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Roadside Graves
w/Bart Budwig
FRIDAY, Aug. 6, 9PM
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Stereopathic on Hypem
Jul
24
Claudette Gable looked in the refrigerator for the aloe. She bent down and moved condiments in the door. Her hand on the mustard, she seized slightly and emitted a low groan. She thrust her hand under the back of her shirt and scratched. She righted herself, groaned again. In the bathroom she lifted her shirt and twisted to look at the redness of her back, which had an unnatural glow that she imagined resembled the sweet and sour sauce at a Chinese restaurant. She decided not to scratch. She would just let the itchiness go.
The scratching didn’t help. Drinking water and applying aloe were the only things that helped. Otherwise it burned, and it actually burned. Her back burned as though she were a Buddhist monk protesting the war. She poured a glass of water from the ceramic dispenser and thought of coolness of the aloe. She began to retrace her steps.
One patch of skin, she could tell, wanted to come off. She wasn’t going to scratch it though. Let it go, she thought, and imagined herself in a yoga video. Namaste, she thought. The patch of skin tingled. Screw it. Aloe, she thought.
As she walked through the living room closing the blinds against the night, still looking, she picked a picture off the desk and held it between forefinger and thumb as she searched. The itching started and she decided to jump lightly up and down and see if it passed. She’d just recently heard somewhere, on a video someone sent her maybe, that jumping up and down actually improved your mood, regardless of sunburn. She couldn’t say that she believed it. She stopped jumping and tried to think of something else. She looked at the photo, but the burning stabbed again, and she went back to jumping. She couldn’t imagine where the aloe was. Screw it, she thought.
The skin had begun to slough today and when she un-tucked her shirt at home, the bits poured out, celebrating the end of the workday and torture by fire. She looked at the photo again. She drank another glass of water and poured one to keep by the bed. She couldn’t imagine that she would sleep tonight. She poured herself a glass of boxed wine. She tried to drink it as it was, but found she couldn’t. She added a shot of Seagram’s gin, a spoonful of frozen limeade concentrate, and four ice cubes.
Claudette put down her photo and picked up an issue of Real Simple. A sentence into an article on all-natural cleaning agents, she remembered. She left the aloe in the basement when she started a load of laundry. She didn’t want to go into the basement. She wished, for only a second, that Kent was there. She would make him go into the basement. But she didn’t really want him there. The patch of skin wanted her to go into the basement, was asking her to put it out of its misery. She picked up the photo. She lifted the useless latch on the basement door, flipped on the light, and started down the stairs.
The basement was still a mess. She didn’t care about that. The windows butting against the ceiling were dark. She didn’t want to look at the windows. She used to scare herself in her parents’ house by looking into dark windows and imagining something awful suddenly popping into the frame. She turned into the hall towards the laundry room and tried to concentrate on the grit gathering on the undersides of her bare feet. The laundry room was lit by the light that she left burning there always, just in case she had to come down in the night like this, because you had to enter the room and pull the string to turn it on, which required more faith than she felt she had; there on the folding table was the aloe. She grabbed it and ran the way that, she was sure even though she was approaching thirty years old, she would always run out of basements. The already tingling skin of her back tingled more. She slammed the door and carefully threw the useless latch.
She threw up the back of her shirt and applied the aloe, and believed momentarily that the sense of relief was worth it. She rubbed away the patch of skin. This was coolness.
She got into bed. She touched the place where the patch of skin had been. Did the new skin feel softer? Maybe. She put the photo on the stand by her bed and realized that she was very tired.
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of Montreal - “We Were Born the Mutants Again With Leafling” mp3
- Therese Illus lives alone in Rhode Island.
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Therese, this is so very perfect; I laughed and then there were tears.