Tarryn Fisher - Mud Vein

I walked to the middle of the driveway and scooped up some of the snow, cupping it in my palm, looking around. It was then that I saw it. A patch of snow had been cleared from my car’s windshield. The car that I never park in the garage, though now I wish I had. There was something underneath my wiper blade. I carried my handful of snow over, stopping when I reached the driver’s side door. Anyone could drive past my house and see me half undressed, cupping snow in my hand and staring limpidly at my snow-capped Volvo. There was a brown square underneath the blade. I dropped my snow, and it landed in a semi-hard clump on my foot. The package was thin, wrapped grocery bag paper I turned it over in my hands. He’d written something on it in blue sharpie. His handwriting flicked across the paper in messy, carefree lines. A doctor’s scrawl, the kind you might find on a medical chart or a script. I narrowed my eyes, absently licking off drops of snow on the back of my hand.

Words. That’s what he’d written.

I carried it inside, flipping it over in my hand. There was a slot on one side of the cardboard. I stuck my finger inside and pulled out a CD. It was black. A generic disk, something he’d burned himself.

Curious, I put the disk into my stereo and hit play with my big toe as I stretched out on the floor.

Music. I closed my eyes.

Heavy drum beat, a woman’s words … her voice bothered me. It was emotive, going from warm cooing to hard with each word. I didn’t like it. It was too unstable, unpredictable. It was bipolar. I stood up to turn it off. If this was Isaac’s attempt at facilitating me into his music, he was going to have to try for something less…

The words—they suddenly picked me up and held me, dangling in the air; I could kick and writhe and I wouldn’t have been able to come down from them. I listened, staring at the fire, and then I listened with my eyes closed. When it was over, I played it again and listened for what he was trying to convey.

When I ripped the CD from the player and stuffed it back in its envelope my hands were shaking. I marched it to the kitchen and shoved it in the back of my junk drawer, underneath the Neiman Marcus catalog and pile of bills bound by a rubber band. I was agitated. My hands couldn’t stop moving— through my skunk streak, into my pockets, pulling on my bottom lip. I needed a detox so I retreated to my office to soak up the colorless solitude. I lay on the floor and stared up at the ceiling. Normally the white cleansed me, calmed me, but today the words to the song found me. I’ll write! I thought. I stood up and moved to my desk. But even when the blank Word document was pulled up in front of me—clean and white—I couldn’t splash any thoughts onto it. I sat at my desk and stared at the cursor. It seemed impatient as it blinked at me, waiting for me to find the words. The only words I could hear were the words of the song that Isaac Asterholder left on my windshield. They invaded my white thinking space until I slammed shut my computer and marched back downstairs to the drawer. I dug out the cardboard sleeve from where I’d shoved it underneath the catalogs and bills, and dropped it into the trash.

I needed something to distract myself. When I looked around, the first thing I saw was the fridge. I made a sandwich with the bread and the cold cuts Isaac kept stocked in my vegetable bin, and ate it sitting cross-legged on my kitchen counter. For all of his save the earth with hybrids and recycling bullshit, he was a soda fanatic. There were five variations of carbonated, stomach-eating, sugar-infested soda in my fridge. I grabbed the red can and popped the tab. I drank the whole thing watching the snow fall. Then I dug the CD from the trash. I listened to it ten times … twenty? I lost count.

When Isaac walked through the door sometime after eight, I was draped in a blanket in front of the fire, my arms wrapped around my legs. My bare feet were tapping to the music. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at me. I wouldn’t look at him, so I kept to the fire, focused. He moved to the kitchen. I heard him cleaning up my sandwich mess. After a while he came in with two mugs and handed me one. Coffee.

“You ate today.” He sat down on the floor and leaned his back against the sofa. He could have sat on the couch, but he sat on the floor with me. With me.

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

He kept staring at me and I squirmed, pressed down by his silver eyes. Then, what he said hit me. I hadn’t fed myself since it happened. I would have starved if not for Isaac. That sandwich was the first time I’d taken action to live. The significance felt both dark and light.

We sat in silence drinking our coffee, listening to the words he left me.

“Who is it?” I asked softly. Humbly. “Who is singing?”

“Her name is Florence Welch.”

“And the name of the song?” I sneaked a glance at his face. He was nodding slightly, like he approved of me asking.

“Landscape.”

I had a thousand words, but I held them tightly in my throat. I wasn’t good at saying. I was good at writing. I played with the corner of my blanket. Just ask him how he knew.

I squeezed my eyes shut. It was so hard. Isaac took my mug and stood up to carry them to the kitchen. He was almost there when I called out.

“Isaac?”

He looked at me over his shoulder, his eyebrows up.

“Thanks … for the coffee.”

He tucked his lips in and nodded. We both knew that was not what I was going to say.

I put my head between my knees and listened to Landscape.

