My Mental Milkcrate » random acts of fiction

In which our hero finds she has been breathing the wrong air

Jessica N. Coles — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:15:44 +0000

Lydia dreams of being a housewife and carrying Paris in her veins. The way Paris seems to sink into the psyche and fill her heart with black-and-white romance. Grainy photos and uncertain colours line memory boxes stacked against the base of her skull. She believes and so she becomes a knee-length skirt and high-heeled shoes clicking over cobblestones. The whisper of a car three roads over at midnight. The shine on asphalt after rain. The misinterpreted wink from across the bar.

Lydia sighs into a pen and cups her palms around morphology that settles in elusively bold strokes on shards of used paper.

A nearly true story that may not have happened to me. Or anyone else.

Jessica N. Coles — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:17:47 +0000

We fell in love in the span of a bus ride. Twenty minutes from my stop to the transit center where we parted. We weren’t reading the same book or magazine; we didn’t happen to realize we had the same playlist on our iPods. He simply asked me if I liked public transportation. He had a short grey coat. Green sneakers. I don’t remember his dark eyes or that flicker of a smile around his words. I don’t remember that he squeezed my hand through my mittens in parting. And maybe he does this every day: falls in love with another woman, absorbs her heartbeat into his chaotic solo drumbreak. I don’t know. It never matters in these affairs. I’ll see him tomorrow or the next day or three weeks from Sunday. I’ll find the release on my vocal cords and give him an answer.

Merle’s Photo

Jessica N. Coles — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:08:20 +0000

He could see the air fading into a new season. Wouldn’t be for a few weeks, but he could see the first glimmer of autumn blurring at the edges of his lens. He sucked in his breath, as if it were the last puff of his last cigarette (no, this time, he had really quit). Good god, what a summer.

Lee fidgeted beside him. Merle knew she didn’t know how to just sit and take in the lake like this. He’d been trying to teach her all summer what mornings were supposed to be. He’d sent her back up the hill more than once for breaking into the silence with plans for the day. He wasn’t sure why he’d brought her here. Aren’t these things supposed to be a measure of something? This place was his family and she didn’t fit in. She was trying, he supposed. He could have been too hard on her. She was beautiful, even dressed down like this and out of her element, but her awkwardness made him, on more than one occasion, contemplate throwing her into the water. He always threw a few rocks instead.

“I’m going to head up and start packing,” she said, finally. “I want to be on the road by 4:00.”

He tossed a rock in the water. “It won’t take that long. You’ll run out of things to do.”

“I’ll wander down to the Logans’ when I’m done. Tammy asked me to stop in before we left. I’ll probably stay for tea.”

That was the one thing Lee had managed to do: make friends with the neighbours. It wasn’t a point in her favour; he didn’t like the summer villagers. “Fine. I’ll see you when you’re back.”

She kissed his forehead as if she could guess the source of his terse responses. Maybe she could. He contemplated reaching up and catching her wrist. Trying one more time to explain why this moment was so much more important than packing up and taking leave. He knew she wanted him to, but he didn’t have enough rocks nearby.

As her footsteps crunched out of earshot, he pulled his camera out of his pocket and flipped through the pictures he hadn’t transferred to his laptop. Lee making faces over fish guts, Lee pouting at the rain, Lee barreling off the end of the dock, Lee trying to pretend she wasn’t scared of the canoe. He began absently deleting the digital recollections. She would sulk when she found out, but he was such a fucking bad photographer. He only got the damn thing because she thought he should have some record of their first summer together. First. She had complicated the one simple place left in his life. It was going to be a long drive home.

To be in the world

Jessica N. Coles — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:12:59 +0000

My cherished,

I left you 100 days ago today. Walked out over the grass and found myself spectacularly at the bottom of a fountain collecting wishes. But not for long. In the 100 days since then, I have experienced several hundred humans. Quite possibly into the thousands, but you see, I lost count. I began by handing out pennies, and when the pennies ran out, I wandered to the edge of a river to gather pebbles. I smiled at people and said hello, good day, take care. More than they did to me. It was mostly glorious. I could see eyes full of suspicion even though they wanted to trust. They wanted to find me in their family of hello, good day, take care. But the pebbles ran out too. And now, 100 days later, I am coming home to you. I think. If I can find the soles of my feet above the first shake of fallen leaves. They will lead me to you with the rustle of fading heartbeats.

Deidra Devino

Jessica N. Coles — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:37:10 +0000

She wanders down thrift store aisles. Her fingers tip-toe across the shoulders of faded reds to faded pinks. Everything stiff with the soap of second lives. She searches the well-washed rainbow for something she would know. Not this halter-top with the sequined flowers or that v-neck t-shirt designed to meet (just barely) the waist of jeans from ten years ago, but somewhere further down this row or the next or the one at the very end.

