Notice

by Heather Lewis

I was beginning to think his eyes never changed. That they looked this same way always—guarded but not entirely cold, not quite closed off. There's so much more someone like this can accomplish if he keeps himself just that little bit open. That's the pull. And the kicker, too. That it's absolutely you he's fucking with. Not anyone else. That's the thing you've probably always wanted. Someone's undivided attention. And you've wanted it so much and for so long that the form it takes no longer matters.

tooooo real

She said, “So, Nina, did you come here only for him?” And when I didn't answer she said, “I asked him to bring you. He brought you for me.” I think she said “brought.” She might have said “bought,” I'm not sure. The thing I do know for sure is women do everything differently, though not so much so you can't catch it.

I wasn't sure how she wanted it. The men always say. Not real clearly, but enough so you know what they mean. She didn't say anything.

Daylight came in through a window behind us and I could see she was older than I'd thought, closer to his age, and I wondered how many years they'd been at this. Whether I was the beginning of something, or the end of it. I always come at one end or the other for people, never in the middle.

I began to worry what he'd done to her, but at the same time I knew it wasn't anything so very different. What it was, was her running out of ways to let herself take it. Running out of ways to make it her own, make it something she wanted.

No one else noticed what went on with me. That was the point, not to notice. The point was for me to be forgotten.

the title

I lay there spent, or expended. I went to a place of not knowing anything anymore, especially who I was, or always had been. So maybe I had got this all wrong, even backward. That Beth was the one making me see things inside, go places I didn't want to go, but had to. And what I found there wasn't ugly, not exactly. Messy and massive, monstrous even, but not evil, more a behemoth than a demon.

She quieted me. She said, “Sweetheart, just rest.” And the words changed me from restless to sad; not huge and crazed now, but quiet and ageless. Her ease took me over, and my tears in her shirt—all of her wrapped around me. I cried easily this time, hushed and tranquil and endless.

“That's right,” he said. “That's it.” And his voice sounded gentle now and the comfort I felt from this seemed wrong but no less soothing for it. And so that's how I felt—soothed but sickened, sickened at the way these two things so often arrived together.

I felt a tiredness so big, I feared I'd never wake up from it. I couldn't fend it off, though. And when I went to it this time, I understood my fear. This time that black sleep was so endlessly empty it'd become the only place for me. The only place a person like me might want to stay.

I did wake up. Woke up sore and feeling drugged and wishing I really was, but having no inclination to even find my liquor. I wanted to go back to that blackness where nothing ever happened or ever had. Wanted this the way a child wants death, or the way I had as a child. A want simply to stop it.

I could hear her cries, which weren't the kind from pain. Her taking pleasure in this felt like failure and so I had to see I'd come here to hurt her in the way I'd always known hurt.

I left her this way. Stumbled out her doors, craving that blackness, craving it physically.

all I could do was stay in this stasis, unable to live in the way I had for so long, to live a life all about looking for death while pretending survival. But not yet able to live any way else.

That familiar heaviness crept into my limbs as I thought these things. It began to take me over, and then turn me over, until I lay mostly on my stomach with the pillows pulled close and me huddled into them. The blackness came behind the heaviness. Came on comforting and big as always. But not deathly. Not exactly. Not for tonight at least. And this let me believe I could maybe just dip into it. For little bits of time. Go to it without that eerie pull to stay and, in this way, maybe get some rest. Get some actual sleep that might start me mending. So I went to it, greedy as always. But, even with that slumber taking me over, and then taking me under, I knew that leviathan thing slept in this same darkness. Lay with me, too. Resting, biding its time.