Wreck

by Catherine Newman

Hey, Nick, what do you think this is? I don’t say out loud, because my husband is asleep the way regular people are at 3:38 a.m. Also because I know he wouldn’t help me. He’d peer at the bumps and shrug. Spider bites? Or he’d say, Here? and touch my boob because we are starring in a perpetual middle-aged remake of Porky’s II.

His personality is very cross that bridge when you come to it. Mine is very apply to engineering school in case there’s a bridge that might need crossing but it hasn’t been designed yet

“Can I just send them myself?” I ask, and she explains that they must be faxed by the referring office because of confidentiality. This is frustrating because a) Within this very calendar year they will inevitably be sending me an earnestly apologetic letter about how they leaked or sold my personal data, including but not limited to all my biographical information and account numbers as well as, like, my birth certificate and a photo of my vulva that they had on file. And b) Faxing? Really?

I can be on my mental hands and knees, flailing around under the couch of my mind with a hockey stick, trying to sweep out a name I can’t remember—and all I’ll dredge up is a Ping-Pong ball, a catnip mouse, and a spool of thread. If I look away, though, sometimes it might creep out on its own little feet.

Our room smells so thickly of mothballs that it’s like a substance in the air; I picture us leaving black-lunged, but—silver lining!—permanently mothproofed. Also, there’s a four-poster bed with a nasty lace canopy draped over the top like a large ghost has dropped her undies here on her way up into the attic. There are many wreaths made of faded plastic flowers, many haunted wicker baskets and chairs, many admonishing signs everywhere: DON’T WASH YOUR FEET IN THE SINK! NO BANANAS IN THE TRASH! THE BED IS NOT A TRAMPOLINE! “Is the bed a trampoline?” Nick asked, testing my knowledge of the room’s constraints and limitations. “Yes?” I said. He jumped on it to make me laugh, and one of the posts fell off and thudded to the ground, tangling Nick up in the ghost underpants.

“I have a head cold.” His voice sounds wet and thick. “Oh no, Dad, I’m so sorry.” He shrugs, coughs into a handkerchief. “It is what it is,” he says. “But my temperature is eighty degrees, which seems low.” “Indeed,” I say. I make a mental note to replace his thermometer, which is doubtless from the 1960s and the mercury all leaked out into somebody’s butthole decades ago. Probably my own! That might explain a lot, actually.

I’m just trying to figure out where they’ve hidden the neck and the giblets inside this enormous bird. “Aha!” I say and pull out a papery bag with dark shapes in it, which I tip out onto a paper towel. But the neck is somehow frozen to the inside the rib cage, and I can’t peer into the cavity without feeling like the entire turkey is going to Mr. Bean its way onto my head.