sunsetfell

[sunsetfell]

the first time I learned to fly I flew over by the funnel cake stand by Rt 36 where Allison Lee was talking to the kid with the red curly hair who poured batter into the hot oil, and I swooped down and picked her up, pulled her by the torso and lifted her into the air so we were flying above the empty field, once farmland returning to trees, beyond the highway.

it took her a moment to realize who I was and when she did she screamed:

“what the hell was that?”

“I had to save you,” I said. “you saw the way he was looking at your boobs. he might have done anything.”

we both knew it wasn't true. under her maroon sweatshirt, he couldn't have seen her boobs.

“I can perfectly well handle it myself,” she yelled.

“you don't understand, Allison Lee,” I said. “you're in a world where people can fly now. ideas you used to believe don't make sense anymore.”

and I demonstrated this by turning half into her, and her half into me, so that for a moment we were equal mixes of the same two people, perfect mirror images.

she shuddered and screamed and demanded I let her down, so I did and we tumbled into the grassy field by the edge of the forest where the moss creeps out from beneath the trees.

“show me where you learned to do that,” she said, still yelling.

“it was deep in the woods,” I said, “where the twigs fall from the elm tree and you scrape them at just the right place and—”

“we're going there.”

it was a long walk, since she wouldn't let me carry her, and her sweatshirt caught many times on thorns. (this new-growth forest is full of low bushes, but it’s the most magical place on earth.) it's a risk she took, leaving a trace like that, but what could I do if the wolf men found her and devoured her?

when we reached the elm and its magic twigs she demanded I show her how it worked, so I took her hand in mine and guided it over the rough bark that felt like the fingers of the old man that would pull her up into the sky when she was ready.

“stop squeezing so hard,” she said.

so I held her hand limply, but at that moment she clenched her fist over my finger and shrieked because it was working and we flew up into the air and into the clouds and vanished into the emptiness of space.

[sunsetfell]

my favorite type of train station platform is the underground ones where there's no wall at the end and it just gets darker and spookier as it gradually fades from public platform into the tunnel beyond

[sunsetfell]

“How many ‘s’s in Sabrina?”

The question came from across the desk of the Marriott hotel as I stood with my suitcase waiting to check in.

“What?” I replied, not having expected the question.

“How many *‘s’s* in *Sabrina*?”

She sat poised with a pen in her hand, waiting for the answer.

“Uh, one,” I said.

“I'm giving you another,” she said. “Just in case someone takes one from you. There.”

And sure enough, the paper now said `Ssabrina`.

She put the pen down.

“Enjoy your stay, Ssabrina. But remember, you can only afford to lose one ‘s’.”

[sunsetfell]

It’s Tuesday night, so good chance we’ll hear screaming from the floor above, like last week, and the week before, and maybe feet stomping and, if we’re lucky, a chair crashing on the floor.

It’s just another noise to you—no biting your hair or pacing, wondering if you should call the police. Maybe you think I’m nervous. Maybe you think that’s why I sit on the couch watching you, following your relaxed body as you saunter from the kitchen counter to the bathroom sink, to look at yourself in the mirror and wonder if you’re getting enough sleep.

You don’t know I’m wishing I was there.

[sunsetfell]

Every evening, after the sun went down,

I’d send you a text—

begging you to forget me.

[sunsetfell]

I will never go back

to the frozen food aisle

of Jay’s Deli,

without you there to grab me

and press me against the glass refrigerator door

and make me realize

I couldn’t leave you—

until you left me first.

[sunsetfell]

to really torture Sisyphus it should have been whenever he puts on his duvet cover he realizes he's got the long and short edges backwards

[sunsetfell]

In a Field

“Someday, I hope you get to experience lying naked in a field, the long wet grass scraping roughly against your skin,”

she said as she had not been outside in three days, held prisoner in this room by the sickness eating away at her body.

[sunsetfell]

ugh why doesn't this grater come with a lesser now I have to get one of those separately

[sunsetfell]

there actually are people out there who when they go out they know their destination and it's just one and they're going to go there and come home all according to plan

[sunsetfell]

I will never have curves nice as the curve of the earth but flat earthers also find mine unbelievable until I take them to space

[sunsetfell]

I'm gonna start a criminal organization that sneaks into the suburbs at night and builds unwanted sidewalks

[sunsetfell]

DOS a? En ESTA economía?

Butter masala dosa alongwith sambar and chutney for breakfast...

[sunsetfell]

Tried breathing for the first time and it's both exhilarating and inhilarating.

[sunsetfell]

Fruit is intentional. Spices are arbitrary.

