All Full Up.

I separate my plate into quarters, draw divisive lines between foods with the prong of my fork, disallow them to touch. “It all goes to the same place,” my grandmother would say. I would wrinkle my nose and continue building retaining walls made of mashed potatoes and cooked carrots.

Counting bites, the knife a clatter of silver against porcelain, I am always the last one left at the dinner table.

All full up, I break down. Emotional leftovers scraped into the garbage pail, half-hardened expectations layered in saran wrap for tomorrow’s just dessert. Still chewing on my words, conversational enzyme substrates split meanings and intentions into digestive building blocks, cut in half and half again and again – devourable chunks of information sent reeling through the digestive track, an acidic roller coaster ride, gone so fast there’s not a nutrient left when it’s all over.

Sick to my stomach, I am sure I couldn’t eat another bite of quick-fix rhetoric, microwaved previously-frozen apologies and long-lasting excuses losing their flavour in the radio-frequent electromagnetic argument of what’s best for whom.

A lick catching the crumb in the corner of my mouth, salivary slick coating quipping lips, I wipe the table clear of stale moments and reheated debate.

Choking back the last gulp of watered-down meaning, digesting course after course, and I still feel empty.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

The Heat Vent.

I try to remember this feeling. I think back to when I was a little girl – skinned knees and gingham dresses, pretend in the playhouse and long summer nights – but the feeling, it’s not there. I think back even further – pajamas with feet and rocking chairs, picture books and night lights – and don’t find it hiding in the corners with stuffed teddies and plastic dolls. I think back and back and back – amniotic fluid and warm pulses, soft voices and cushioned comfort – I can’t find it there, neither. 

Standing in the bathroom stall, a grown woman, I am lost trying to find where this feeling began. Footsteps on tile bring me back and back and back and I open the door, wash hands, check teeth in the mirror, smooth fingertips over wayward hair, smile once, walk determinedly out the door, across the room, back to the table, back to you.

I nod, offer the niceties of conversation, laugh where appropriate, pretend and pretend and pretend this feeling fits. I think about work and that big meeting and the dress pants I still have to press and the cat litter I need to pick up on the way home and the dirty dishes sitting in the sink and the unwashed laundry and the mundane shit I can’t remember remembering when I was a little girl.

In the bathroom in my mother’s house, there was a heat vent below the towel rack. On cold mornings, I would run from bedroom to bathroom in my nightgown – the blue one with the white polka dots and ruffle round the neck, the hemline ripped and falling away, the same hemline to which my mother always said “I’ll sew that for you, I will” but never did – and I sat on the vent with my nightie pulled taught over my knees and, hidden behind long bath towels draping wet from the rack, I read and read and read and the toughest part of the day was leaving the warm vent to put on cold clothes for school. 

We pay our bill, don winter jackets, exchange polite goodbyes, turn in opposite directions for opposite lives and head to our houses, dark and cold, the heat vents exchanged for hot water heating in high rise apartment complexes, murder mysteries for late night case studies and tomorrow’s to do list. The cold clothes, the dread of leaving the house, those feelings – they stay the same. 

But this one? This feeling sitting heavy in the pit of my stomach, churning with the rich food bumbling about my stomach, it’s new. I don’t remember it the way I remember carelessness, comfort, warmth.

And because I can’t remember it, I ignore it, push it deep to the soles of my feet so I can step on it, heavy footfalls pushing it deeper and deeper and deeper into the ground. It’s when I can’t hear it’s squish any longer that I remember to forget it was there at all.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

Exoskeleton.

“Beetles are perhaps the most successful order of insect on earth. The total number of known species exceeds 300,000,” says the entomologist to the cab driver.

“Where to, fella?” the cabby asks.

“Downtown, Jasper and 109^th. In North America alone, there are 111 families branching into 27,000 species. Because of their evolutionary aptitude, beetles have been found in nearly every habitat on earth,” a rambling exhale, a collision of language, the back end of each word smacking into the one before it.

“Someone got shot down that way tonight, you sure that’s where you want to go?” careful concern, more for his own safety than that of the bug man.