The misshapen cottons and impermeable polyesters whisper stories. I was once, they murmur, stretched against the breasts of a young woman who danced sweat through me and pulled laughter into my seams. She tingled when her partner touched the small of her back and leaned into the rhythm cupped in his palm.

She doesn’t believe half the tales of boardrooms and backrooms and bedrooms rustling from hook to hanger. This blouse was purchased for one half-hearted job interview and never worn again. This jacket was bought on sale and never fit quite right. These sneakers were worn long and often, but couldn’t be thrown out and now were not allowed to die. They haven’t fooled her once in all the weeks she has been combing these forlorn castaways.

She sighs. Her gaze drifts until the colours blur and blend into background. It isn’t here. Again. Nowhere in the carefully sorted corals and yellows and greens. She jerks the hangers back and back and back and back. Her frustration shrieks along the racks.

Reasons for nothing

Jessica Coles — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:59:12 +0000

In fifteen minutes, she will be finished her meal. She will stand up and speak to the man who has been staring at her across the table. She will answer the last of the questions he has been avoiding asking all evening. She can hear question marks crackling like AM radio reception fuzzing in a thunderstorm. She is certain he has never once listened to AM radio, so she will not use the analogy when she delivers the sentences she is sculpting. He won’t understand anyway. Or he will pretend he doesn’t understand to perhaps elicit an understanding hand on his arm. Perhaps she will place a condescending kiss on his cheek. Though her touch, any touch, will change the meaning of her words in ways she both does and doesn’t intend. Until then, she is wondering why she ordered coffee with her dessert instead of sharing a pot of tea.

Five-minute biography

Jessica Coles — Tue, 12 May 2009 05:51:33 +0000

Nicosia Falls was born in the mid-1970s. The exact date was not documented for irreligious reasons. She had an unremarkable education because she refused to answer any true/false sections on exams, stating that the truth or falsity of a statement could not be determined in a non-philosophical setting. Her parents, teachers, and friends rolled their eyes a lot. At the age of 23, she met several men she could have married, but a series of incidents led her to northwestern Manitoba, where she lost touch with all of them. She decided to study land formations of the Canadian Shield without any formal training in geology.

Simultaneity

Jessica Coles — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:50:29 +0000

She washes her hands. The soap smells like the Indian grocery store and other places she’s never been. The water is too cold, but she lets it run over her wrists for a few more seconds than necessary as she scrutinizes the shape of her chin in the mirror.

He opens the door. The air is heavy with steaming cedar planks and re-condensing water vapour. The sweat begins to bead on his forehead, on his upper lip, behind his knees. He closes his eyes and sinks into the sensation of sodden hair settling against the back of his neck.

They wave hello and smile. Pleasantries skip through their teeth in animated flashes of unasked questions. The curiosity between them snaps like pea pods under impatient fingernails, but the facade never falters. They are careful not to move into accidental intimacy, and their feet plant against minute signals of discomfort.

She trips on the uneven sidewalk. Blood oozes around tiny rocks embedded in her knees and palms. The high-pitched wail never comes, but the rest of them run to escape anyway. She squats in the fresh-cut grass and inspects the severed and dying skin for a moment before a ladybug lands next to the scrape and distracts her.

We hold hands across the table. The conversation is intense, and perhaps the woman two tables over believes we are lovers. I sip lemonade through a straw as the cadence of your words wafts around us like glacial breezes in a heat wave.

Abysmal

Jessica Coles — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:38:25 +0000

These dark days came without snow and all I had was a memory of never-resting wind as I walked down the alley day after day. I looked for something warm to shiver under. Because the cold finds a way past everything. Into the snarl and snap of morning voices. There is no quiet. Silence rolled up its tatami long ago with a sigh-o-nara, suckers. Shattered time, space, and eternity with one small phrase. Which was fine by me. I never looked for a place in eternity. Cold, black, and too damned infinite. Nothing to scrape your knuckles or stub your toe on. Just the blustering whip of nothing cracking against forever.

Life should be this exciting

Jessica Coles — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:43:05 +0000

Through a series of accidents, there I was playing footsie with the apparatchik I was never supposed to have met at that bar. The conversation could only be nebulous. My English kept rolling through his Russian mouth, falling to pieces in helpless solecism like crumbs sprayed across the table in a paroxysm of laughter. He asked me to explain the Canadian rock music falling like heavy-footed upstairs neighbors through our miscommunications. As if my toes were not tracing the groove of muscle between his tibia and fibula through carefully distressed denim. I practiced shouting his list of most useful Russian phrases between his deliberately shy smiles. I played and he played along and we did not pretend we were more than cliché strangers in a cliché seedy dive. Whoever we were for those twelve drinks and four hundred minutes. Wherever we would end up in the churn of bodies at the end of the night.