[sunsetfell]

Heading West

As you go west, the features of the land become spread out. At least that's how it is when you start from my hometown in Denfield. You get to a quarry where the workers think nothing of driving an hour each day from home. Still, some, like Christine, don't like the drive at night in the dark. And Charlie once slammed on his brakes when a deer crossed in front of his car, and his four-year-old son in the back seat was flung forward, cracking a rib against the seatbelt. The boy ended up okay, though. The boy's mother, Sarah, even forgave Charlie, eventually.

Growing up in this country, it's etched in your brain that progress runs westward—following the Oregon trail or whatever. Like moving from Queens to Manhattan to a house in New Jersey where your kids have a backyard to get muddy in. Even starting in a town like Denfield—some 3,500 people surrounded by emptiness—the vast westward expanse still beckons, calling itself your manifest destiny.

So when I wanted to leave home, that's where I went. First working at the Turkey Hill, then pushing wheeled metal hoppers around at the quarry. I had no skill in that work. My boss Harper kept yelling at my mistakes. I didn't care. He hadn't fired me yet, and I was out west.

Charlie really wanted to get me pregnant, even though he had that kid already from Sarah. We met at the quarry and first hooked up at the quarry, beyond the drainage ditch where an abandoned wooden structure with a tarp gives privacy from the other workers who don't care anyway. And then the second time he was smiling and giggling and half-joking about how cool it would be if we made a kid right there behind the piles of stone. And next time it was like that too, but more serious. And then so serious it got scary.

I'd known Charlie's ex Sarah from the quarry, too—briefly, before Charlie started working there and she left the next day. We'd spoken meaningfully only once, late at night in the quarry office by the messy table strewn with invoices and work gloves that should have been put away in the shed. She told me how guilty she'd felt leaving Charlie—still felt, even. They'd even planned a wedding, but two months before, an outside force intervened. You see, Sarah had a woman, a friend she'd known since childhood and secretly adored until the friend's divorce, when things changed, and they grew closer in a way Sarah had only before dreamed about. Coincidentally, Sarah was trying to prepare her own wedding and finding it harder and harder. Until that fateful night in July when the friend showed up at the quarry and invited Sarah into her car, and the friend turned out to be wearing just a bathrobe, which inched further off her body as they talked. And that's when the friend confessed she was ready to fall into Sarah's arms and stay there for years and years and maybe forever, if it came too that.

Nothing is ever so simple. Two weeks later, the friend disappeared. Sarah called perhaps five times a day or more—the friend wouldn't answer. But Sarah couldn't go back to Charlie, she cried to me—not after she experienced what was possible.

Sometime during or maybe just after the fourth hookup with Charlie, and hearing him tell me for the tenth time how we'd make a baby and live by the quarry the rest of our lives, I decided I'd have to move west again, so I did. And there I was frying pancakes at a diner owned by a Greek family in Maple Hollow when, somehow, there was Charlie, again. I asked him how that was even possible and he said he's friends with the owners. Of course he was.

We worked side-by-side several days, no incident—he didn't even try anything funny. Then one evening in the kitchen he told me his son's mother had taken the kid, how he missed the kid so bad, but he was scared to go to court over it because he was behind on child support and they could put him in jail if she reported him. He said he wouldn't mind being in jail so much as his kid finding out he was in jail---that would break him.

"I don't understand why everyone always leaves me," he said, looking up at my face for an answer.

It was a moment I should have felt pity, I realized, but instead I wanted to flee even farther west---to a place where he wouldn't try to turn me into the next Sarah.

I called the front desk at the quarry and convinced them to give me Sarah's number from an old personnel file.

"I still have her pepper spray," I explained. "I need to return it." Pepper spray sounds feminine. They won't ask more questions.

"Sarah," I said when I got her on the phone. "I have a proposal for you."

It was a hot September afternoon when, at last, I spotted Sarah's ex-friend (and ex-brief-lover) at the Sheetz by the Turnpike where Sarah had told me I might find her. I leaned against the ketchup and mustard counter and waited for her to walk by with her hot dog.

"You look like you know how to change a tire," I said to her as her jeans brushed against mine while she leaned over for a napkin.

She smiled, and almost, I thought, winked at me, but didn't answer.

"Any chance you could help me with mine?" I persisted.

Outside, I pretended to just be learning her name was Sydney as we crouched on the ground by my beat up Camry and wrestled with the jack.

"There's something sticking to the wheel," Sydney said. "What'd you put gum on it?"

"Let me see," I said, as we both lay on our backs and tried to peer into the wheel from the inside.

