*Fiction — November 10, 2022
Rachel
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Listen. Amy’s in the next room breathing so loud that Rachel can hear her through the walls, even though they’re stone-thick, old concrete slabs hardened around pipes and shit like that. Rachel doesn’t know how Amy and her boyfriend, always-naked Steve, manage to live so loudly when all they do is watch cartoons and fuck around like kids.
Steve used to bring flowers and cookies, offerings to the roommates like they were rabid animals or ravenous goddesses, but now he just ducks his head and plods straight to Amy’s room, in the back, where they sleep on a sheetless mattress and breathe too loud for anyone else to think. A clock in the kitchen, shaped like a cat with two big eight-ball eyes, purrs out the hour.
All around town Rachel knows kids are climbing into private cars and speeding down the highway. They drink from bagged cans and shack up at the clubs with easy bouncers. She was serving them just hours ago, leaning her back against the edge of the bar and feeling for the tender gap between two vertebrae. Her shoulders had bumped the cash register open. Crumpled ones puffed out like dandelions. Over the counter the boys jostle one another like it’s a sport. They play rough. Rachel takes dollars from their hands and folds the change into her bra. She pulls beer into glasses, watches foam grow and simmer. The boys lap it up. They pass over more bills. The group goes on like this for some time, the cast of characters rotates, and then Rachel counts out her cash from the register and walks home.
All around town Rachel knows kids are climbing into private cars and speeding down the highway. They drink from bagged cans and shack up at the clubs with easy bouncers. She was serving them just hours ago, leaning her back against the edge of the bar and feeling for the tender gap between two vertebrae. Her shoulders had bumped the cash register open. Crumpled ones puffed out like dandelions. Over the counter the boys jostle one another like it’s a sport. They play rough. Rachel takes dollars from their hands and folds the change into her bra. She pulls beer into glasses, watches foam grow and simmer. The boys lap it up. They pass over more bills. The group goes on like this for some time, the cast of characters rotates, and then Rachel counts out her cash from the register and walks home.
The time between leaving and getting there is the best. Rachel is alone and the sidewalks are still. There is always the knowledge that someone might appear around any corner, a car might skid by, a drunken group of wrongdoers looking for something to do, but Rachel always gets home safe. She only lives two blocks from the bar.
Amy is crying now. Her breathing sobs into the wall. Rachel imagines the whole house heaving with big tears, tears the size of a school bus. Shutters falling off the side of the house with the weight of the water. After all this imagining, she gets up to pee.
Before Amy there was Megan, and before her, Yasmine. They loaded up the bathroom with floral-scented shampoos and thin self-waxing strips. The small silver trash can, which had a lever the size of a big toe with which the lid could be raised, sat gaping and full of ripped paper and tampons and discarded wax with short hairs stuck in it like the flies in the gluey traps hung up in the kitchen window. Rachel wasn’t the sort of woman who asked questions. She had never been one for gossip, and even if she had, there was no one to tell. In the brief interim periods, when one room or another sat empty with dust and extension cords, Rachel went about the process of cleaning. She swept up lint and wiped down windows and took out the garbage in large plastic bags that ripped and leaked brown liquid onto the sidewalk. Then she usually drank a glass of wine in the kitchen window and spoke quietly to the dead flies.
Amy is crying now. Her breathing sobs into the wall. Rachel imagines the whole house heaving with big tears, tears the size of a school bus. Shutters falling off the side of the house with the weight of the water. After all this imagining, she gets up to pee.
Before Amy there was Megan, and before her, Yasmine. They loaded up the bathroom with floral-scented shampoos and thin self-waxing strips. The small silver trash can, which had a lever the size of a big toe with which the lid could be raised, sat gaping and full of ripped paper and tampons and discarded wax with short hairs stuck in it like the flies in the gluey traps hung up in the kitchen window. Rachel wasn’t the sort of woman who asked questions. She had never been one for gossip, and even if she had, there was no one to tell. In the brief interim periods, when one room or another sat empty with dust and extension cords, Rachel went about the process of cleaning. She swept up lint and wiped down windows and took out the garbage in large plastic bags that ripped and leaked brown liquid onto the sidewalk. Then she usually drank a glass of wine in the kitchen window and spoke quietly to the dead flies.
“Guess it’s just us again,” she’d say. Over time it had become difficult to keep track of the new deaths. Spindly black legs broke off and reattached in odd places. The sickly yellow glue outlined a mass grave, bodies slung over one another until they no longer resembled bodies. Elodie moved in one week, and Amy arrived the next. The flies stopped coming. The traps looked the same. Rachel began inspecting the tape when she returned home from work, twisting her neck to examine the same beady bodies. It was a changing of the seasons unrelated to climate or time. It was its own kind of death.
Amy paid rent late most months, and when she did, the money came through a set of checks that did not share her name. Tabitha R. Montgomery, they said, superimposed over a cartoon rendering of Tweety Bird and Sylvester, the cat. Rachel said nothing. She deposited the money into her account each month along with Elodie’s portion.
In the dim light of the bathroom, Rachel balls up toilet paper and tosses it into the bowl. Outside the crickets are screaming as they do every summer, filling the damp air with their anguish. The house feels less hers at night. Questions crop up in dark corners. Rachel is used to sneaking in late, feeling her way down the hall. When her hand skims the wall now it’s wet with condensation. She opens the front door and sits down on the top step of the porch. A nearby streetlight competes with the half-full moon. It’s been years since Rachel slept normal hours, since she felt more tired at night than in the day.
