Feedback would be wonderful! I’m sort of a novice at short stories so any input is appreciated. Also, please don’t steal this and publish it as your own, etc. It would be devastating. And rude. Love, Megan
LEAVES/PAPER
Door knob eats candles are bright, hurting my eyes close my eyes see
a bright green circle open eyes circle still there acid starting to kick in Will stares a stupid smile at me all I want to do is go to sleep but I remember what Maddy said about not
being able to sleep on acid junior year feel orange maybe metallic I
am metallic a metallic blanket a dog I miss my grandpa Will stop touching my arm I want people…juice…biscuits oh
no I’m going to throw up there it is that’s vomit who did that it came from over here brain slow down okay okay
okay okay okay. Will stop laughing
you are a lizard lizards don’t laugh it is scary lay on floor touch carpet not safe vacuum cleaner dish washer bum on bus touched my butt smell
like leaves like brown leaves I used to put leaves on paper.
“Wait, I wrote this?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Will spits when he laughs and I hate it. I hate that he laughs. “You were pretty much tripping balls.”
“Oh.”
I’m not happy. I touch the bed frame with my finger tips and close the small journal. The bed frame is cheap—a block of wood attached to a piece of metal and it hits the wall when I mercy fuck Will. I don’t like it here and I don’t like Will but I am in what my shrink calls a “transitory phase.” I guess this is a euphemism for unemployment.
“So do you want to help me with this bowl? We could go get some dinner afterwards. It would be fun.”
Will’s idea of “fun” is perverted and childish, and he thinks I enjoy walking stoned through the Tenderloin after dark to get dinner, which is actually just pizza.
“Sure. A bum touched my butt on the bus, by the way.”
“I know. I read about it.”
I’ve been stuck in this cycle for…well, five months, I guess. Will introduces me as his girlfriend to people he knows but it isn’t true. Will is thirty-two and I am only twenty-three but Will picks his teeth with his fingernails and yells profanities at bums for looking at me when we walk by. I’m really not all that attractive, which is probably why I’m still with Will. The truth is, once I moved back in with my parents after I graduated from U.C. Santa Cruz, I got lonely. Most of my friends from high school found jobs in Boston, D.C. and Portland. I called my mom the day after I graduated.
“Mom, I’m coming home for a little while.”
“Oh…well, we’d love to have you back, sweetheart, but we’d really prefer if you got a job.”
“I can work at the bakery again. They said it was okay. They said I can come back to work.”
“Oh, well that’s nice of them…honey, we’re worried about you. At graduation yesterday you were so…solemn. Have you been taking your medication?”
“No.”
She made me go back to the psychiatrist as a condition of coming home.
I got fired from my job three weeks after I started again.
“We’re going to have to let you go,” uptight prick Richard told me.
“Oh. Why?”
“We’re bankrupt. We have to shut down business for a while. Sorry, Leslie.”
I took the bus home. The butt groper bum was there again. I inched away slowly, gripping the pole overhead and read the advertisements in Vietnamese, Spanish and finally English for birth control and family planning to avoid eye contact with butt groper.
When I got home I remembered that my mom kept a box in my old room-now-office filled with report cards, photographs and other such memorabilia. Will came over to my house that day I got fired. He’d only been there twice before. I opened the door for him.
“We have to break up,” he said.
He looked at my mouth, then at the top of my head.
“Come here,” I said.
“What?”
“Just…I want to show you something.”
Will looked skeptical about this proposal.
“Please,” I said.
He shrugged in acquiescence and we climbed the steps up to my old room-now-office, Will following me nervously.
“Your parents aren’t home, are they?”
“No. Relax, I don’t want to fuck.”
Apparently this reassured him.
I pulled out the box of saved childhood memories. Notes to the tooth fairy, sonogram pictures of me at three months, five, seven, eight, were all there. My six year-old attempts at art were there, including one “natural art” piece we did in Ms. Cooper’s class.
“Look, I used to put leaves on paper.”
