Thick City

Meanwhile, a forefinger killing a small ant on a desk. Crack of an egg. White jeans snapping in hot, dry wind. Whine of a table saw. Two people at the end of a driveway talking with their hands, laughing silent laughs. Beyond them, children in a living room of a split-level house ramming a toy car into a larger pile of toy cars. In the distance, the continuous beeping of the drawbridge stuck for the fifth hour, car horns talking, too, with their hands, balled fists waving over steering wheels, someone is coming to fix it soon. Through the walls next door, the baby is crying. His mother is single, but looking, or so says her dating app profile. She doesn’t tell anyone about him, too scared of outright rejection. She wants a woman who will accept her for who she is, but not too much of who she is. How to explain to a single lesbian in her early 20’s that she has a baby? It’s too complex, really, she thinks, as she pulls her nipple out of her shirt, folds it like an envelope as her midwife showed her, and gently delivers it to the already gripping baby’s mouth. He latches, pulls, drinks. She likes to pat her hand on his stomach to feel it filling it up with slow, methodical expansion. The cries are so distant sometimes, from elsewhere, the baby doesn’t seem real. On the other side of the wall, I face a plate filled with a whole dried salmon (head attached); sweet cherries (pitted); a small salad of arugula and black olives (no dressing). Hands over my ears, I stare into the salmon’s hollow face. It turns its head, opens its mouth, and out comes the baby’s cry. I punch the salmon’s head back down. I think of my own dating profile, the one I made behind my partner’s back. How, I, too am looking. There is no heart here at home. What ship long sailed. I am alone with my crying fish, my fruits, my sad salad. Maybe I need a baby. Maybe, in the night, I should steal the baby next door, let his mother find her new lover to run away with. Maybe I should give her mine. The crying intensifies, through the walls, on my dinner plate. I grab a blanket from the couch. I wrap the fish in it, push the cherries around the head, shape the salad into a tidy diaper on the bottom. I swaddle my food baby until all I see is the gaping mouth of the salmon’s head. I unbutton my shirt, bring my left breast out of my bra. I tilt my nipple into the salmon’s mouth.

Thick City

Meanwhile, the sign inside the children’s section says “Petri is gone (but not forgotten!) He was a good friend. Check back in August for a new friend.” The home of Petri is taken from the front and brought to the back, out of sight, but the smell from the cage lingers of cedar and mustiness. If only making friends were so easy, I think. Lose a friend, get a new one. Misplace that one, here’s another one. May I offer you a Friendship Menu? Today’s special is loyal, honest, and not a dick. I think of a friend in college, a bit of a narcissist, asking me “How do you make friends?” Quite a masterful exclusion, a chiseled crack right through what I considered a shared, intimate moment. Are we not friends if you must ask such a question? I still think of this question from time to time, “How do you make friends?” coming from a supposed friend. And, of course, with the lingering-woodchip-turned-shit-trap in the air, I consider the question once more. Was Petri a friend? My friend? A good one, even? What did he ever do for me? I fed him. I held him. He bit me once, which is a dick move. The wailing begins. One wailing child, beside herself, when she realizes the cage is gone, small chubby fists hitting the floor. Petri!!! The swollen face of agony. Another. And then another. All day long, dejected children.

        My ex-girlfriend is no longer my friend or she is, ostensibly, another bad friend. Terrible, in fact. There are times when I believe we were never friends at all. 

        What friendship traits off of the Friendship Menu would I have selected had I the option then. Kindness? Empathy? Thoughtfulness? Love?

The last time a pet from the children’s section died, we were together.

        “How was your day?” my ex-girlfriend asked.

        “The pet friend died at the bookstore,” I said. “The one in the children’s section.”

        “Who cares? I’m sure they will get another one,” she said. “What do gerbils cost like $2.00? Rodents are gross, anyway, and you all are gross forcing children to love them and get attached when they die so fast.”

“Sparky was a rat,” I said.

“Like I said, who cares,” she said.

        I remember I did not ask her about her day because suddenly I did not care about her day or her life anymore. She left her massive mixing bowl and long wooden ladle on the bedside stand from two days before, rotting milk sickly sour. She ate all of her meals in bed. She never took care of the dishes, no matter what. She said she didn’t have time.

        Today, the bedroom is dank, black-out curtains pulled tight when I enter to go to bed. I don’t eat dinner. I am still thinking about Petri, the smell of cedar chips in my hair, the residue of friendship left behind. How dispensable and tenuous a heart the size of a pea can be. I get under the covers and put my arm where my ex-girlfriend would have been. Instead of her rounded stomach, her flat hips, I cradle balls of fur, so many, and all of them moving at once. A body made of fur balls, bone, and teeth. One crawls into my cupped hand and falls asleep—I can feel its rapid heartbeat against my fingertips.

Thick City

Meanwhile, we are inside, outside, behind, inside, outside, a dumpster piled high with a man and woman who are lovers/fish. They call themselves spiritual siblings, metaphysical conjoined twins, attached at the fin. Rainbow scales. We are snorting speed from a folded envelope crease, our rat named Wrench perched on our shoulders, cradled in our shirts. The dumpster people are growling about how things are different everywhere, how things have changed, not just in this Thick City, but all over this great big United States of Ours. They nod their heads inside, outside, behind our backs.