In the dim light of the bathroom, Rachel balls up toilet paper and tosses it into the bowl. Outside the crickets are screaming as they do every summer, filling the damp air with their anguish. The house feels less hers at night. Questions crop up in dark corners. Rachel is used to sneaking in late, feeling her way down the hall. When her hand skims the wall now it’s wet with condensation. She opens the front door and sits down on the top step of the porch. A nearby streetlight competes with the half-full moon. It’s been years since Rachel slept normal hours, since she felt more tired at night than in the day.
There is at least one good hour before dawn when time is no longer a matter of concern. For a moment Rachel thinks anything could happen, but tomorrow she will wake up late and fry an egg and walk back to the bar to start her shift on time at 8:45 PM. Tomorrow it will be as if the previous night did not happen, or rather, that it is the same night as the one before.
The sidewalk in front of the house is crooked and broken into large pieces, bouncing up and down like cracked ice or the deck of a ship. Always-naked Steve bursts out the front door (clothed, this time) and starts when he sees Rachel tucked under the handrail, her thighs milk-white and veined.
“Rachel,” he says in a formal tone. She doesn’t reply because it is clear sometimes-naked Steve has been crying. The skin beneath his eyes is shiny and red. He looks like a worm on a hook.
“You okay, Steve?” Rachel asks. She tucks her shirt between her legs to cover her underwear, not because she’s afraid Steve will look but because he is the one who is usually naked and is now crying.
“Yeah, I’m good, thanks Rachel,” Steve is hiccupping with sobs. He pulls up his ratty t-shirt and exposes the curly black hair that covers his stomach, which Rachel has had the unfortunate experience of seeing far too many times already. The fabric comes away from his eyes dark and wet. His shoes are untied and his bare feet slip out the back as he stumbles down the front porch steps and across the balding patch of grass that separates the house from the sidewalk. When he reaches the first streetlight sometimes-naked Steve shrieks and doubles over his own sobs. When he reaches the second, Amy opens the front door and lights a cigarette. She stands against the handrail so Rachel has to look back to see her face.
“Want one?” she asks.
“No, thank you.” Rachel doesn’t smoke. Sometimes-naked Steve cries out again, but by now he’s so far down the street neither Amy nor Rachel react. They watch his shadow stretch and collapse for another minute.
“Sorry about Steve,” Amy says. The lighter sparks as she flicks the flint again and again, and each time her face looks different, the shadows skipping over her nose, her pale brow. She takes a long drag of her cigarette and the breath between her teeth rattles. With her floppy pajama pants and straggly brown hair, Amy has always seemed like a child to Rachel. Now her skin looks yellowed and lined behind the burning embers. The ash grows long and shrivels like snake skin. Amy never bothers to flick it away, merely watches the grey paper disintegrate and fall to the porch floorboards.
It’s not like it’s her house, Rachel thinks, which is only half true. On the porch floorboards, which are painted grey and peeling, though you can’t tell at night, a few specks of ash remain lit and brighter than the sun, only smaller.
“He’s so sweet. I should be nicer to him,” Amy says, but the way she says it, flatly and with no humor, like she’s reading an encyclopedia, does not suggest that she means it. Rachel doesn’t know why she’s saying anything she doesn’t mean, to Rachel of all people, who has never been one for gossip.
“Mm,” Rachel says. She wonders if Elodie heard the commotion. They rarely see each other. Elodie is in nursing school and works nights at a hospice center. Rachel prefers not to think about Elodie except when rent is due, otherwise she’ll worry about all the death in the house. How it clings to the items the roommates leave behind when they move out. The cat clock on the wall that predates all of them.
“I hit him, you know,” Amy says, “like a good old fashioned domestic abuser. I actually hit him. For some reason I was surprised it hurt him. It’s like I forgot I could do that. Hit somebody. Hurt them.”
“Mm,” Rachel nods. The air is thinner than it was when she first stepped outside, and she shivers in her t-shirt.
“Would you mind if we got a dog? I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Amy says, then she adds, “Sorry, change of subject.”
Rachel says the word Sure, though she intends to rescind it in the morning when there is more distance between them and the night isn’t close like it is right now. Amy seems pleased. She jangles a massive keychain in the cup of her hand and heads back inside. Light begins in one corner of the yard, then reaches toward the other.
In a week, Amy moves out overnight. She drags her suitcases down the hall while Rachel stares at the ceiling in the dark. She leaves behind the mattress she slept on with Steve, who carries boxes of video games and crumpled clothing out to a truck they’ve parked against the curb. Rachel waits through the point in the night that lasts forever, and when it ends she gets up to watch the sunrise through the kitchen window. One by one she reaches up to pull down the fly traps and, without thinking, runs a finger over their immobilized wings, which are thin and crunchy, like the skins of a pistachio. She drops the traps into the garbage and opens the screen door to let the air in.
In a week, Amy moves out overnight. She drags her suitcases down the hall while Rachel stares at the ceiling in the dark. She leaves behind the mattress she slept on with Steve, who carries boxes of video games and crumpled clothing out to a truck they’ve parked against the curb. Rachel waits through the point in the night that lasts forever, and when it ends she gets up to watch the sunrise through the kitchen window. One by one she reaches up to pull down the fly traps and, without thinking, runs a finger over their immobilized wings, which are thin and crunchy, like the skins of a pistachio. She drops the traps into the garbage and opens the screen door to let the air in.
That night at the bar, the boys try to be charming. They take bets over darts and leave receipts with their phone numbers for Rachel. She is standing with her back against the bar and wondering what it would be like to hurt the boys. Under the overhead lights their cheekbones look thin as spun sugar. She could break a pint glass, smash a bottle. She wouldn’t get far. There are easier injuries to inflict. She remembers the sound of Amy’s crying, how she imagined drowning in the salt of it. At the end of her shift Rachel counts out the cash and walks back to the house, which is vacant and waiting.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.