“I’ll be fine,” curt, annoyed, the bug man starts to shake his left knee, tapping a bouncing rhythm to inaudible music. “Beetles can be distinguished from other insects by their opaque armored forewings – or elytra – which connect in a straight line and cover the hind thoracic segments. The Tiger beetle is the most common to the Prairies,” fidgeting, he pulls curly locks through twitching fingers, eyes darting from rearview mirror to back seat window to scuffed shoes.

“Yeah, right. City sure has changed a lot over the years. Never used to worry about shootings downtown. Mind you, I moved here from Vancouver couple years back. Saw as many as 30 corpses in one night working the east side run.”

“Vancouver. Colourful place. You know, Tiger beetles are extremely colourful and are native to the dry, open areas of Alberta’s badlands. In Alberta, there exist 19 different species of Tiger beetles.”

“I don’t know much about beetles, never liked bugs much. Vancouver was full of colour alright, I saw my fair share of red while I was there,” hand over hand, turning left across three lanes, a quick glance in the rear view mirror, returning left and right to ten and two. “You know what it’s like to hold a dying man in your arms? I watched this young kid get shot in the head twice down on East Hastings – pop! pop! – just like that. I have my first aid, you know, so I rushed outta the cab to see if I could help, but I just held his head in my lap as I felt his pulse stop. The paramedics, they took too long to get there,” a sense of failed heroism tainting his voice, he stretches an arm across the back of the passenger seat, a glance over his shoulder to see if the bug man is listening. “You ever seen anything like that?”

“No, can’t say I have. Sounds intense,” a distant vacancy in his voice. “Josepph Wolpe was a South African psychologist who worked in a military psychiatric hospital. He developed the psychiatric concept known as desensitization. By teaching patients a series of relaxation techniques and rehearsing stressful situations, they learn to become comfortable with something that may have been a paralyzing fear previously,” hands folded in lap, looking from side to side out each window, once, twice, three times. “He cured a woman of her fear of insects using this method.”

“Guess you could say I been desensitized over the years. Not much I haven’t seen. Strange place, the world.”

“Turns out she was afraid not because she had an actual fear of insects, but because her husband was nicknamed for a bug and she was actually afraid of him,” a short head nod, matter-of-fact.

“Like I said, strange place the world. Here we are. Be careful out there, eh?” a hesitant glance in the rearview mirror, the brim of his cap pinched between two fingers.

“Like the hardened exoskeleton of the beetle, I am protected,” a folded bill passed over the console, a labored shuffle out the back door, a grunt as, pushing to his feet, the bug man hefts his heavy frame from the cab. “Take care.”

“Yup, take care.” A head shake before throwing the car into gear and driving off into night.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Skeleton Key.

I knew this guy once: Didgeridoo Stu. He was wacky – wacky the way you should be only after you’re old or have survived a traumatic experience. When I was seventeen and Stu was nineteen, we lived in the same apartment building. An old run down block of apartments above the liquor store; Stu, he lived in the apartment next door to mine.

Sometimes Stu forgot to take the garbage out and sometimes Stu forgot to shower, but sometimes Stu would invite me over for dinner. He would warm a can of creamed corn on the stove, stirring it methodically with a wooden spoon as he held a hard cover collection of Eliot’s poems in the opposite hand, reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in a mock English accent as the yellow juice of the corn sloshed over the edge of the pot. His shirt un-tucked, the hole in his sock, his sideways hair bent with grease and sleep, tapping the spoon on the edge of the stove when, measuring his life in coffee spoons J. Alfred accepts his fate, Didgeridoo Stu would take a bow and I would clap, clap, clap, sitting there on the floor in the middle of the linoleum in Stu’s dirty dank kitchen trying hard not to touch too much in case it all rubbed off on my new white sweater.

Stu’s dad died a long time ago. Stu always told stories about telling other people about his dad, like when he told me he told his best friend about telling his mom about missing his dad and how Stu and his best friend swung in the hammock in the backyard sun all day when they were twelve. Stu cried a little, when he talked about the hammock.

Stu came over to borrow a pot one afternoon, saying he’d bring it right back. Not quite sugar, but not quite clothing, I agreed and dug one out of the cupboard. I took the lid off as I handed it to him and he dropped his pet snake right into it.

