On day thirty-seven of shelter-in-place, you moved in upstairs and the sobbing began.
You’ll learn soon: the building delivers sound like an overeager telegram
messenger. Ecstatic sex of questionable authenticity full stop. Screaming matches on the
phone full stop. Percussive diarrhea complete with mammalian moaning full stop.
These days I haunt my apartment like an echo. Here is the missing N key from my
keyboard, here is the frying pan blighted with last week’s congealed bacon fat, here is the
wife untouchable like so much smoke and gossamer. In the heaviest hours of the night,
she limns the edge of our bed, breath thick with incipient snores, and I slip my thumb into
my mouth and listen to you.
Every night you start slow, a low keening. Tonight’s the night I won’t let it get so
bad, you think. Tonight’s the night it’ll ease up. This is the last time. But every night it
rattles down the walls like a maimed animal scrabbling for a way out of its skin. Every
night your voice breaks into a wail and the cries come like pulses of arterial blood. Every
night your spirit comes untethered and must be dragged back into your body, only to be
huffed out bawling again.
Tonight I need a witching hour piss, and you’re clear as siren song in the
bathroom. The sobs break past your voice box—ha ha ha, a parody of laughter. I flush
and shut the seat cover. Water washes through the building. Water announces me. I sit
down and absorb the shock of cold tank on hot skin. Behind my eyelids is red as offal,
but rest assured I am actively listening, just like the therapist wants me to. You’re in the
weeds, now. Hitching your breath. Blotting your lungs.
There’s an easy fix to this. Pick a finger; it doesn’t matter which one. The thumb
is a classic, but the index allows you the advantage of cupping your chin in pensive
repose while you watch TV or read a book. The pinkie is unobtrusive and easy on the
teeth. It offers your palm as a cradle for your cheek but necessitates an unnatural angle
for the wrist. I’ve known smug double suckers—index/middle, middle/ring,
ring/pinkie—but this is an advanced technique that must be practiced from birth, before
the vagaries of bone and tissue settle the size allowance of one’s grief.
Mine is the exact size and shape of a thumb smoothed of its fingerprint after
decades nestled warm and wet between palate and tongue. Twin grooves mark the space
between my second and third knuckles where my bottom teeth have insisted upon the
flesh. The nail is soft, the skin is shriveled, and brown and sinless my thumb stays tucked
away from all of life’s bustle and filth. My wife averts her eyes when she catches me
suckling.
My thumb slots into place and peace like an opiate warms me where I didn’t even
know I was cold. This is how I got through the end of high school, when Tony
Pajaczowski met Heather Dibbens and stopped talking to me even on the bus. This is how
I got through finding my dad’s second family on Facebook ten years after the last time I
saw him. This is how I get through slipping between the covers next to Mariah night after
night. Who needs to cry, when we’ve all got perfectly good thumbs?
Neighbor, I’ve got a Solo cup. I press it to the wall behind the toilet; the pipes can
be our string.
Can you hear me? Listen. You know how this goes.
Lay your thumb on the tender bed of your tongue. Hook your fingers over your
nose. The mouth gives suck on its own.
Originally published by Ghost Heart Literary
Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and Indiana University MFA alum whose work appears in such journals as Ploughshares, AAWW’s The Margins, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. They serve as associate fiction editor for Fairy Tale Review. Their debut collection, The Anchored World, is available from Rose Metal Press. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis. Learn more at jasminesawers.com and Twitter @sawers.