        Days later, we have returned to our hometown and are mowing our mother’s huge dirtlawn, down one side, up another, down one side, up another. She is on her fourth marriage to a fourth fat catfish, every house substantially larger than the last. “Finish line,” she says, of many mansions, marriages, catfish. Up one side, down another, wheels stuck in dirt. Huge houses equate to more places to clean in all the various ways one must keep houses clean. “I could do it,” she says, “but I don’t want to.” We offer to be her temporary housekeeper. “That’s thick,” she says, “more house, more shit.”

        This is the Lake Ocean shoreline, but here are our dirt dumpsters, our speed, more homeless fish sibling-lovers and speed and it feels like Thick City. After mowing her lawn, we visit an old friend in a side-of-highway motel called the Anchor Inn that has no telephones in the rooms and boosted basic cable with one extra, fuzzy, HBO channel. Our old friend is leaving for Vegas in the morning to get away from Thick City. She is using needles these days, bright pink track underbelly. I tell her to maybe lay off the injectables in Vegas, and she gives me a sign of the horns, devil fingers, both hands, heavy metal.

The Great Lake, greatest of all, “sounds like the ocean,” our mother says. The waves of the lake-ocean sound as if it will overtake the inside of her house even with all the windows shut, a violent flood coming to break us apart. 

        Sign-of-the-Horns, heavy metal. We flash it in the mirror, more I Love You in sign language than devil music reference. I snap a picture. We are gnashing our teeth. I destroyed the ends of three Bic pens while on the plane here. We can barely speak without having to bite the insides out of our cheeks. When we are back in Thick City, we go see an orthodontist and who wants to fit us for a mouthguard to wear when we sleep. Too much speed in envelope creases. We do not have the heart to tell the truth, the speed makes our jaws ache, we grind and clench at night/all the time. We never go back to the orthodontist.

        In the 7th floor attic of mother’s Lake/Ocean mansion she finds our tackle box full of tinfoil pipes, white and black residue. “Are you doing that nasty stufffffff? It’ll turn your mouth black!” she yells over the phone. She doesn’t exactly know what “that stuff” is, but she knows enough to hang up the phone on us for the first time in our adult lives. So far, since moving to Thick City, when we are tired of adult city life, we have flown back to our hometown, to our mother’s various mansions to rest, but all we are is wet, sharp fish scales in burned out tinfoil. Needless to say, we are never invited back to our mother’s house. 

        We think about our hometown all the time. We think about the Lake/Ocean, the suburbs and the cities, boundaries and borders. Thick City. We think about how if speed were legal what would happen to our incisors, or about those dirt twins/lovers in the dumpster a few weeks ago, or the baby in the carriage, or on the other side of the wall. We think about who gets away with what and how. We think about flukes, near misses, direct hits. We think about our Anchor Inn Las Vegas friend and what could happen if she laid off her veins enough to get well. All we can do is dream. We think of heavy metal, what salvation looks like for fishes like us. How the desert, how the money, how the water, gets thinner and thinner inside, outside, behind. How, at any moment, the next draught will be the thing that kills us.

Thick City

Meanwhile, the woman with the red t-shirt that reads DEVOUT PAGAN skips circles around the intersection of curbs, the one way that curves at the right angles, as if to say please here look at me, hanging around like a lackadaisical slip under a skirt, lace jerked up a touch, and the woman circles, skip turns to gallop, between the DO NOT PARK HERE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 AND 10 PM sign and the YIELD sign, spray-painted over with GET F*CKT in neon green.

There are hours to go before the night will fall on Thick City and you stop hearing the sirens and grid-traffic and the lockjaw. The woman circles, circles. No money, no vice of any kind, no money to buy any vice of any kind.

  This is the age to spend the money you make, she thinks. This is the age in which you make the money and you spend it here and there and everywhere you want to. You live in the heart of the city and you spend your money. She sings Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world… repeatedly, hopping from one yellow corner to the next, absently watching for cars.

  A car stops with many passengers in it, stops in front of MILLIE’S FINE MARKET CUTS, which has been replaced with a sign that reads HIGH LIFE: 1.00 OTD over it. A woman with dark hair steps out of the car, steps to the curb, waits for the trunk to pop open and unloads a stroller. The woman on the corner cannot do anything but stare at the dark-haired woman. She does not jump the curbs, does not finish her perpetual circle, leaves a half-moon, stops singing. The woman picks up a rock off the street, and approaches her.

“Lilith,” the woman says. The dark-haired woman’s companions are slamming car doors, checking locks, answering phones, folding and putting away. The dark-haired woman shields her eyes from the sun by holding a baby blanket to her forehead, looking out as if she is at sea. “Adam’s first wife,” the woman says. The dark-haired woman nods and tips her head back in a fiery laughter, as if she has heard that one before. The woman wraps her fingers tighter around the rock and shoves it into her pocket.

Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of three novellas and five chapbooks, most recently Ruination (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) and Rat Queen (Bloof Books, 2019). Other works of prose, poetry, and criticism can be found or are forthcoming in Flaunt, Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, Washington Square Review, Sporklet, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. She serves as poetry coeditor of DIAGRAM and teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing at Sam Houston State University.