Stu had a skeleton key to the building. He would let himself into people’s apartments while they were at work and sit for while. He would listen to their music and try on their shoes and sample the food in their fridge and sit on the couch and pretend to be them.

After work, at least he’d knock before trying the key.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Impossibly Red.

The walls are impossibly red. You are impossibly calm.

Hanging limp in one hand, a near empty beer bottle, green glass glinting in low light. You are thin, your bones sharp angles through tissue-paper skin – grey and wrinkled. Long hair slicked back, frayed string tied tight around colorless locks. A wife beater ripped along the bottom seam, hanging loose over worn jeans, a hole showing skinny knee and hairy calf. Brown boots weathered with dirt, you are a bull pawing at the ground, feet shuffling back and forth, grinding cold cigarette butts into the floor of the garage stained dark with oil. On each arm, a sleeve of faded tattoo, the words a blur of ink, the pictures lost in the translation of age.

You are sinewy strength, a command of respect despite small frame, short stature. There is a meanness to your lank, a coldness in you. Your breath is short, controlled and forced, sharp puffs from moving too fast too quickly. In out, in out, you huff until, a long drag of cigarette and eyes turned to the roof, your lungs slow the heaving of your sunken chest.

Sitting in the corner, your pal. Wide-legged on the old lawn chair, – an indignant spread to make room for itching balls and wrinkled manhood – he sports a flannel shirt ripped at the sleeve showing pudgy muscle, shoulders to elbows to wrists, one continuous roll. Pot belly pushing through black shirt stretching to meet the elastic band of grey sweats with a rip in the fabric dangerously close to the crotch, the knees are stained with grass and dirt and something dark, something indistinguishable.

He, too, looks up, his breath laboured under the fat spread of his chest, a wheezing effort.

From the rafters of the garage, an old rusting chain, links so caked they’re orange. Drip, dripping like that in the soft light of moon, you wonder how you’re going to clean up this mess.

You sigh, you shake your head, you throw the bottle against the wall, a cascading spray of green diamonds, your buddy covering his face with his fat hot-dog fingers.

Fuck. That’s one hell of a mess.

But even though the walls are impossibly red, you are impossibly calm, even when the blue-red bounce of light starts to spill in through the windows.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Broken Metal.

Mending the broken metal of character, a jigsaw of just-maybes and what-ifs, the pieces don’t fit the way they ought. You say: “it’s all going to work out.” You say: “it’s all meant to be.”

I want to believe you this time. I want to believe you so badly I smile and nod like I do when I try real hard to convince myself. But I know you know I know the truth and the truth between us hurts. It’s dark and murky, that truth, a den for a dragon’s worth of mean words and nasty glances.

With it all laid out on the table in front of us like this, the pieces lacklustre from wear with worn angles of awkward realization and compromise, our puzzle looks less impressive, less rewarding, less inviting, more plain, more disappointing, more ugly.

There’s reason why we lose interest in the game so quickly.

You get up from the table, push the pieces away, send a few falling off the edge of the table face down on the floor, the puzzle still incomplete. You walk into the kitchen, slam dirty dishes around the sink.

We are like the kitchen sink, you and I: scratched and worn, shine buried beneath the dirt and grit, strewn with leftover bits of last night’s dinner and the sediment of carried conversation.

We need a good scrub, we do. Hot water and bleach to get the stink out.

Reflective chrome bouncing back the banality of life, we are nothing new. Ours is the pattern of the puzzle before us, a replication of him and her before you and me.

You run the water, soapy suds sloshing in and out of haphazardly wiped glasses and mugs, plates and pots. A splash slops the floor with a wicked slap, droplets smacking your pant leg and sock, the base of the cupboard door. You swear – a guttural bellow of anger and frustration.

I flinch, the water nowhere near my pant or sock, and reach to touch my foot, soft hand to hard toe.

I stare at the pieces, the chaos on the table nothing like the picture, perfect on the box. You let out the drain, water sucking down, a slurp breaking the silence between us, not mending the break between us.

A sigh: “it’s all going to work out,” you say.

I shake my head, no.

xoxo

M.L. H’art