Tilt: A Novel

by Emma Pattee

It’s like life is this powerful river, of doing laundry and buying groceries and driving to work and scrolling on my phone, and the weekends are so short.

What is your face doing right now? Crazy to think how little skin sits between you and the world, just an inch. Maybe less. A tiny X-Acto slice worth of skin. I could just lean down and peel back my stomach skin and there’d you be, peering out of my belly like it’s a window frame, all yellow goo and Gollum face.

Without a phone, I’m like an animal without legs. You have to understand about people my age that we got phones before we had sex, we got phones before we got credit cards, before we started therapy, before we started drinking beer and coffee and two-for-one margaritas at the shitty bar down the street. I learned to drive by following the glowing blue arrow wherever it took me.

He’d eat a hot dog every day for the rest of his life if he could. Isn’t it funny that this is the kind of information that makes a person unique? That they love to eat a stick of meat in a round bed of bread. Absurd. When you grow up, Bean, maybe you will love trains. Or brussels sprouts. And we will all marvel over this thing that makes you you.

Lately, time seems to move like that, like as soon as I get my hand firmly around a moment, it has turned to dust and there’s a new moment to try and grasp.

The children are orbs of noise and light that seem to never stop moving. The parents sit slumped on benches, staring off into space or down into cell phones.

The man you marry is the man you get, my mother used to say. Meaning: men don’t change. My mother didn’t expect much from men. Not that she was immune to their charms. Men delighted her, fascinated her, the way tourists lean out of the car window to watch a tiger grooming itself in the sun. But nobody’s jumping out of the car for a tiger hug, you know? That was my mother, hands inside the vehicle, hands to herself, men better left sleeping outside in the jungle.

Maybe your father and I will finally have a chance to buy a house—and yes, I know what you’re thinking, that I should not be thinking about real estate at a time like this, but you don’t understand how it is here, how the prices go up and up and up and leave me and your father standing like little children reaching up to grab a balloon that has slipped out of our grasp.

The honks rise around us like the mating calls of a long extinct species.

Her hand is rubbing her belly slowly and carefully. When I look down at my stomach, I see that I’m making the same motion. Contagious.

Another building is resting against its neighbor. What a day, it says. Just give me a second and I’ll stand back up.