Each time a car pulled through the parking lot, I wondered if this was the one—or whether he'd even show. How long could I keep Sydney lying with me under the this stinky car in the warm afternoon?

Then my phone buzzed, and I knew it was him.

"Where the hell are you?" Charlie's voice bellowed from across the parking lot. "You said meet you here for some 'emergency' and you don't even pick up your damn phone."

Sydney and I extracted ourselves, sweaty from exertion, our hair muddled. I pulled the left strap of my tank top back up, but the other still hung over my arm. The button on my shorts was undone. How had I managed that?

And then Charlie saw us, and he froze.

For a moment, Charlie seemed unable to speak—unable to assess the situation, unable to understand what he was seeing. Then he screamed:

"What the hell kind of shit is this?" he demanded.

It was a new side of Charlie, this forceful anger. If only he'd showed it back at the quarry, maybe I would have trusted he had the common sense not to murder me or something worse.

Sydney, who must have been equally shocked, scrambled to her feet and backed into the car.

"Charlie??" she yelled, as if she couldn't believe it was him. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Oh don't try to run away again," Charlie sneered. "You think every time I find a woman who wants to be with me, you can swoop in and make her yours? Oh, and you'll probably ditch this one in two weeks like you did the last one."

Sydney couldn't respond, so Charlie went on:

"You're not getting away with it this time. You're getting exactly what you deserve."

He started advancing toward Sydney with the grace and determination of a tank. I looked around the parking lot to see who was nearby. A dirty red pickup in the far corner that'd been there a while. A state trooper's car partially visible around the back—but I couldn't remember seeing the trooper inside. No human being besides us three was currently in sight. Just the roar of the Turnpike reminding us of the continuing, foolish existence of the human race.

Charlie took a step closer to Sydney. It was strange to see Sydney scared to run from this man, just frozen with her back to the car. Charlie was a big guy. Not athletic, but large. Sydney was muscular but thin and short. Charlie was just a few steps away now.

Then a little boy's voice called out from the side of the parking lot:

"Daddy don't do it." And the three of us turned east in unison.

It was Charlie's kid, of course—yes, of course it was—waddling toward us across the parking lot, face orange from the setting sun. Did his words sound awkward? Not quite as urgent as the situation seemed to demand? Likely no one but me would be listening so closely—likely no one but me was worried if they'd sound rehearsed.

And so Charlie fell to his knees.

I could describe the next 20 minutes of sobbing, the dark well of thoughts Charlie tapped into, confessions I couldn't believe, as the sun dipped below the hills and it became night around us. But what I really want to talk about is the other half of my plan. You see, I had to offer Sarah something for her to help me out—hell, she even brought her kid to deliver the fatal rhetorical blow.

And so it was during Charlie's sob-spree that Sarah stepped out from around the Sheetz. No one immediately reacted—myself because I had to play dumb, and everyone else because—well, it was not clear why. The emotion, I guess. Sarah walked slowly until she was standing in front of Sydney, who did not seem to recognize her---or even, really, to acknowledge her presence.

"Sydney," Sarah said.

Still, no reaction. We were the only ones left in the parking lot now. An 18 wheeler drove by but did not stop.

Sydney did not look up, but she spoke:

"I hoped, so many years, you'd find me."

"Find you?"

"I thought I had to hide from you after what I did to you and Charlie. Or maybe I worried you didn't really want me—that you just wanted an excuse to get out of a bad relationship. Proof that something else was possible."

"Sydney—"

"I thought we might meet in the woods or something—somewhere romantic. Of course, since it's you, we met in... some sort of scheme you or your friend concocted."

"She's not my friend," Sarah clarified.

"Of course I'm mad at you—furious—but I've been mad at you before, and I forgave you. And at least I can stop being mad you haven't found me yet."

Sarah was starting to cry. Sydney went on:

"Anyway, now it's me who needs an excuse. Not to get out, but to come home." She looked around at our pitiful gathering. "Let's go, Sarah."

They drove off, one behind the other. It was just me and Charlie in the parking lot. He'd stopped crying and was sort of sitting dejectedly on a parking barrier. I walked over to him.

"You won," he said. "I don't know what game you were playing, but you won it. Take whatever prize you want."

"Charlie," I said, "you really think I won?"

"Obviously," he responded.

"And you know if you ever try to pull any funny tricks on me again, I'll get you even worse, and there's nothing you can do about it?"

"Yeah..." he agreed, gazing into the sky to the west that still held a dark blue light from the now gone sunset.

"Then follow me," I said, stepping over to my car (which did not in fact have a bad tire). "I know a great spot we can go behind the quarry."

[sunsetfell]

Closing the parmesan bag with a hair tie