Saphira Elgin. What kind of shrink goes by the name Saphira? It’s a stripper’s name. One with scabby track marks up her arm and greasy black roots growing inch-deep above brittle yellow hair. Saphira Elgin the MD has smooth slender arms, the color of caramel. The only things decorating them were thick gold bracelets that stacked from her wrist to the middle of her forearm. It was a classy show of wealth. I watched her write something on her notepad, the bracelets tinkling gently as her pen scratched across the paper. I categorized people by whichever one of the four senses they exhibited the strongest. Saphira Elgin would fall under sound. Her office made sounds, too. There was a fire to the left of us, snapping as it ate a log. A small water fountain behind her left shoulder trickled water down miniature rocks. And in the corner of the room, past the walnut bookcase and chocolate couches, there was a large, brass birdcage facing the window. Five rainbow finches hopped and chirped from tier to tier. Dr. Elgin looked up at me from her notepad and said something. Her lips were the color of beets and I watched them vapidly when she spoke.

“I’m sorry. What did you say?”

She smiled and repeated the question. Smoky voice. She had an accent that put heavy emphasis on her ‘r’s’. It sounded like she was purring.

“Yourrr motherrr.”

“What does my mother have to do with my cancer?”

Saphira’s leg bounced gently on her knee, making a swishing sound. I’d decided to call her Saphira rather than Dr. Elgin. That way I could pretend I wasn’t being psychoanalyzed by Isaac’s choice of shrink.

“Our sessions, Senna, arrrre not just about your cancerrrr. There is morrrrre to your composition as a perrrrson than a disease.”

Yes, a rape. A parent who left me. A parent who pretended he didn’t have a daughter. A slew of bad relationships. A lost relationship…

“Fine. My mother not only walked out on her family, she also probably passed this disease down to me. I hate her for both.”

Her face was impassive.

“Has she trrrried to contact you afterrrr she left?”

“Once. After my last book published. She sent me an e-mail. Asked to meet with me.”

“And? How did you respond?”

“I didn’t. I’m not interested. Forgiveness is for Buddhists.”

“What are you then?” she asked.

“An anarchist.”

She considered me for a moment, and then said, “Tell me about your father.” Tell me about yourrrr fatherrrr.

“No.”

Her pen scratched on her notepad. It sounded itchy. Or maybe I was just aggravated.

I imagined her writing; Will not talk about father. Abuse? There was no abuse. Just nothingness.

“Your book, then.” She reached under her notepad and pulled out a copy of my last novel, setting it on the table between us. I should have been surprised that she had a copy, but I wasn’t. When it was made into a movie, I didn’t think I would see it, but I did. Chances were they’d turn my book into some bastardized Hollywood knockoff. At least my book would get good publicity. They anticipated a small release, but on opening night the movie grossed three times the expected amount and then went on to top the box office for three weeks before it was knocked out by a tights-wearing superhero. My book became an overnight sensation. And I hated it. All of a sudden everyone was looking at me, looking into my life, asking questions about my art, which I had always deemed highly private. So, I bought a house with my money, changed my number and stopped answering my e-mails. For a while I was one of the most sought after interviews in the book world. Now I was a rape victim and I had cancer.

I hated Isaac for making me do this. I hated him for making this the condition for performing my surgery. I’d taken to the internet, searching other surgeons who could cut out my cancer. They were plentiful. Cancer was trending. There were websites you could go to where you could see their pictures, where they went to medical school, how their former patients rated them. Five stars to Dr. Stetterson from Berkley! He took the time to know me as a person before dissecting me like a live specimen! Four stars to Dr. Maysfield. His bedside manner was stiff, but my cancer is gone. It was like a damn dating site. Scary. I’d quickly closed the window and resolved to see the shrink Isaac was forcing on me.

The only peace I had at that point was knowing it was he who would cut the cancer from my body. Not any old stranger—the stranger who’d been sleeping on my couch and feeding me.

“Let’s talk about your last relationship,” Saphira said.

“Why? Why do we have to dissect my past? I hate it.”

“To know who a person really is, I believe you have to know first who they were.”

I hated where she put her words. A normal person would have said you first have to know who they were. Saphira mixed everything up. Threw me off. Used her dragged out ‘r’s’ as a weapon. She was a purring dragon.

In my hesitation, her pen scratched on paper again.

“His name was Nick.” I picked up my untouched coffee and spun the cup in my hands. “We were together for two years. He’s a novelist. We met at a park. We broke up because he wanted to get married and I didn’t.” Some of the truth. It was like sprinkling artificial sweetener over bitter fruit.

I sat back, satisfied that I’d filled the session with enough information to keep Saphira the Dragon happy. She raised her eyebrows, which I figured was the prompt to keep talking.

“That’s it,” I snapped “I’m fine. He’s fine. Life moved on.” I pulled out my grey and smoothed it back behind my ear.

“Where is Nick now?” she asked. “Do you keep in contact?”

I shook my head. “We tried that for a while. It was too painful.”

“For you, or him?”

I stared at her blankly. Weren’t breakups always painful for everyone involved? Maybe not…

“He moved to San Francisco after he published his last book. Last I heard he was living with someone.” I looked at the finches while she wrote on her notepad. I had to turn my back to her to do it, but it felt good, like passive-aggressive defiance.

“Did you read his book?”

I waited a second to turn back around, just enough time to rearrange my face. I lifted a hand to my throat, wrapping my forefinger and thumb under my chin. Nick used to say it looked like I was trying to strangle myself. I suppose subconsciously I was. I quickly pulled my hand away.

“He wrote it about me … about us.”

I had thought that would be enough, that it would divert her attention and allow me to breathe. But she waited patiently for my answer. Did you read his book? Her chocolate eyes were unblinking.

“No, I didn’t read it.”