Triple Take

by Aziza Barnes

He would remember that her face looked like the oatmeal she wasn’t eating. Then he would stop remembering that. Then he would stop remembering. He’d only recall his small ugliness the night he attempted to entangle their bodies into a catapult and failed because he could not tip their balance. The night when their sacks of muscle sardined one another, wet and unsatisfied. He would remember the oatmeal face of his “girl.” That her name was Cynthia and is Cynthia and what a horrible name, Cynthia, the way it slides through your teeth like a brittle death. He’d remember then and blame that “girl” that “baby” who would cry out for him after each lost battle, holler into the back alleys of his frame, turned away. She tried so hard to make conquest out of his hoarded pleasure that it wasn’t trying anymore—it was bleeding. 

She had been lost in a man before, but none of them had ever made her an artist. She would make audio recordings every time he cried out his mother’s name in the most inappropriate moments; opening a jar of pickles, ejaculating into her inner right thigh (his gentle refusal to fatherhood), nicking his skin while shaving. She’d label the tapes, like vials of bone marrow and fill herself with the mama-on-his-tongue, the most passion he’d ever licked his speech with. 

There would be nights he would not come home and mornings that he did. He would find her naked, covered in the packaged cassettes of his voice. She’d imagine everything he wouldn’t say and place those confessions in the small pockets of nerve endings only successful lovers seek out. If he told her he’d be gone for a weekend, he’d stay in town and drive by his own home, watching her take each mix-tape, hook it up to loud speakers and feel him, loud and alert on top of her. 

* * * 

I am a simple woman. I grew up in a house full of cockroaches. I eat spaghetti with ketchup. I wash my face with Dial soap and I have never said I love you. My brother still visits in the winter. He eats all of my tomatoes, packs each one into his mouth until he can’t close himself without spilling. I know he packs his bags this way. I know he packs his women this way. One night, I watched. That night I murdered 9 cockroaches with my right boot. He inserted a small colony of himself into a woman named “Cynthia.” Her legs, locked around his soft backside, reminded me of my brother’s fist smoldering a tomato. I see how my brother is like a tomato, how they leave the same beaded juice on my countertops. I clean his room. The woman named “Cynthia” does not know this is my house. “Cynthia” shivers like an intrusion of cockroaches the night I turn on the lights in my kitchen, to find my brother tearing the walls open with our mother’s name, refusing “Cynthia,” her skin ripe, naked and red. She shatters herself into all of my available corners. I wipe her up. I boil water. I boil spaghetti. I boil. I have never even had sex on my kitchen table. I shake loose the ketchup from its casing. I haven’t had my period in 9 years. My brother shakes loose our mother’s name from his “Cynthia,” his “girl,” his “baby.” I often imagine “Cynthia” with 3 heads, just to keep all her names in one body. I clean my kitchen. I use Dial soap for the floor and my face. Both are puckered by people who don’t love them. Instead of apologizing about the mess he left behind, my brother wandered my house like a leopard’s carcass with no skeleton. I annihilate 7 more cockroaches with my left boot. “Cynthia” is very attractive. “Cynthia” is completely useless when it comes to killing cockroaches. Or purchasing Dial soap. Or saying, “I love you.” “Cynthia” fills her lungs with that phrase until it becomes a lethal mucus lining her organs. She does not consider the distance between her and my brother in that sentence, how far apart the “I” is from the “you,” how a lifetime of unreal has been buffered onto their copulation, this “love” of hers shining a rotten machine. I violently collect 5 more cockroaches with both boots, one in each hand. The cockroaches are in my corners. The cockroaches are in my house. “Cynthia” may be this sort of cockroach; when you kill one, she leaves a small pustule of herself in its place. My house is crowded and hollow. Our mother died of pneumonia last winter. My brother and I are selfish when filling our spaces in. 

* * * 

Working in the Natural History Museum is a bitch. I’d rather work in a morgue. I keep dead shit safe. But it’s dead shit no one’s ever seen alive. Working with mummies would be fuckin’ fantastic. Someone’s seen those muthafuckers alive and preserved the shit out of ’em. These fuckin’ dinosaur bones don’t mean dick to dick, they just wound up in the ground like the first dick to die, like Adam, that fucker. I don’t read the Bible anymore. That’s another dead thing I can’t stomach. Okay, yeah—someone did preserve the shit out of that shit but what the fuck do I care about an overripe fairytale? I’m big on preservation. I do it to myself. There’s enough rubbing alcohol in me to last another 50 years, even if I don’t last another 50 years— it’s probably better that I don’t last that long. 

I like keeping my shit to myself—that’s another preservation thing. Growing up in the Bronx does that to you. 167th and Gerard Ave is a Museum of it’s own. A bunch of people stuffed away in boxes on boxes on boxes—they never leave. They born there, they live there, they fuck there, they go to a bodega, they do laundry, they get sick, they get shot, shot up, shot down—or they stop breathing in front of a TV. And no one ever knows about it. They die without anyone seeing ’em live and there’s always someone like me to watch over the leftovers. Women are like that—pregnant ones. My sister is the luckiest woman I’ve ever met. She can’t have babies so she can’t ever be like the Bronx, like the Bible, like the Natural Fuckin’ History Museum—she won’t be the carrier of something that’s going to die. Yeah, it would’ve grown in her and yeah, someone would’ve seen the thing alive but he would’ve been a Bronx-born brown boy—who would care? Who would’ve preserved him? Maybe a chalk lining on a sidewalk. Maybe unpaid doctors bills after his death. 

One thing I do love about my job is my nametag. It’d be nice if it did what it’s supposed to: make folks remember what to call me. It doesn’t. I don’t believe in girlfriends. I don’t believe in that shit. I do believe in wives, though. I just don’t believe in bullshit, to be honest. A girlfriend is a bullshit wife—just marry the broad. Marry the broad and she’ll never need a nametag to know what to call you. Marry the broad and stay in your Bronx box. Marry the broad but don’t get her pregnant. The kids wouldn’t preserve you—they out trying to preserve themselves. They won’t call you your name—you lose your name; they’ll call you “Daddy” and who are you then? It makes perfect sense to me. 

I met her yesterday. She was in a diner down the street from my sister’s spot. There was a coat over her oatmeal that looked like embalming fluid. She was from out of town. I liked that. She had Botox in her forehead. Probably in her elbows, eyes and knees—she likes preservation, too. She reminded me of my mom, the way she filled herself with mucus—her insides beginning to bloat on the outside—dying the fullest she could’ve been. I’ve been careful. I’ve been looking for a woman smart and full and quiet—I took Cynthia home. I was still wearing my nametag. She said my name until I forgot who it belonged to.