TWO THINGS by PRIYA ELE
You & Me & the Mannequins
If you knew how much I write about you I think you’d probably break up with me. We watched Phantom Thread before going to sleep and the feeling of your fingertips on my back turned into a needle and your breath into thread, twining and spinning, colors trapped in picture frame stills and downturned lips. You fell asleep first and the shadow of your eyelashes burned over white bed covers. The movie played silently, etching sounds and beads and pins into the side of your face. I reached for you. I have a tattoo on my ankle that looks like shaking hands, the sound of fabric unwinding, the words never cursed. I heard that Paul Thomas Anderson pushed Fiona Apple out of a car once. I wonder if you would have played the movie had you known that. I wouldn’t have gotten the tattoo if I had. There’s something to be said about the permanence of that. Maybe the permanence of what we’ve done to each other. I watched you sleep. I told someone at a party yesterday that I was done being evil to boys. I said against the rim of a wine glass that it hasn’t done any good. The person I told laughed like I was kidding and he barely knows anything about me and barely knows anything about you but I still felt like he knew I was talking about you. Because I just want to be good and I want you to be good too. I don’t want it to ever go back to the way it was. I laid my head close to your’s and shut my eyes. I touched your shoulder. The characters fought on the movie screen. I imagined us as mannequins bent towards each other. I imagined my throat doused in fabric, my chest sponged and contorted by ribbons. Your eyes fluttered. The tips of my fingers turned to needles and I was writing over you, pressing seams and stitches, white thread and bloody pinpricks. Your expression softened. Once when we first met I made you sit with me on cement stairs in the winter until the sun came up. On the movie screen they danced against ruin, the edges of a dress skirted against a ballroom floor, wilted balloons and numbing colors. I touched the side of your face, your eyes opened, I told you over and over again that I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.
Kitchen Date
Toothpaste. Red wine. The corner of the inside of my mouth. Black licorice. The spot beneath my gums that know how teeth and hands taste. I tried to bake a cake for your birthday but the yolk burrowed too deep under my fingernails and turned to something gummy and warm and rotting. I threw it out and used the edge of my wrist to scrape the pan clean, batter smearing over my calluses. I like to lie about you and tell people that we met on the corner of 1st ave and 9th street in blistering heat and I was holding an apple core and a bag from Trader Joes with papery seams. I like to tell people that I’d gotten in the habit of talking to strangers and buying my own ingredients and somehow I still don’t actually know your last name. But really, I know how you like to cook vegetables over searing heat, I know the rhythm you use to press spices between your fingers. I know your last name and your mom’s last name and your middle name. I still only buy frozen meals from Trader Joe’s but I like to watch you cook over the rim of a wine glass, mint and white clattering on the cartilage of my teeth. Sometimes I read you poetry as the stove heat cracks against my cheap linoleum counters. I read a ten page one from the Paris Review once and by the end of it I was crying and you were caramelizing onions. You listened to my words soften and curl into each other. You asked me if I could say the ending again. I did, feeling my hands smooth against the countertop, my nails on my phone screen, your back to me, my heart coasting between the wooden spatulas. Simmering and crackling and popping. I took another sip of wine, the words tasting like its glass edge. You said wow. I said that I had trouble believing any of this was fair. You moved to open the fridge and pressed into its light and I spilled wine on the sleeve of the white dress I was wearing. It stained like a bloodstain. From the fridge you pulled Trader Joe's berries that had already gone bad and the mint toothpaste I always use and my entire nervous system and the first time we met, our knees pressed to cement in wintertime before the sun came up. You sat across from me. I listened to my heart teeter and burn against my cheap nonstick pans. It fried with the oil and the color of the center of your eyes. Spilled wine dripped off my fingertips. You couldn’t smell the heat behind you. I didn’t think of the kitchen going up in smoke until it did. Today I’m standing on the corner at 1st ave and 9th street with black licorice and clean teeth. I think I’m trying to make something new but I also think I might just be trying to tell another lie.
Priya Ele is a New York based writer. She studies dramatic writing at New York University and has work in forthcoming/in Passages North, HAD, Rejection Letters, Maudlin House, and Pidgeonholes, among others. You can find her on Twitter: @priyaeler.