Kait Leonard
After They Removed Your Body
When I opened the door, the room sucked the air out of me. A path wide enough for a stretcher had been cleared through the piles of boxes and stacks of papers and overturned chairs.
I kicked at a pyramid of food wrappers and pizza cartons and found your collection of snow globes and ashtrays from all the states. Except New York. I’ve spent hours now searching for it. Through drawers and piles. We went there together. I have a vague memory of a plastic globe with an apple inside, but it’s nowhere. I found stacks of books stolen from libraries, due dates stamped clearly inside. A history of Pythagoras and one of Vlad the Impaler. A series of slim books on the American presidents, minus McKinley and Kennedy. Notes, letters, unopened bills long overdue, faded reminders written on post-its. Torn tee-shirts and greasy ball caps. Newspaper clippings reporting car crashes, openings of pizzerias, and Y2k prophesies. Stacks of obituaries from all over the country, even one from Canada. A piggy bank with “p-i-g” written on the side. It rattled when I shook it. Seven cheese graters and twice as many corkscrews. A box of feathers that might have come from a pillow. Cocktail napkins, wrinkled from the sweat of glasses, now dried. In your closet, a pyramid of the tubes from rolls of toilet paper. A deflated football. One crutch from that time by the lake. I found pictures of holidays and birthdays and vacations, of people I recognized and people I didn’t. But also pictures of isolated body parts, feet in shoes and bare, hands, knees, a bearded chin I recognized as yours. Prescription bottles, some almost full. Percocet. Dilaudid. Valium. Wine bottles. Vodka bottles. Soda pop cans, some full but not cold. Pay stubs and tax forms and insurance cards. A golf ball with something unreadable scrawled on it. An antique silver picture frame. I’d chosen it carefully at a little boutique downtown. I inserted the perfect photo of us and then wrapped the gift in purple paper with mint ribbon and hid it in my undies drawer until your birthday. In your care, the frame tarnished. The picture was nowhere to be found.
Sharing Secrets and Old Movies
I leaned over and puked on the passenger seat of my Pinto, shoved my seat back, and closed my eyes. I prayed the nausea would pass soon.
~
I jumped and looked around. In the window, A man’s face shifted, doubled, and blurred. My head felt like an autumn melon, heavy and full. I closed my eyes.
His voice pounded through the glass: “Are you alright?”
A cop, or maybe a security guy. My car. The clinic parking lot. I cranked it down and squinted, trying to get his face to hold still.
“Can I call someone?”
I wiped my sticky mouth on my sweatshirt sleeve. “I’m fine. Just need a minute.”
He spoke slowly, syllable by syllable. “You been here for hours.” He explained that I couldn’t camp in the lot.
The sun had begun to drop behind the clinic, a weird neon disk mounted on the roof. It would disappear soon.
~
I drove out of the parking lot and around the corner, away from the watchful eyes of the security guard. The clinic probably needed security just in case crazy protestors showed up to taunt women trying to get inside. I thanked God they hadn’t been there that morning. They wouldn’t have changed my mind.
Everything looked fuzzy, and my empty stomach tightened. I steered to the curb, turned off the engine, and threw my seat back again.
The sky transitioned from blue to silver. I wished I had a someone to call who wouldn’t ask a bunch of questions or even try to console me. I wanted my grandpap, but I didn’t want to walk through their front door and act like everything was fine. My grandma would want to know why I was there, why I wasn’t home with my husband. She’d want to know when I would come to my senses and grow up. I dreaded having to listen one more time to all the things that made Danny a good man and why I should count my lucky stars because he’d chosen me. As I thought about it, there were so many things I didn’t want. I wished I could figure out what I wanted.
~
When cramps woke me, the sky had gone heavy black. The dashboard clock read 11:43. Good. My grandparents would be asleep. I’d deal with everything tomorrow. The hollow pain in my abdomen kept me alert, as I navigated the dark streets toward home. Their home, I reminded myself.
A blue light shone around the edges of the metal blinds in the window of the TV room. Grandpap always fell asleep with the TV on. He devoured old westerns, staring at the images he’d seen a million times. Since his hearing had gone, there was no reason to turn on the volume. It also meant my grandma wouldn’t know what he was watching and scold him for wasting time on reruns, especially on those old cowboy movies.
I’d kept my key when I moved out, just in case. Now I turned it carefully and tiptoed through the little entry and into the kitchen. I shook three aspirin from the bottle my grandma kept with the spices, washed them down with milk from the carton, and leaned on the open refrigerator door. The cold felt good.
“You okay?” my grandpap whispered. He stood in the doorway, the little hair he had left pillow-mussed, his pajamas mismatched and baggy.
I couldn’t speak. It was like when I was little and he’d ask what was wrong. I never knew what to say because I didn’t want to make him sad. I pressed my palm against the cramping in my abdomen.
He looked at my hands and then at the clock on the stove. He held out his arms, ropy with purple veins and scarred from hard work. “I got you,” he said.
I crossed the room and fell into him. I cried, quietly so my grandma wouldn’t wake.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll share the couch. John Wayne’s on. It’s the good part coming up.”
On the couch, I leaned into him and pulled the blanket to my chin. I told him everything. I knew he couldn’t hear me, but it was okay.
Kait Leonard writes in Los Angeles where she shares her home with five parrots and her gigantic American bulldog, Seeger. Her fiction has appeared in a number of journals, among them Does It Have Pockets, Roi Faineant, Sky Island Journal, The Dribble Drabble Review, and other wonderful journals. Kait completed her MFA at Antioch University.
