The Half Life of Glitter
by Sarah M. Balcomb
They let us out into the night and forgot to hang weights on us. Now of course we are floating on air... - Unknown
1. Direction
He thinks about death too much, she thinks. In the mornings he is up before her, always, a little ceramic bowl for his coffee with the international news online. A blue-eyed, lapsed Catholic obsessed with Israel. Like all her boyfriends, wannabe Jews. The third question posed on their first date. A pattern she chooses to ignore.
She stirs, stretches under the big white blanket, tousled hair covering her face. From under that dark mop comes her smoky voice, What's the body count today? He is keeping a list. She is keeping one of direct quotes, the words she likes ornamented with elevated curlicues. From Homer to The Angry Ukrainian at the corner bodega. A harmony out of dissonant voices. The irregular curvature of hands, the way her index fingers angle in. How many kinds of rhythm, she wonders, are in the world.
2. Location
Two months after he moved in, she quit her job for full-time focus on art-making. It wasn't until after another two that he started to resent her bait and switch. He has a novel, in a drawer somewhere, growing dated.
Home alone she feels catlike. Starts to stir little bits of cooked ground meat into her paints. Flowered garlands weave around her ankles, keeping her warm.
3. Inheritance
The second-bedroom-cum-studio began to smell like her grandmother's apartment in the Vermeer. Like the rough green wool couch so low to the ground that her knees tented up in front of her like bony rocks she watched breaking through the stream of their customary conversations on what books they'd been reading lately. When she is a little old Jewish lady shuffling slumped, hunched down to Balducci's and the library, will her literary taste also turn to hardboiled detectives? She won't mind, though, if the only food she still enjoys tasting is sweets. Her grandmother's homemade biscotti still hard after soaked through with the warm sugary milk masquerading as coffee.
4. Boundaries
After the funeral, he takes her out for ice cream. Across from them a deaf couple yells with their hands. The man's head jerks backwards to the rhythm of his words, the occasional gold tooth flashing through the silent accompaniment of his mouth.
She pushes around at her sundae until it's a sweet brownish soup. Embarrassed, he doesn't speak to her on the subway ride home. She thinks of his silence as gently handled space.
5. Twinge
When she forgets that he is there, the back of her throat hums, her nose sighs, her elbows snap, her stomach bitches about the state of the world.
He thinks of her little noises as of pain, as much as she assures him that they're not. It bothers him that these signs of suffering, real or not, turn him on, but they just do.
6. Practice
On warm evenings they sit out on the back fire escape, any chance at a view obscured in the awkward tangle of scrubby trees. The gentle clicking of pool balls rises up from behind the dive bar across the way like the urban consolation for lack of crickets. He takes occasional drags off the cigarettes he has been begging her not to smoke anymore. Between smokes, she picks at the flakey layers of black paint on the bars beneath and around them.
Next door there is a home for wayward teens, an austere yellow brick block that breaks the otherwise uniform line of ornate old tenements. Shortly after midnight, without fail, there's the clatter of young feet descending the adjacent chain-link encased fire escape. She takes his hand‚she never had a curfew to sneak out on afterwards. Her latchkey like a get out of jail free card. Now she can't recall the last time she went out without him. Nights at home, shoe gazing.
7. Non-extant
When he talks about writing his memoirs, she laughs. His hairline, she noticed, is marching backwards by the day.
8. Discipline
The last time she checked on him he'd been retching, hard, his knees bookending the porcelain toilet base. Now he is fetal on the floor, his curled body fitted flush inside the red oval bathmat. She remembers the day he bought that fuzzy little rug, the proud email he'd sent: I bought a new red bathmat. When I get home tonight, we will stand on it.
She curls around his shaking body, the tiles cold though her thin cotton undershirt, fits her cheek into the hot nape of his downy neck. No space between them, she holds him until he falls asleep there on the floor.
9. Notion
A new villain has entered her dreams, a man with a face she can't quite see. He follows her horse, car, bicycle, taunting her when no one is watching. Kicking is the only way he'll stop. She stomps on his toe, jabs at the shins, her sharp shoes making their way up him as his body folds down. But suddenly someone else is there and he has shape-shifted into something harmless. Puppy, kitten, sweet old neighbor lady. Stop her, the people shout, stop that evil girl from kicking that sweet thing. How can they not see that he is the evil one, he is.
