What We Do In Small Towns
by Lexys Sillin
Photo by Vivian Le
We’ll meet in small towns, about halfway, we decide in September. Only two hours if we both drive, maybe less if I drive fast, you say, but I’m so blinded by tears brimming on my cheekbones, all I hear are the days in between where I befriend the blades of a ceiling fan and wonder if you’ve slept with someone else already. I feel so fragile, everything is so new. No, never, I love you the most. I cannot fall asleep.
Photo by Vivian Le
The first small town is further for me, but it has an antique shop, and I love antiques. It’s noon. I carry a handmade sign with my fingertips for an hour while we rifle through the assorted collection of misfit items that smell of decaying skin. You check every corner for cameras and feel me up behind a shelf with Janet Evanovich lining. I swipe the top after and tract only dust. The sign is gone, there are no old postcards in a thick, lonely binder to redeem this strange aching. The only record player is missing the needle, I think, but we leave before I have the chance to confirm. Travel as far as you can, as often as you can said the sign.
You take me in the back of my car after, covering my mouth, and then you fall asleep. A snowy film falls over everything, so fine that it sparkles. It’s five o’clock. I am reminded of the few hours we have left, but only because you so graciously remind me. Dinner can be seen through the window of a pathetic Chinese restaurant with more fluorescent lights than a hospital. We laugh sometimes, the food is toxic, and I will find somewhere better next time. We transfer to a park, where you hover over me like night. My leg slips from beneath me and my skin divides to an askew screw. If blood were to fall in the open door and onto the frame I couldn’t tell. You are an Eagle Scout, that is why you carry so many supplies in the back of your car. Or a murderer. All I have is a Swiss Army knife and some napkins. Eight-thirty. Again and again and again, the snow falls heavy over me until the small town is littered by stars we cannot see anywhere else.
Nine o’clock. There’s no remorse in your face or your voice, but there lingers something sickeningly sweet, like honey—subtle like a half plugged headphone jack, with only the harmony coming through the speaker. I spill myself because I don’t want you to leave. The vehicle next to us is red and running. When you look offcenter of me, I think the red car may take off on its own. If we don’t leave now, we will be so tired tomorrow. My hands are peeled off your shoulders. You escape to the red car, and eject down the interstate. The road is blurry, I cannot see. Make a U-turn ahead.
The repetition of long days is too much, and you decide we can spend one night in a two-star hotel newlywed suite, and you unpack luxury bath items we never talked about. You think these are gifts, but I think I can get used to sleeping in someone else’s sheets. I have amnesia every night, and that’s how I always end up in your bed. In the mornings, your lips are melted like a sigil until you have gotten what you came for. I am nothing. No, my love, you are everything.
I drown in the bathtub every night. I turn my car into the median and everything is stardust. I daydream about a vaccine injury from a tetanus shot and rub my leg raw again. Life is so sweet that it’s sickening. I think about walls of the iron maiden closing around me—a warranted penetration. I wake up to find it wide open, my body whole, your arms in open embrace. Come to me.
Here is another small town next to the last, and I cannot hear anything but the water pouring through a drain outside. Maybe the greatest injustice is boredom I think. I stick my head out of the snow only to ask about a movie title or excuse myself to the bathroom. Inside, the open window smiles and curtains bat like eyelashes. So pretty, and look at my face in the cloudy mirror. Trauma is a loving mistress, and how great is it to be covered in snow? I brush long hair behind my ears. So pretty.
In a small town, but north this time. Everything is in your name, and you start charging your credit card. Nowhere to go, and a brown paper-wrapped box with a twine ribbon. More gifts, you think, and I accept them, but I do not want them. Inside is a piece of plastic painted like driftwood. An approximation of the sign in the antique shop from several months ago, but the states and countries behind the letters look like spots of dried blood. At midnight, I take a pregnancy test in the soft haze of the tiled bathroom. Another gift? I wonder. The door is pounding for hours, I think, and everything is white. I spin on the floor until I can see again. A blizzard roles in, and even the red roaring engine cannot kick up. Negative.
I have found my way back to the very beginning. I see the same character come up in your contacts, on various platforms, and in your anecdotes. Confrontation is not my strong suit, and you try to take advantage like everything else. I refuse anything but the truth, banking on the instability of my hormones to last this stand-off, folded in a computer chair while you make the bed. Twice, last July. You make us both relive the time I studied abroad for two months and left you all alone with no one to hold (down). I climb back into bed.
And it’s still fucking snowing. You wouldn’t have stayed with me if you knew when you were leaving. You’re right.
Our meetings are two weeks apart now, and that’s all I have courage for. I am strung out by promises that you will come to me more, more, and more, but I drive further each time, until there are no more small towns. An apparition appears in the basement while I’m boiling water one night. I don’t see her—I am thinking of the snow in Minnesota that concealed the window. A mist seeps through the ceiling—dust collects over the water stains. Behind me, she lifts the hair at the base of my neck. I jump. Oh my god, I’m alive I think for a brief second. The water falls, scalds my foot, burns through my sock. Everything is crying on the floor, and the water never evaporates, but neither the fear nor pain can measure up to you. You are everything. For the first time, I don’t believe it.
You can kill me if you want to, but you do not, I think. Then, I think I’m a sociopath you say, and I can feel the walls jester their spikes close around me. With release, as they cut my sides, I start looking for the words. I think you need help turns into a war inside the walls of your red Honda Accord. The passenger side is child-locked for a long time, and the clouds start turning from above. Winter may last forever. No, no, no; what I’ve said all along, but this time loud, louder for the people window shopping to hear. I fly over your lap to unlock the driver’s side door and start the foot chase to safety. As I pull out from the side street, you stand in the middle of the road, with a smile slippery enough to spin out on. I wish it was the last time I saw you. I love you, don’t leave me. I’m sick, don’t leave me.
My phone rings incessantly until I agree to meet at a public place. It hasn’t snowed in weeks, go figure. The woman you slept with quit her job and moved to Indiana, so I pray there is no one left for you. Your face is unshaven and you have not taken your medication, or you have, and this is just how that looks. I deny your pleas to turn you into the cops because I’m not confident in my case, and that’s my fault. The fear of stepping out into the parking lot at the same time keeps my feet glued to the floor. It takes an hour for you to run through the playbook, slam the table, and leave. I watch your car, now red and running for another twenty or so. When it begrudgingly peels out, I still feel unsafe. I’ll walk you to your car. No thank you.
There is no end. I hate all red sedans, but in time, I return to all the small towns. Gas, food, nice pictures along the river—there’s still plenty of water. Not all snow falls the same, and the lenses of my glasses will mist for days sometimes, but no one comes to visit. I don’t believe in Divinity any more than before—I wish I did—but everything is terribly pragmatic. For a while, no place is comfortable, and I can still feel you touching me. On particularly bad days regular people shapeshift into the parts that scare me the most. And I don’t know where you are, but I do keep a switchblade now in case you’re ever curious where I am. How is she doing lately?