Portrait of a Life I Kind of Know
Losing my body
Article by Anabel Shenk Art by Sadie Fleig
I walked out the backdoor and the air was disgustingly temperate. It was exactly the same temperature as my body. I looked back to check the door and winced at the offensive comfort. There was no end to my body. My skin and the air were as warm as each other. I could not tell the difference. I was everywhere.
Ten years earlier, I had walked out my front door and the air was at least 20 degrees colder than my skin. It struck my small, iridescent body so harshly and perfectly. “Annnnnnnnnaaabelllllllllll.'' Mike Meehan was whisper-shouting from the middle of the street. “Annnnnnnnnnnnaabellllll.”
Was I supposed to respond? I was so small and iridescent. I curled myself around a rectangular pillar on my stoop. Always delaying response time. Always considering ways to release myself from the moment. I stared at him. My eyes little, barely open, widening with every second. I stared at him as he blasted my name into the fog. “Annnnnabbbbbbellll.”
Valerie Meehan, the mother of all five Meehan boys, lived right across the street. Mike came around quite often to move things around in her garage, spray paint metal poles, walk Valerie to the pink church, not quite sure what else. The fog was so gooey as it settled down for its midday rest on the concrete. Mike’s whisper-scream suddenly turned into an opera. The fog wrapped itself around his breath and the note, inducting it. One sticky mess rising and falling above the sidewalk. Like an old, juicy heart undulating slowly and flawlessly on every beat. A heart that’s been beating for years and years, expanding and retracting, unimpaired by time, showing off.
The fog goes up, “Annnnnaabbbbeell,” the fog goes down, “Annnnnnn,” it ripples against the street, practically shutters, “abellllll.”
I never actually saw the face of the 100-year-old-woman who lived in the house right next door to mine. She was 100 when I was born. She was 200 when I was five. Then 300…she died when I was 16. I swung from a very round, very smooth red buoy my dad had turned into a rope swing in the yard. My butt slid further and further down the red ball every time I went up. When I leaned my head backwards on the swing, everything softened. The ground and the air no longer existed apart. They were kissing each other at the meeting point. My eyes rolled around until I couldn’t see anything. Whipping my head back up onto my neck, I swung again. At peak height I could barely see four ceramic bowls on the other side of the fence. They were lined up in 100-year-old woman’s cement yard. 100-year-old-woman put rice out to feed rats that came by. One day, I was swinging and could see her. She was kneeling down over the bowls, re-filling them with what I imagined to be leftover rice. I wondered if she had made it fresh. I couldn’t see her face. She knelt deliberately over the bowls. It took a whole day to fill them all up. She started in the morning, got one full by noon, got the other three full by five, and by the time the sun began to set, the rats enjoyed their meal. When she was 200, she couldn’t leave the house anymore and the rats stopped coming. “RAATSSS!!!” My mom hates rats. When she talks about them her face melts and she almost cries. I stood up on the red buoy, used my toes to balance my weight, disengaged my neck muscles, and plunged into the lovely, emulsified air.
“Well, well, well…” Bobbi the Butcher’s eyes burst out of his bald head. “Where’s your mama? Are you old enough to be here on your own?”
There’s a gigantic case of slimy chicken breast, tiny shrimp, and lamb chops between us. The room smells cold and sour. It’s hard to say how old Bobbi the Butcher really is. He’s worked at this butcher counter as long as there’s been one. He is twelve feet tall and he is screaming. My body absorbs the sound of his voice as fast as it can, trying to keep up. His voice bounces around like a song. It is loud and then it quickly dissipates, soaked up by the big sourness. Then it’s loud again. His laugh is even louder. It shakes the counter and the meat jiggles on the ice. I smile as wide as I can before I look stupid. Bobbi the Butcher owns the 2006 white Scion xB that sits on our street. I see it out the window or at the end of a walk and I imagine Bobbi the Butcher driving it to our neighborhood every morning, belting Prince out the window, pausing to shout the name of someone he recognizes on the street (he knows everyone), wiggling his body, his shoulders, his fingers. I gaze at all the pink flesh in the case and think about how odd it would be if Bobbi the Butcher came to our house for dinner. I grasp onto my shopping basket and try to figure out once more how old he could be, or rather how long he’s been standing behind this butcher counter. He spins around, threatening to break into dance under the fluorescent lights of the store. My dad needs an onion, or maybe two. I can’t remember so I begin my backwards walk away from the butcher counter. Bobbi the Butcher’s eyes soften, and we melt away. I’ll see him next week or next year.
The steps that go up to Turtle Hill are just one block up from my house. My dad and I counted 5,000 steps once. Or was it 500…or maybe 500,000. Halfway up the steps I laid, sprawled out in the arms of my first boyfriend. “You know there are 500,000 steps?” We both shivered in the dark, cool air. “I love when it gets dark earlier and earlier.” “I feel like a worm in the night. Slithering around, no real sense of anything.” “I can’t really see and I can just…” “Slither?” The more of my body that touches the concrete, the more heat I lose through my jeans. My muscles get weaker, and my mouth moves slower and slower. All of a sudden, I am a spirit, more of an affect, less of a body. We stayed out as long as we could stand the cold. The earlier it got dark, the longer we could be worms together. I broke up with him on the top step. It was day and I could see everything. I said I could feel myself changing and my skin felt tight. I was fifteen. But really, I was only ten and it was just that Mike was still whisper-opera-singing and I couldn’t for the life of me see my name in the wet, dripping fog. And so, he got up, bounced down the steps one by one and I watched. Slithering. Maybe I thought it was time to stop slithering and start walking a little faster and appreciating the daylight, but I was going to miss him. “This is my spot,” it read in spray paint on the side of the steps three years later. My mom and I stopped on our way up to look at the words and smile. I recognized the handwriting.
The pink church that Valerie Meehan went to every week is also a school, and the courtyard is enclosed with a chain link fence. Along the sidewalk, there used to be an old, dead tree that had grown into the barbed wire. Its middle section was missing. It was just the top branches and the stump sitting snug in the fence. When it was still there, and my body was small enough, I would stand on the stump and press my head up against the top and pretend to be the middle. Pieces of the dead bark hung from my hair.
I used to tell my mom to close her eyes when I laid next to her in her bed. Once they were closed, I’d get as close as I could to her face without touching it. I tried not to breathe so as not to give myself away. I told her beforehand to open her eyes once she heard me snap my fingers. I get close, then feel a laughter rising so I back away and take a deep breath. Once again, I move my face right next to hers. I hold my hand back, away from my face. I snap, her eyes burst open, and I scream joy across her head and up her nose. Some of all of this gets too far up her nose and she sneezes.
I stumble into my bed fifteen years later, 1,000 miles away, and close my eyes thinking about my backdoor and wake up to that same body-temperature air soaking into my skin and nails and eyes. I call down to my mom. My voice bounces off my door, smacking me in the face. I sit straight up in bed and watch the fog roll in through a crack in the window. It fills up my room and I call down again. I’m everywhere.