank you! – as he raises himself off the ladder and onto the rooftop.

Nick claps a hand over his heart, beaming. “That’s her,” he says, clearly smitten, “That’s the mother of my children.”

“If you swoon straight off this building I am not going to catch you.”

“I am flying on the wings of love, man, I won’t need catching.”

Val snorts and cracks the seal on the bucket of roofing cement, wrinkling his nose at the sharp rubber tar smell. The cement has the same texture as the bowl of yogurt he had for breakfast, slopping off the trowel and into the bucket with an audible splorch. Val grimaces and scrapes the excess off the container’s edge, holding it out to Nick and met only with empty air: Nick is halfway up the higher part of the roof, circling carefully around the chimney. Val sits on his heels and watches Nick stalk toward the birds they’ve been studiously avoiding all week.

“Doves are a sign of affection, right?”

“That’s a pigeon,” Val says.

“Same difference!”

“It’s really not!”

Nick ignores him, and in the blink of an eye somehow, impossibly, manages to snatch an unsuspecting pigeon out of its nest.

“What the fuck –” Val starts, but Nick is already coming back, the freaked-out bundle of feathers held tight between two unsteady hands like it’s a bomb, not a bird. He raps on the glass with his elbow, banging until the woman finally opens the window, and in that moment it becomes excruciatingly clear to everyone involved that Nick has no real plan.

The woman stares at him expectantly and Nick swallows hard, and without any warning or explanation just thrusts the pigeon at her.

She shrieks and flinches, her high-pitched “Are you kidding me!?” drowned out by the angry cooing of the bird sailing past, desperate to escape, disappearing into the depths of her apartment. Nick stumbles backwards in the upset, arms pinwheeling as he tries to keep his balance, and Val scrambles, somehow managing to catch him before Nick plummets to his untimely death. He hooks his hands tight under Nick’s armpits and hoists him back onto the roof.

“Amazing,” Val deadpans, setting Nick upright with a grunt. From inside, something heavy crashes to the floor; they’re definitely taking a pay cut on this job. “Wings of fuckin’ love, right?”

After the breakup Kevin threw away all his records, just threw them away, and he tells her about how just looking at them, piled up in plastic milk crates under the window in his living room, it made him sick, made him want to puke. He boxed them up three days after his girlfriend told him that she wanted to see other people and Green Is Blues and Hello Nasty and Frampton Comes Alive!, everything, everything, it all went flying into the trash when he realized she wasn’t coming back. Kevin’s hands rattle in his lap as he talks, picking at the bandage tape wound all the way up to the knuckles of his left hand, and just looking at him makes Holly want to cry.

Holly knows Kevin the way you know anyone you see maybe once a week, that sort of localized osmosis that comes from shared social contact, occasional occupation o the same space. Kevin smokes Marlboro reds; Kevin drinks White Russians; Kevin spent an entire evening two weeks ago putting nine dollars’ worth of borrowed quarters into the jukebox, playing Green Day and Springsteen and Modern Baseball and exactly one Stevie Nicks song, just because Holly asked him nicely. The girlfriend was there – Layla? Lila? Dark eyes, lovely, distant; she sat apart from Kevin and his friends, far from Holly and hers, staring at her phone in the corner by the dartboard. Holly glances over at that space now, the big picture window fogging from the bodies crammed inside, momentarily distracted by the darts sailing toward their target: double ring, triple ring, bullseye, wall.

In Kevin’s pockets there is only: ten dollars, lint, guitar pick, keys. He pats the front of his shirt and comes up empty; Holly slides her Camels across the wire table they’ve been sitting at, leans over to light it for him when the spark doesn’t catch, his hands shaking too much to be steady. “We were friends,” he says, keeps saying, palm opening and closing, the tape around it dirty. “Like you and – what’s the fuck, that guy, whosit, fuckin’ Jim, the one you used to –”

Holly chokes on smoke, coughs through it. She’s three drinks in but still painfully sober, and what can she say? She already spends so much of her time sifting through old hurts, new pain, unearthing all her traumas like some sort of emotional paleontologist, excavating wounds from the Mesozoic Era. Who wants to hear about the numbers she can’t call, the places she can’t visit? Sitting on the tile floor of the shower, the water cranked so hot it feels cold; sitting at the table, head in her hands, music drifting down from the apartment upstairs – I have my own life, and I am stronger than you know. She wishes she had a better story. She wants a better story.

Holly stubs out her cigarette, finishes her drink. Kevin slumps forward, taped hand over his face. Beyond them, in the parking lot, the lights flicker.

It was well beyond last call while Marie squealed, drunk and excited, at another girl about boy bands in the half-dark of the bar; the only lights left were the ones from outside, halogen white shining in through the plate window and turning the pair screeching at each other about the Backstreet Boys into a missing Escher print, a lost frame from an Arbus contact sheet. You and I were by the door, tired and waiting, your head tipped back below the unlit Molson Canadian sign, and without any warning you reached out and tucked me under your arm, held me there.

Somewhere in the space between the end of Henry and the beginning of now, I’d somehow lost this: easy familiarity, casual flirtation. Being comfortable. You radiated warmth and I turned into it, tried to breathe, suddenly ticking through all the small kindnesses I didn’t even know I was collecting – stupid texts and terrible shots, nicknames and dumb jokes and everything layering one on top of the other like the sediment in rock, fortified enamel.

“Hey, goose,” you said, simple as anything, and I closed my eyes.

Continue reading “you said you wanted a love letter (but i don’t think you meant this)” →