Mikki Aronoff
FACING YOUR IMMINENT PASSING, YOU REMINISCE STRETCHED OUT ON YOUR LA-Z-BOY UNDER A SHAWL SPOTTED WITH LIPTON TEA AND DOTTED WITH LUCKY STRIKE BURNS PATTERNED LIKE CONSTELLATIONS IN A WRINKLED PLAID SKY
The last day of summer camp, when Harold tried to force an open-mouth kiss on you, or maybe it was Jake, drillers sucked the wetness from the Wabash, and ducks gorged themselves on minnows, such tiny fish flipping around in sunlight, flashes of silver blinding all who came to watch. The eye doctor’s waiting room was crowded that week.
§
The second you first spotted blood in your cotton undies, the Naugahyde on your dad’s La-Z-Boy cracked. You fingered the map it split open to see whether you could find your way out. Your Ma screaming in the bathroom, teeth cracking like the broken tiles around the bathtub’s bottom rim.
§
The day in church the preacher was storming about hellfire and masturbation, and you wet your pants from the sound of him in your ears, poachers poached a family of gorillas somewhere. You knew even then that poaching wasn’t the right thing to do to animals, but you thought it was something like eggs.
§
The first time a tongue powered down your throat and you let it, a man in Marshall County, Indiana choked to death on a T-bone in one of those eat-the-whole-goddamn-32-ounce-steak-and-it’s-free places on the dusky edge of town where dogs run free. They blamed his attire, too casual for the restaurant, but you knew better. You just can’t have something down your throat without some kind of mechanism to push it all the way down or bring it back up. Any esophagus knows that.
§
The first time you drew smoke into your lungs, Winstons they were, and Marty said you looked sophisticated holding a fag, which was only his way to get into your pants, which he did that inky night in the back seat of his dad’s Plymouth, the mayor of Elkhart, Indiana’s son was the first person in history to get thrown in the clink for trainspotting stark naked. Behind a stand of pin oak stood a clump of townsfolk pointing and laughing at his skinny pink self.
§
The moment your virginity was took, a roll of quarters jumped out of the pharmacist’s cash register like a cartoon rabbit. It split and spilled onto the floor under the counter. Coins on the run. He tried a half hour to retrieve them, but his fingers were too pudgy. Two customers left the store because they couldn’t wait any more. Later the pharmacist came to call on your Ma just so he could get a chance to put his arm ’round her shoulder, inch those fat digits down the fullness of her bosom.
§
The afternoon you came home from school and told your Ma no one asked you to the prom, she yelled why not as if she couldn’t figure it out and proceeded to smash her favorite platter, the one with roses on it, and yelled at you again. That platter came down the pike from someone else and someone before that. That afternoon, the town parade got cancelled and nobody knew why. But you figured out it was a sympathy vote for you, having to sit at the dining room table with twenty-six pieces of porcelain and a tube of dried-up glue. Petals scattered everywhere.
§
The night Henry asked you for your hand in marriage, you wondered why he didn’t want the rest of you. The day he asked for a divorce, you already figured it out.
§
When the pharmacist got his way and finally entered you, he wisped into air like smoke. He was a ghost of a man unless you came into the store with your Ma. Then his molecules regrouped.
§
The morning they cut the cancer from your left tit, the twin towers …. you only knew this because you checked your watch and so did they
§
your body so cold this hot August day, you dig out grammy’s shawl, the one spotted with Lipton Tea and dotted with Lucky Strike burns patterned like constellations in a wrinkled plaid sky, and it is
feasts
of moths
of
holes
Mikki Aronoff’s work appears in New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Tiny Molecules, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, The Dribble Drabble Review, 100 word story, The Citron Review, Atlas and Alice, trampset, jmww, and elsewhere. She’s received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.