10. Snatch
They spent a summer on the coast of Nova Scotia, to clean up before it got any worse. Subletting her rent-controlled walk-up was more than enough trade for the trip up and the one room cottage on a bluff where the wind never stopped blowing through weathered gray boards. Whistling all through the night as if the shakes weren't enough to keep them awake.
That first week was all Valium, Xanax, and Vicodin, Nyquil, Robitussin, and Nytol, and ice cubes to get the pills down. Even a glass of water was too much to taste. Chalky. The ashtrays filled with cigarettes stubbed out after only a drag or two.
Days straight she sweated under a patchwork quilt that someone else's grandmother had made, while he moved from bed to floor to couch to floor to inside the big claw-footed bathtub. He wanted to be close to her but needed to be away, the pains she continually broadcast ringing in his ears like permanent damage. What she wanted was him dead. When it was worst, she jiggled her arms or her legs, alternately, and fantasized how she would do it. Garroting seemed the best bet. She would fashion a noose at the end of a pole just long enough to keep him at arm's length. When she jostled the bed springs with her arms and her legs like that, he gritted his teeth not to yell at her. Once he clenched his jaw so tight that he chipped a tooth.
11. Texture
He clambers along the rocks along the water and imagines that she is back in the white cast-iron tub, milky white bathwater covering up all but her knobby tomboy-scarred knees and the headless oval of her pale face. Beneath the cloudy surface he can just make out the billowing acres of her black brown hair. It threatens to surface but remains hidden, scared. The eraser tips of her nipples emerge instead.
Miles out to sea, storm clouds gather, clumping like dust bunnies. He watches their progress towards shore, carefully scratching at his thinning hair. If he didn't need to breathe, would he, he wonders.
12. Stream
When she first makes it outside, feeling like a camera panning onto a landscape setting the tone from the specific to the universal, the land is like a smooth green water plane calling her to swoop down low over it, skimming the wind-stunted greenery like a rock tossed close across a pond. Though she has never been good at skipping rocks, her body feels like the perfect smooth, flat stone for it. Weightless, she grabs back at the doorframe as anchor.
13. Terrain
They circle each other in the cottage that seems to grow smaller and darker each day. Careful not to let their fractured eyes meet. She takes to spending too much time staring directly into light sources. Her vision should be hazy by now, she thinks. He takes up smoking again. Chaining, practically. Finishes off all her barely smoked butts abandoned all around the house.
It thunders rain every night for weeks. He goes out anyway. Drinking until one of the locals has to drag him home. At home she listens to a radio that is more static than tune. She embroiders wavering designs into leftover scraps of canvas. These designs begin as crosshatched words, I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, which she later obscures into elaborate abstraction. Most of her clothes are soon edged with this hidden message too. A comfort she carries everywhere with her. Clothes he refers to as her "orphan gear."
14. Stratum
A week back in New York and he was using needles. The bloodied crook of his arm took on the visual memory of her impetigo ringed wrists. Blue black sweatshirt fluff stuck in the pus-y little circles of summer camp contagion.
In the dark of night she would wake even herself from screaming, until a hand came down hard over her mouth. Stroking up fast through the heavy water of dream layers in search of a semblance of breathable air. The sound of cracking enamel as they quieted for the nosy whoever at the door to go away.
15. Labor
She thought to change the locks while he was out. Instead she opened up her wrists in a nice warm bath. He found her face up, mouth open in the pink, just this side of red, water.
When she awoke, he had packed his things. Gone. Along with most of her jewelry, mostly costume pieces worthless but for the hand-me-down memories. She stands on the faded red bathmat and drips until dry. Bandages her wounds, not nearly deep enough for stitches, then goes to bed. Naked beneath the big white blanket, everything feels very clean. Even the cracks in the plaster ceiling like they've been scrubbed out with an old toothbrush stored under the sink just for that purpose.
16. Loose Change
In her favorite faded, embroidered jeans and her grandmother's green cashmere sweater, bald at the elbows, she limps down to the library, checks out a stack of detective novels. A little old lady and she isn't even yet thirty.
At home she slides her shiny new key into the lock and lets herself in.